The Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer | Pacific Magazine | Sunday, April 7, 1985

Published in The Seattle Times/ Seattle Post-Intelligencer Pacific Magazine, Sunday, April 7, 1985

In my grasp at the moment is a baseball. It is an object I long ago gave up throwing for any useful purpose and it sits on a shelf in my bedroom, a neglected artifact of my past, faded and inoperative, something that will never again be thrown in joy or anger.

The inked-on signatures are faded, too. But they can still be deciphered: Seattle Rainiers, 1942…Bill Lawrence…Len Gabrielson…Eddie Carnett...Hal Turpin...Lynn King...Sylvester Johnson...Pete Jonas…Hal Patchett…Bill Matheson...Hal Sueme...Bill Skiff. Once I played on this team.

As I contemplate· this baseball in my hand it is Interesting to examine its character. The ball is very hard, covered with cowhide (not horsehide, as legend has it) and it Is held together with exactly 216 raised red stitches. It is just over 5 ounces in weight and measures anywhere from 2.86 to 2.94 inches in diameter. Inside it are wrappings of wool yam, a coat of rubber cement, a small composition-cork center, around which the wool yam is wrapped.

This ball probably was made In Chicopee, Mass., since it was manufactured in 1942. It has the official stamp on it, "Pacific Coast League," and the official signature of that era, "Clarence Rowland, Pres."

When the Seattle Mariners arrive home for the official opening of 1985 season on Tuesday in the Kingdome, they will be throwing, catching and hitting a ball that is exactly the same as the one I hold in my hand. The only differences are that the cover will be stamped "American League," not "Pacific Coast League," and the ball was manufactured not in Chicopee, Mass., but in Taiwan. Thus, the hundreds of thousands of baseballs used in America's "national game" now contribute, in some measure, to our massive foreign-trade deficit.

But what difference does that make? To understand the hold that baseball has on us, you must go and see Robert Redford in "The Natural," and you must listen to the character he plays. You must listen to Redford, playing Roy Hobbs as a young man, carrying his magic bat, like Excalibur, and enunciating the dream of all American boys: "When I walk down the street, I want people to tum and say, 'There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'"

To understand baseball, you must read Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Ring Lardner and Roger Angell and George Plimpton and James Thurber and Robert Frost and Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell and Ogden Nash and John Updike and P.G. Wodehouse. Jacques Barzun, the distinguished French historian, once said: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Can you imagine any of those people, celebrated writers and poets, wasting their talents on basketball or even football?

George Plimpton once said that he thought the amount of good writing on American games has been produced in an inverse ratio to the size of the ball. "There have been many great books written on baseball," he said. "A handful of good things have been written about football and very little on basketball. There are no books on beach ball."

To truly understand baseball, you must have lived in Seattle (or any town in America, for that matter) in the 1930s. There would have been no professional basketball except for the Harlem Globetrotters; no professional football to speak of; no hydroplane racing on Lake Washington, and certainly no television, no VCRs, no home computers, or any other technological distraction.

And by understanding baseball, you would also understand Seattle a bit more than you do now.

Every city and town in America, from the smallest hamlet to the largest metropolis, has its tradition of boys playing baseball. We played it in streets and cow pastures, on vacant lots and community playgrounds. To play a game, you needed little more than a single bat and a ball (sometimes wrapped with bicycle tape when the cover wore off); beyond that, all you needed were space enough and time. You roamed neighborhoods, challenging other teams, and in Seattle, for sure, you sometimes played in the mud.

When I was growing up, the town team, the real professional club, was called the Seattle Indians. They played on the old grassless, dirt surface at Civic Field (where High School Memorial Stadium now stands). It was a terrible field, surrounded by heavy wire meshed fences with barbed wire on top and sheet metal all around it to foil the freeloaders from watching from the street.

Opening day was a license to skip school. Civic Field was a piece of cake when it came to sneaking in because you could dig the toes of your Keds into the wire mesh and climb the fence like a monkey, which is what we were, a bunch of unruly monkeys, who outsmarted the guards. We worked in relays. One ruse was to set up a horrible clatter by hammering on the fence and shouting obscenities at the guards, who would rush to quell what seemed like a riot; this was a signal for other boys in the unpoliced areas 200 feet away to vault the fence, leap down inside and disappear into the crowd.

Another way was to wait, poised, near the top of the fence and listen for a home run. The old Indians had some great homerun hitters like big Art Hunt and “Scrapiron” Freddy Muller, and when they unloaded a drive against the balcony of the old Civic Ice Arena beyond left field, all eyes were on the ball and you could drop inside unnoticed. Oh, the old Civic Field was a glorious sieve!

