San Francisco Giants announcer Jon Miller took a detour during a trip last year to visit Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, Wash., and its former Seals Stadium seats.
It’s a piece of San Francisco baseball history that’s largely forgotten, and it’s sitting right under people’s butts in a different state.
San Francisco Giants broadcaster Jon Miller only learned the full story last year while visiting family in Washington state during MLB’s All-Star break. On his drive to Olympia, he took an off-ramp in Tacoma toward Cheney Stadium, which he stepped inside for the first time.
Miller already knew that the six light towers at Cheney Stadium ballpark once illuminated Seals Stadium, where Willie Mays and the Giants played their first two seasons in San Francisco before moving to Candlestick Park. But only here, touring the field as it was resodded, did a groundskeeper tell him the full story.
When Seals Stadium was demolished in late 1959, 4,500 of its seats were shipped with the light towers to Tacoma to quickly build a ballpark for the Giants’ new minor league team.
A scene from the demolition of Seals Stadium in San Francisco, taken Nov. 4, 1959. (Photo By Joe Rosenthal/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
A scene from the demolition of Seals Stadium in San Francisco, taken Nov. 4, 1959. Some of these seats would end up at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma. (Photo By Gordon Peters/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
A scene from the demolition of Seals Stadium in San Francisco, taken Nov. 4, 1959. (Photo By Joe Rosenthal/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
By the early 2000s, only 2,132 of those seats were still in use. In 2005, almost all of the seats were sold off or unloaded. Today, 20 of the original weathered, wooden, slatted seats remain in the stands, nearly behind home plate, next to a bronze statue of the local businessman who built the park.
“It was really cool, like being in a museum,” Miller told SFGATE of his visit. “That’s why I wanted to go sit in them. I asked if it was all right, and he said to go ahead.”
According to Miller and other visitors, the remaining seats — now 90 years old — are a rough sit without a cushion. But they’re available to fans who want a firsthand experience of a quickly vanishing part of baseball lore as they watch a game from Section K.
Cheney Stadium is now home to the Tacoma Rainiers, a Triple-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, as well as two professional soccer teams. The park was inspired by a group of locals’ passion for baseball and their desire to root for a team as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Seals Stadium, built in 1931 for the Seals and Mission Reds, began to be demolished just days after the Giants lost to the Dodgers in heartbreaking fashion to end their ’59 season. An October 1959 story in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the park’s ripped-up seats would be kept in the outfield for any interested buyers.
Two former Seals Stadium and Cheney Stadium seats that are now kept in storage by Tacoma sports historian Marc Blau.
“It’s a shame, just a doggone shame. It’s still a beautiful park,” said Jerry Warner, a spokesman for the firm that built and demolished the stadium, in the piece.
By January 1960, Seals Stadium lay in ruins around Potrero Avenue and 16th Street. A snarky Chronicle headline over a photo of its corpse read, “Seals Stadium – Everybody can get in now.”
At the same time, Giants part-owner Ben Cheney and fellow Tacoma businessman Clay Huntington convinced the team to relocate its Phoenix Triple-A squad to Washington state. The catch? The new field needed to be ready to go by opening day in April.
Faced with about 100 days to create a ballpark, Cheney got a tip from Phoenix Giants GM Rosy Ryan: Importing large parts of Seals Stadium would save time and money. Cheney approved, as did the Tacoma City Council.
Six steel light standards, four of them measuring 122 feet and the other two measuring 60 feet, were loaded on trucks along with the seats and taken 890 miles north of San Francisco.
The Tacoma Giants had 100 days to build Cheney Stadium in time for the 1960 season. With light towers and seats from San Francisco, they built it ahead of time.
Or did they go by barge? Some have suggested the latter, and we can’t discount it completely. But after contacting longtime Tacoma sports historian Marc Blau and the Rainiers and reading through archives of the Tacoma News Tribune, trucks are the much stronger probability. Blau shared with SFGATE a 1959 Tacoma News photo of trucks shipping at least some of the gear.
“That must have been a hell of a truck,” joked Cheney’s son Brad, who has been going to Tacoma baseball games since the early ’60s.
The yard sale approach helped build what is now the country’s oldest Triple-A stadium at a needed discount. Rather than pay $17.50 per new seat, Tacoma spent just $1.50 per Seals Stadium seat. The light towers cost $20,000. And the Los Angeles-Seattle Motor Express fleet of trucks that shipped all of it reportedly cost another $2,000.
