As the recently appointed general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Dave Stewart is reserving the right to root for the Oakland Athletics. That is the team he helped pitch to three consecutive World Series from 1988 to 1990 in a now-outdated stadium a short drive from the poverty-stricken neighborhood of his youth.
Stewart, hired by Tony La Russa, his former Oakland manager and now Arizona’s chief baseball officer, figures he is entitled: His new team is in the National League.
“Until we have to play them, I’m an A’s fan,” Stewart said. “I’m still around the Oakland area two weeks out of every month. I have five sisters, a brother and cousins there. To be honest, my heart sank with what happened this year.”
After sagging in September and missing out on the American League West title, the A’s surrendered a late 7-3 lead to the Kansas City Royals in the wild-card game. With one small-market team shown the postseason door, the other was launched all the way to the World Series to face San Francisco, 25 years after the earthquake-interrupted A’s-Giants Series.
Who could blame Stewart for asking why Oakland couldn’t get a break? Must it always — culturally, athletically and otherwise — live in the shadow of sexier San Francisco?
Under the “Moneyball” principles of General Manager Billy Beane, the A’s have long been regular-season overachievers. But if there were ever a season for them to mitigate their chronic October malaise, this would have been the one — pushing their way onto another shared World Series stage with the Giants, who have starred on it in three of the last five years.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Athletics’ sweep of the Giants was interrupted by the Loma Prieta quake that struck minutes before Game 3 at Candlestick Park, the most devastating toll in lives lost occurred in Oakland, where 42 people died when the upper level of Interstate 880, also known as the Nimitz Freeway, crashed onto the lower part at the Cypress Street viaduct.
In a telephone interview, Stewart, 57, was not suggesting that the Oakland fatalities were treated any less gravely than those across the bay. But a horrified nation perceived ground zero to be Candlestick Park; baseball’s operations had shifted there along with a huge news media contingent typically inclined to stay in San Francisco when covering events in that area.
I told Stewart that I was a rare exception, based on circumstances and preference. I had been assigned by The Daily News to cover Games 1 and 2 in Oakland and the off-day workouts on Monday in San Francisco, and then to spend time with Chris Mullin, the New York-bred basketball player with the Golden State Warriors, for a preseason N.B.A. article before flying home.
I stayed in downtown Oakland for the easier commute to the ballpark and the basketball arena next door, and to visit with a friend, who lived in Berkeley and worked in Oakland. Having done my Mullin interview earlier in the day, I was walking with my friend from the hotel, crossing Broadway, when the ground shook. A veteran of quakes, he pulled me by the arm down a flight of stairs, into a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
Somehow a tower under construction on that corner, cranes and all, remained upright. But debris was everywhere, fallen bricks, and soon we heard about the freeway collapse. That was where I spent most of the night, gathering information and trying to locate an operational pay phone.
It remains a haunting experience, seeing from behind police lines what looked like a giant movie set in encroaching darkness. The crushed bodies were all too real.
For Stewart, this was no visit to a horror scene. This was home.
“I lived in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley,” he said. “I saw the Nimitz every day after the earthquake, on the way to the Coliseum. The devastation, the effect it had on a city that had already suffered too much.”
Stewart grew up in East Oakland, a neighborhood where he was “exposed to prostitution, drugs, crime — you name it.” His career was a study in mediocrity or underachievement — including one embarrassing off-field encounter with the law — until he joined La Russa’s A’s in 1986, at 29, having developed a forkball that precipitated four consecutive 20-victory seasons.
Stewart was the most valuable player of the Bay Area Series when it finally concluded. He didn’t jet off to Disneyland or the Caribbean. Known in Oakland for his charitable work, he took to the streets, the shelters, the schoolyards. He played in pickup softball and basketball games, organized fund-raisers and Christmas toy drives for quake victims.
“I wasn’t a policeman or a fireman,” he said. “I just wanted to help however I could. Oakland had always been a place that was so easy to neglect. But through all the years, I also focused on the positives that came out of the earthquake, the rebuilding that took place, the improvements.”
Oakland’s mayor, Jean Quan, likes to say, “The city is undergoing a huge renaissance.” Lake Merritt, its crown jewel, underwent a $122 million makeover completed in 2013. With gentrification fueled by the Bay Area’s high-tech industry has come resentment of an increasing lack of affordability, but Stewart believes “the city is much better now, many more restaurants and businesses, so much more to do.”
The A’s, whose attempts to leave for the San Jose area were thwarted by the Giants, are talking about a new stadium in town. Whether any city — much less one with Oakland’s history — should be in the stadium-building business is another story. But Stewart, a baseball lifer whose boyhood passion was the A’s of Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, can’t fathom his hometown without them.
What he can sadly imagine is how exhilarating it would have been had the A’s shared this week with the Giants instead of the obviously deserving team from Kansas City, where the A’s played before moving to Oakland in 1968.
I asked Stewart if he had seen ESPN’s documentary “The Day the Series Stopped.” He had not. Having covered the freeway collapse, I mentioned what had struck me most: a doctor’s recollection of rescuing a 6-year-old boy and his 8-year-old sister from the back seat of a car on the lower level, with two adults — their mother and a friend — crushed to death in the front. For the boy, Julio Berumen, to be freed, his right leg had to be amputated at the knee by the doctor, James Betts, who later witnessed the emotional hospital reunion of the boy and his father.
Stewart said he didn’t need to see that part. He’d lived it. He’d visited Julio at the hospital, taken a photo of them together.
He said, softly, “It hangs in my office.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the place where the upper level of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed. It was the Cypress Street viaduct, not Cyprus Street. The error was repeated in a picture caption.