Inside the relatively small park, every seat was a good one. Peanuts were a nickel a bag. One of the more enterprising peanut salesmen was a quite large young boy, age 15, named Dewey Soriano. By day Dewey was a student at Franklin High School, and he worked by night, selling peanuts to help out his family. In his school days, Dewey was a strong, sturdy young pitcher who dreamed of one day playing for the Indian team. Dewey's dream was shared by another young Franklin student, Fred Hutchinson. They were close friends and working separately, but sometimes together, they would revolutionize the sport of baseball in Seattle.

Also present at every Civic Field game the Indians played was a compact, loquacious Italian kid, who grew up in Black Diamond but later was a star athlete at Queen Anne High School. His name was Edo Vanni, and he had a very large nose and a very large voice, and his feet were so mercurial that he dazzled people with his speed on high-school base paths.

There were others, as well. There was Jeff Heath, a broad, heavy-muscled slugger from Garfield High School; Hunk Anderson, a large pitcher from Ballard; Ira Scribner, from West Seattle; Earl and Chet Johnson, from Ballard; and a huge. strapping pitcher from Queen Anne named Mike Budnick.

All of them shared the American dream of millions of boys across America. Like Roy Hobbs in "The Natural," they wanted to walk down the street and hear people say, "There goes the best there ever was."

This was the Depression era of 1933 to 1937. We had no money then, so we ritualistically banged on the old tin fences and taunted the guards, dropping safely inside to cheer on our heroes – Bill Lawrence, Joe Coscarart, "Scrapiron" Muller, big Art Hunt, Johnny Bassler, Chick Ellsworth, Alan Strange, Dick Gyselman, Kewpie Dick Barrett, Farmer Hal Turpin, Clarence (Snakeyes) Pickerel. We were drawn to them by our own fantasies, but also by a shrill, siren voice of excitement that beamed out of a cramped little wooden broadcasting booth onto the airways:

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Leo Lassen speaking. And now, another exciting game of baseball, brought to you by crispy, crunchy Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions!"

There were usually parades on opening day. A man named "Baldy" Baldwin was usually the general chairman, and there were prizes for the player who got the first hit, stole the first base, or scored the first run on opening day. Always on hand for these openers was a tough rotund labor leader, whose offices were not far from Civic Field on Denny Way. His name was Dave Beck, and he was the powerful head of the local Teamsters. He too would do much to change the game of baseball in Seattle.

The old Indians were an impoverished franchise, owned more or less jointly by a bland, clever fellow named "Bald Bill" Klepper, and George Vanderveer, the famed criminal attorney who was already a legend in Seattle courtrooms.

The Indians were so impoverished by 1936 that county and city officials appeared regularly to collect back taxes out of the gate receipts. So the manager, a man named Dutch Reuther, would coach at third base with his baggy baseball knickers filled with paper money. This was the evening's receipts, collected at the gate, which Klepper was forced to hide from the impatient city tax collectors.

As for George Vanderveer, he found that you could not support a baseball team on revenue earned by defending prostitutes and criminals. So one day in the winter of 1937, Vanderveer walked into Dave Beck's office on Denny Way and said, "Sign this piece of paper and you will own the Seattle Indians. They won't cost you a dime."

“Are you crazy?" said Beck. "I don't have enough money to pay the firstbaseman's salary. But I know somebody who does."

Within a matter of days, Beck persuaded Emil Sick, a wealthy brewery owner, that it was his bounden duty to buy the Indians and rescue them from possible bankruptcy. "You will be a big man in this city and you will sell lots of beer," Beck said.

So for little more than $100,000 dollars and some back debts, Emil Sick acquired the Seattle Indians. The old Indians quickly became the new Rainiers, named after Mr. Sick's Rainier beer, and that is how, in 1938, Seattle had two opening days of baseball.

The first one was at the Civic Field and the place was crawling with dignitaries, including Gov. Clarence D. Martin and Mayor Arthur Langlie, and of course the league president, Mr. Wilbur (Two Gun) Tuftle, who got his nickname because he made his living by writing cowboy-story shoot-em-ups for pulp magazines.

There were 11,000 fans there, too, because they now knew that Mr. Sick and his money had given them hope, that they would not need to watch players whose skills, in a figurative sense, were scarcely good enough to keep them off a WPA project. For one thing, Mr. Sick had signed Fred Hutchinson, the Franklin High school kid, for a lusty bonus, and he had also signed Edo Vanni and Mike Budnick. To put it bluntly, the whole town went crazy over the new Rainiers.