They've had LED light replacements over the years, but the light towers have remained a fixture at Cheney Stadium's Triple-A games ever since they were shipped from the ruins of Seals Stadium in San Francisco in 1959.
When the ballpark faced cost overruns, Cheney paid an estimated $100,000 out of his pocket. The 100-day deadline was met, at an estimated price of $840,000, or $8.3 million in today’s money.
Future San Francisco Giants Matty Alou and Gaylord Perry were in the lineup when the Tacoma Giants lost their home opener 7-2 before 6,612 fans (not every seat came from San Francisco). Also playing in Tacoma that year were legends-to-be Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal. For young Brad Cheney, seeing such luminaries in his hometown was the highlight of his summer.
“When the major league guys would come down, it was awesome,” Cheney said. “My dad knew Willie McCovey back then, and he stayed at our house. I pinch myself that it didn’t happen, but it did.”
The wooden seats endured decades of rainy Pacific Northwest weather, many coats of paint and splinters. But by the early 2000s, with the Tacoma Rainiers now the seventh home team in Cheney Stadium, the seats were showing their age and needed upgrading.
These are among the last of the 4,500 seats shipped from the demolished Seals Stadium to Tacoma, Wash., to build Cheney Stadium.
In 2005, the Rainiers offered around 2,500 Seals Stadium seats for sale at $75 each, many of them right back to San Franciscans. Their condition aside, the price was more than fair considering some original Seals Stadium seats are selling for hundreds online.
Blau, who runs the Shanaman Sports Museum of Tacoma-Pierce County, said that during the sell-off, a Cheney Stadium grounds crew member approached him about taking a few of the seats before they went in the trash. Blau has restored one of them, a navy blue box seat he sits in often, which is displayed in the museum. He also has a few unrestored seats in storage.
Other original seats are still floating around the market, as Blau can attest. He said he heard of one in terrible condition recently selling for $100. “A month ago, someone got a hold of me and said, ‘I’ve got four seats connected, are you interested?’ I said, ‘I’d like to say yes, but I don’t have the room in storage.’”
As for the light towers, they’re standing guard over the field as always, though they’ve since had an upgrade to LED lights.
Fans at a Giants-Dodgers game in 1959 at Seals Stadium. (Photo: OpenSFHistory / wnp14.10968)
The 20 seats that do remain in Section K, next to a statue of Ben Cheney reading a newspaper, are available to sit in only if you first visit the stadium box office, so staff can alert you to their history and rickety condition. Giants broadcaster Miller was among those to note their, um, vintage comforts during his visit.
“I remember going to Candlestick, and they were the same seats,” he said. “They did a brisk business in renting out seat cushions every day.”
The Tacoma team says it does still maintain the Seals seats with pieces of stock original parts when necessary and that almost all the people who buy tickets in Section K are aware of the conditions.
“Considering it’s something that a few fans seek out, they’ve already judged the pros and cons themselves,” team spokesperson Paul Braverman said.
A scene from a Giants game at Seals Stadium during their first season in San Francisco. (Photo: OpenSFHistory / wnp25.1349)
To get a true glimpse of Seals Stadium in San Francisco, you’ll need to either use your imagination as you gaze at the stores within the Potrero Center mall or step inside the nearby Double Play sports bar to check out the many photos and other memorabilia that remain of the park. There is also an easy-to-miss plaque on the sidewalk at 16th and Bryant that recognizes the history of the old ballpark.
Miller was there at the plaque’s unveiling in 2008, during a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Giants’ first game in San Francisco. When asked if it’s unfortunate there isn’t more to mark where the ballpark stood, he responded, “That’s just the nature of the passage of time.
“I think there may be more of Seals Stadium that exists in San Francisco than there is of Candlestick Park. That new park that replaced Seals Stadium, the earth the park stood on is gone.”
As for Candlestick’s more popular successor, Oracle Park, it’s doing just fine next to the cove named after the player who thrilled fans out of those old, transplanted seats 800 miles away.
Greg Keraghosian is an SFGATE homepage editor. Before joining SFGATE in 2016 he was an associate editor at Yahoo Travel. He was born in San Francisco, grew up in the Los Angeles area and graduated from the University of Southern California.