The Amazing Baseball Adventure: Ballpark Wonders from the Bushes to the Show by Josh Pahigian

Author:Josh Pahigian [Pahigian, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781493025084
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2017-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

56 San Francisco Giants

THE CABLE CAR AT AT&T PARK

San Francisco’s cable cars are one of its main tourist attractions, ranking right up there with the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island on most visitors’ hit lists. Fittingly, then, you find a retired car on AT&T Park’s right-center field concourse.

Not to be confused with trolley cars or streetcars, which are powered by different mechanisms entirely, cable cars were invented by San Franciscan Andrew Smith Hallidie in 1873. They are pulled by underground cables that run between their rails. Once, they could be found in cities across the United States, but today you only find them in San Francisco.

At the height of their popularity, San Francisco’s cable cars traveled along twenty-three lines, shuttling commuters and shoppers up and down the city’s infamous hills. Although most locals today choose other modes of transportation, the forty remaining cars are a point of civic pride.

The ballpark cable car offers views of McCovey Cove on one side and of the field on the other. You can stand on its rails or sit on its wooden benches. To board one of the city’s operational cable cars, you have to endure long lines and fork over six dollars for a short ride. To check out AT&T Park’s car—labeled No. 44 in homage to Willie McCovey, who wore that number for nineteen seasons—you need only take a midgame stroll out to right field.

The car is even equipped with an authentic bell that—in keeping with a tradition established when the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals were the only show in town—rings out the number of runs the home team has at the conclusion of each inning.

"Ballpark Chatter"

“It’s a token of gratitude.”

—JAKE PEAVY, ON PURCHASING A TROLLEY CAR FOR HIS ALABAMA HOME AFTER WINNING THE 2014 WORLD SERIES WITH THE GIANTS

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