They went even crazier when the Rainiers had their second opening day on June 15, 1938—that is, the official opening of Sicks' Seattle Stadium, out in Rainier Valley. This spanking new temple of baseball worship was built at a cost of $350,000 and was judged to be the finest minor-league park in America.

On that first opening night, the place was jammed because by now, the Rainiers were up there fighting in first division. Hutchinson, the 18-year-old school boy, was stringing together a remarkable number of victories, and the papers were full of his deeds. And Edo Vanni, also 18, was batting a merry clip and running wild on the base paths. On opening night, in fact, Edo got the first hit, stole the first base and scored the first run ever recorded in Sicks' Stadium.

That year, the Rainiers broke all attendance records and when the season ended, Hutchinson had won 25 games and Mr. Sick sold him to the Detroit Tigers for the then unheard-of sum of $50,000 and four players. Even the great Joe DiMaggio fetched only $25,000 when the New York Yankees bought him from San Francisco two years before. Edo Vanni had batted .332.

Then came the glory years. The rollicking Rainiers won the pennant three seasons in a row. Flushed with money and success, they featured a colorful cast consisting of Jo Jo White, Gilly CampbeU, George Archie, Barrett, Turpin, Paul Gregory, Dick (The Darning Needle) Gyselman, and Billy Schuster, otherwise known as Schuster the Rooster, after his penchant for climbing the grandstand screen and crowing at the fans.

Oh, yes, they were a rollicking crew of winners. Barrett sold insurance on the side and he would arrive at the ballpark, nattily dressed in a business suit, carrying his briefcase. Fortunately, the youth of Seattle did not know what was inside that briefcase. It contained a few papers, perhaps one pencil, and two pints of Seagram's VO. "Do you ever drink that stuff during a game?” somebody once asked Dick.

"It depends on how long the game is," Barrett said. Well, Barrett's games were always long because he usually ran the count to 3-and-2 before either walking or striking out the batter. This made for 3½-hour games, and connoisseurs of baseball quickly noted that Barrett usually pitched on Saturday nights, a busy night for concessions. He was known as a "concessions pitcher," because fans had time to drink lots of Mr. Sick's beer when Barrett pitched.

Vanni continued as a hometown star and there was much sentimental nonsense written about how Jo Jo White and Gilly Campbell nurtured the boy along with their sage advice. "Yes, they taught me a lot," Vanni would concede. It was years later before Edo amplified that tribute. He observed they had taught him where to find the best nightclubs and how to sneak in after curfew at various hotels in the other seven cities of the Pacific Coast League.

One guy Vanni learned a lot from was Pepper Martin, who was the playing manager for Sacramento. Pepper came here for the opening day of 1942 season at Sicks' Stadium and fans flocked out in droves to see "The Wild Horse of the Osage," as Grantland Rice had dubbed him when he played for the St. Louis Cardinals' famous “Gashouse Gang." Pepper was in the autumn of his great career, but he could still show kids like Vanni a thing or two about base-running and hitting. Pepper was immensely strong, built like a brick outhouse, and he was one of the few players in those days who took his Christianity seriously enough to go public with it, the way so many athletes do today.

The end of the glory years came in 1943. World War ll and the military draft and defense plants took away so much of the talent that even l could make a team. Or so l thought. On that lovely April day at Sicks’ Stadium I was in a Vanguard of 4-Fs who began our 1943 season in Sicks' Stadium. We played the San Francisco Seals, whom the legendary manager, Lefty O'Doul, had wisely stocked with players too old to be drafted.

I had a good seat for that one. I adorned the Rainiers bench wearing No. 9, which was Edo Vanni's old number—but none of Eda's mercurial base-running talents rubbed off on me. Sent in as a pinch-runner at second base, I was waved home ahead of a run-scoring single by Bill Lawrence, my boyhood idol of the old Indian days. Rounding third, I fell down. In front of 9,000 witnesses, I landed in a sprawling heap and crawled back to third base like a sand crab exposed to danger by a receding tide. Oh, the ignominy of it all! I was promptly fired the next day.

But the glory years returned to Sicks' Stadium not long after the Potsdam Conference. Once again the kids of Seattle had true heroes to worship. Charles Dillon "Casey” Stengel brought his Oakland Acorns to town; it was in 1948 that Stengel won the pennant with 0akland, after which he moved on to fame and eventual fortune as manager of the New York Yankees. But Casey was ours for one season, and it was Casey who defined, as well as anyone ever did, the art of managing a baseball team.

