To commemorate the Giants' final season at Candlestick Park, the Sporting Green offers a countdown of the 10 most memorable baseball moments in the park's history. The installments run every other Tuesday.
The pitching matchup was intriguing on its face: an ancient veteran with his Hall of Fame status already assured against a rising star who was halfway toward his first 20-win season. But no one in the crowd of 15,921 at Candlestick Park on July 2, 1963, knew they would witness the greatest pitching performance in the history of the ballpark, one of the greatest two-man duels of any time, anywhere.
For 15 innings, Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal put matching sets of zeros up on the Candlestick scoreboard. Inning after inning, deep into a Tuesday night, nobody could score. There were no thoughts of relief pitchers from either side, this was a fight to the finish. And the end came suddenly -- with one out in the 16th, shortly after midnight, the Giants' Willie Mays hit a home run.
"I'll never forget that night or that pitch," Spahn said by phone from his home in Florida. "I threw a screwball, and I don't think it was a very good one."
Both teams were having lackluster seasons. The Braves, who represented Milwaukee at the time, were destined for a sixth-place finish, while the Giants would wind up a well-beaten third. Marichal and Spahn, however, were having the type of years that would land both in Cooperstown.
Spahn, who was born in Buffalo, N.Y., had arrived in the major leagues in 1942, five years before Jackie Robinson broke down the barrier to black players. The 42-year-old left- hander entered the evening with a 11-3 record and 3.12 ERA. He would finish the season 23-7, the 13th and last time he won more than 20 games. He retired two years later, dividing his final year between the Mets and, coincidentally, the Giants.
Marichal's resume was from a different stack. Hewas 25, one of the first stars to reach the big leagues from the Dominican Republic. He had been an instant success, breaking in three years earlier with a near no-hitter. Going into the game against Spahn, he was 12-3 with a 2.63 ERA, having won nine straight decisions. It had taken a no-hitter by Sandy Koufax to hand him his last defeat and he would win 25 games that year. But none of his performances approached this one.
"The idea of Spahn pitching always riveted you anyway," said former Chronicle sports columnist Ron Fimrite, who was in the stands that night as a paying spectator. "And the age-youth thing just added to it."
The two lineups that night featured seven future Hall of Famers: Marichal, Mays, Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda of the Giants; Spahn, Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews of the Braves.
Although the pitchers dominated, each team had some chances to put a run on the board before Mays actually did. With the Braves' Norm Larker on second base in the fourth inning, Del Crandall singled to center. Larker, a first baseman but not a tanglefoot, hightailed it for home. That wasn't a good idea when Mays was the man picking the ball up. Willie threw him out at the plate by a wide margin. Larker was the only Brave to touch third until the 13th.
Earlier in the fourth, Aaron hit a long drive that the Giants' left fielder caught at the fence. What's notable about the play, other than Candlestick winds possibly costing Aaron a total of 756 home runs, was the name of the man who caught it. McCovey was playing left that night, as part of the Giants' desperate attempt to have him and Cepeda in the lineup at the same time.
The Braves' only extra base hit was a double in the seventh by Spahn, who was one of the better hitting pitchers of his generation. "You hung one up there and I should have knocked it out of the park," Spahn told Marichal the next day. The Braves pitcher died at second.
In the ninth, it looked to everybody in the park except Chris Pelekoudas that McCovey had ended the game. His drive to deep right went out of the stadium, which was not enclosed in those days, and landed in the parking lot. It seemed to be on the fair side of the foul pole as it cleared the fence, but Pelekoudas, the first base umpire, did not think so. He called it foul.
"I followed the ball all the way, but apparently the umpire didn't," McCovey said at the time. "It's a shame to hit a ball like that and lose what it means. It made me mad because I couldn't do anything about it.
"As hard as I hit the ball, it didn't have a chance to curve foul before it left the park."
Closers, setup men and middle relievers were not part of the baseball vernacular in those days. Most relievers were failed starters. The starters this night wanted no part of their bullpens.
"I can still remember (Giants manager) Alvin Dark asking me after the ninth if I wanted to come out," Marichal said. "And I told him, 'I'm 25, that old man is 42. If he's going back out there, I'm going back out there.' "
And Spahn was going back out there. "There was no way I was going to come out," Spahn said. "You didn't make any money sitting on the bench. I felt like it was my game to win or lose.
"And I could always get a second wind. I would get tired, and then after a while I would feel OK again. That's just the way I was."
Marichal says he enlisted help in his lobbying effort. "Ed Bailey was the catcher, and he told Alvin he thought I was still throwing good," he said.
He certainly was. Over the last eight innings, Marichal held the Braves to two hits and retired 17 in a row at one stretch. "It was 1-2-3, 1-2-3, which helped me last," Marichal said. "And I remember it being a warm night, at least warm for Candlestick. That helped me stay loose."
Spahn said he doesn't recall the night being that warm. "It was Candlestick," he said. "But I pitched in Milwaukee and it could get pretty cold there. The cold never bothered me."
The fans were spellbound. "I don't remember anybody leaving," Fimrite said. "But you wondered if anybody would ever score."
In the 14th the Giants loaded the bases on a bloop double (that kept Harvey Kuenn's hitting streak alive at 13 games), an intentional walk to Mays and an error. But Spahn then wiped out Bailey on a fly to center.
Spahn got through the 15th in order and retired Kuenn leading off the 16th. Then came Mays, who for one of the few times in his brilliant career did not inspire overwhelming confidence in the home fans. He was in something of a slump. The day before he had come up with men on base five times and gone 0-for-4 with a walk, dropping his average to .255, not a figure Mays was familiar with. Dark was publicly considering dropping him down in the order, and in this game Mays was hitting second, instead of his usual third. However he would finish the year at .314, and probably started his resurgence with this at-bat.
"I knew he had to be tired, we all were," said Mays at a recent Candlestick gathering. "But I wasn't thinking home run. I never thought home run, never tried to hit them. But when I hit this one, that's when I started thinking about a home run. I knew it was a home run."
Spahn finished the night having allowed nine hits and just the one, intentional, walk. He struck out two. Marichal gave up eight hits, walked four and struck out 10. He threw a staggering total of 227 pitches, but such a heavy workload did not bother him that year or in the future.
"I do remember I was real tired and pretty sore," he said. The four-hour-and-ten-minute game came on the 30th anniversary of another Giants gem: Carl Hubbell's 1-0 18-inning victory over the Cardinals. But as a two- man duel, this one is probably second only to Koufax's 1965 perfect game. The Cubs' Bob Hendley lost that game 1-0, allowing one hit and an unearned run. Speaking on FOX Sports Net Bay Area's recent 'Stick special, McCovey summed it up this way: "It's probably the best game ever at Candlestick Park. It's the best game I've ever been in."