"The trick to running a baseball club," he said, " is to keep the five guys who hate you separated from the five who are undecided."

In those postwar years we thrilled to the playing of hometown luminaries like "Jungle Jim" Rivera, "Skinny" Brown, big Walter Judnich and such colorful opponents as Ferris "Cocky" Fain, Calvin Coolidge Melish, Minnie Minoso and Cletus Elwood (Baron Boots) Poffenberger.

Then Fred Hutchinson returned to Seattle in 1955, after a long career in the major leagues. He was brought here by his old Franklin High School teammate, DeweySoriano, who was by now the general manager of the Seattle Rainiers. Together they fashioned Seattle's last real Pacific Coast League pennant winner—a team solely owned by Emil Sick. But after that, attendance dwindled to crowds of 600 and 800; soon they were (alas) the Seattle Angels, owned outright by the California Angels.

The major-league Pilots arrived in 1969 and there was much rejoicing among the populace. Parades of welcome were formed on opening day and for one brief, exciting season, the Pilots performed in the American League. Major league at last! The Pilots were managed by genial Joe Schultz, who declared on opening day:

"All right, gang, it's played with a round ball and a round bat and we gotta hit it square.”

The Pilots, though they lasted here only one year before bankruptcy set in, were a colorful lot. It was the year that Mike Hegan, a young first-baseman, told an interviewer after a road trip that ''the toughest thing about baseball is trying to explain to your wife why she needs a penicillin shot for your infected kidney."

Eight long years passed before another opening day came to Seattle. Not until1977, when the Mariners arrived in the new Kingdome, had real baseball been part of the city. Since then it has been a checkered nine years of quarreling owners, pointed fingers, litigation and great public wailing about whether Seattle can support a major-league team.

Salaries have now skyrocketed into the stratosphere. Where once our great stars, like Kewpie Dick Barrett and Jo Jo White, pleaded to get as much as $1,000 a month, new players, fresh young faces, are represented by agents who get them contracts of $300,000 or $400,000, and even higher.

But the strength of baseball is that no matter how they mismanage it, no matter how callous its owners seem, no matter how fan loyalty is used and abused, nothing ever destroys the game itself. Each spring brings a renewal of spirit, another season of hope, a rebirth of optimism and room for new heroes. The Mariners of this season are filled with young players and strong arms, kids with the blast and drive of youth in their legs, and within all of them, unspoken but alive, is the dream of Roy Hobbs: “I want people to say, 'There goes the best there ever was.’"

Something else has to be said about this enduring hold that baseball has on the people of America. It is, in large part, a loser's game. Most of major-league baseball's 26 teams will, inevitably, lose more games than they win, and some will lose horrendously more than others. It has always been so. Yet it's a curious fact that some of the most popular teams, the ones remembered in song and story, were chronic losers like the Seattle Pilots and the Mariners, the old St. Louis Browns, the Brooklyn Dodgers of generations past, Connie Mack's hapless Philadelphia Athletics, and the early New York Mets.

The Mets of 1962 were loved far more than their cross-town rivals, the Yankees, but this was the most inept team of all time. The Mets lost 120 games in a single season! Jimmy Breslin tried to explain, via the Mets, America’s affection for losing baseball teams.

"You see, the Mets are losers, just like everybody else in life,” he wrote. "This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough.

"It is a team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up 10 years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”

More than any other sport, baseball is a game of vivid, stop-action memory, which, because of its open expanse, freezes the action forever in one's mind. Football is a mass collision of bodies, and basketball's action has a sameness that dulls the senses. Not baseball.

Even as l look at this 42-year-old ball I hold in my hand, many scenes of that 1942 season are still fresh. Looking at the faded signatures, l can still envision Billl Lawrence, tall and graceful and swift, going back...back, back...taking in a long drive against the fence; I still see the flash of Eddie Camett's yellow bat and Eddie rounding first base with that peculiar ducklike run he had, and Hal Sueme uncoiling out of his catcher's crouch to pick off a runner at first. Each of us has what Roger Angell calls our "interior stadium,” in which lovely scenes are played over in our memories, ready to be called up again and again by nature's own videotape recorder.

And finally, there is the dimension of time. "This is the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball,” says Angell, “and perhaps explains why this sport, for all the enormous changes it has undergone...remains somehow rustic, unviolent and introspective.

"Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythm as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then—back in the country days—there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.

"Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young."