From the Cap to the Nat
(or How Editing Ken McIntosh's History of Professional
Baseball in Vancouver Made Me a Fan)

By Rod Drown

One of my life's singular glory days unfolded during a lunch hour when I was about ten, back in Golden, BC. After hitting a fly ball in a school yard softball game, I became the afternoon's hero. The adulation continued only for a few more days since my athletic feat had led to the unfortunate – and unrealizable – expectation that I would continue to hit balls with such magnificent trajectories. However, being more of a scholar than a sports star in elementary school, I was not able to repeat my noon hour feat. But, for awhile, I was the right-handed batter among my classmates.

This is all by way of introducing the fact that, before I was hired last year by New Westminster writer Ken McIntosh to edit his manuscript chronicling the history of professional baseball in Vancouver, I had not given more than an iota of thought to softball, let alone baseball, for years. The book is now complete and it is now with one of BC's most reputable publishers, awaiting their acceptance.

Although I have published poems and been a freelance journalist, I am no George Bowering and so my knowledge of the game was entirely superficial. However, over the last several months of working closely with Ken on the intricacies of how this sport has evolved since 1951, baseball has not only grown on me, it has also grown within me. In fact I recently had my first baseball dream.

GLORY DAYS IN MY DREAMS!

In the dream, I am playing baseball and, as it opens, I have just hit two singles and people have gathered around to congratulate me. As I had hit the singles, I had felt lean and athletic, and had walked with great ease to first base. Obviously, I had knocked the ball clear out of the park! Later in the game, after the teams had exchanged positions and my group had gone into the field, I caught two hit balls. Just before I caught the balls, I had borrowed a light brown leather glove, which had – perhaps for added padding – a black covered booklet, almost like one of my poetry collections, inside it. As the game had progressed, one of the opposing players had bunted the ball down the first baseline. A beautiful woman beside me had kept praising me for my playing. I remember now how the field had seemed rather crowded when I was catching the balls.

This dream either contains or infers the elements physical, mental, athletic or esthetic that are essential to baseball's attractiveness. It has the batter with his bat, the audience with high regard for its star, the base-stealer with his physical prowess, the catcher with his glove and the overall poetic elegance of a well-played inning. It has been said, fairly often, that baseball is a kind of very slow-moving and elegant ballet. The dream also draws, by inference, the distinction between the sport itself and the ordinary life that exists apart from it. Perhaps the dichotomy is this: In baseball the field might appear crowded in some areas and at some times but there can only be one ball in motion during the game, whereas in life outside the ballpark many balls are in motion.

KEN MCINTOSH – POLICE OFFICER, UMPIRE AND BASEBALL CONNOISSEUR/HISTORIAN

Ken McIntosh is a hard-working square-dealer who has spent nearly four years researching the story of professional baseball in Vancouver. That he has worked as an umpire seems to speak directly to the probability of there residing within him the sense that the world should be a more fair place where the weak are protected and the strong constrained to act fairly. A place where people know the rules and there is someone who can enforce them. Ken used to be a policeman in New Westminster, British Columbia and so, judging from what that bit of his history may reflect about his character, his role as Umpire is also fitting.

As to the nuances of the game in terms of strategy and tactics, Ken has been a great teacher and I have learned a great deal from him about the game. I have come to understand why some people love it. It is a game of strategy and tactics: a kind of large chessboard disguised as a baseball diamond – where, every so often, the batter turns into a knight. I have learned some other things too – that home plate is a pentangle, the catcher is like a captain or a football quarterback, that most pitchers deliver the ball in excess of 90 MPH and that the batter has about half a second to decide what kind of a ball is being thrown at him. In terms of Vancouver, I have come to understand that there will almost always be a coterie of local businessmen eager to take on the responsibility of owning or, in bad times, financially supporting the home team. Sometimes over the years it has almost seemed they are willing to throw money at it – as if they were some kind of temporarily deranged pitchers, standing on mounds of money.

The story that Ken has succeeded in telling is the erratic and often uncertain survival of professional baseball in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ken believes, and I agree, that telling the story was a job that needed to be done. In our wildest baseball dreams, we even see this book being influential enough to turn Vancouver sports fans away from hockey and into baseball fanatics. It is interesting to consider that Vancouver is now the only place in Canada that has A-level professional baseball in which a team is affiliated to one of the Major League teams.

FOUR BASEBALL ERAS IN VANCOUVER

So what is it that has attracted people to the game in Vancouver? Since the very early 1950's Vancouver baseball fans have cheered on four separate professional teams, organized within two leagues (the Western International League and the Pacific Coast League). The Capilanos (1951-1954), the Mounties (1957-1962 and 1965 – 1969), the Vancouver Canadians (1978-1999) and the short-season Canadians (2000-the present) have all made their home in the Nat. Three of them (the Capilanos, the Mounties and the PCL Canadians) have risen and fallen. The last, the NWL Canadians, the short season Canadians, have been around since 2000, attracting about 115,000 fans annually. Over the last 58 years these four teams have been affiliated to one or more of 12 Major League teams : the Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Braves, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City A's, Oakland A's, Seattle Pilots/Montreal Expos, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago White Sox, California Angels, Anaheim Angels and Oakland Athletics.

George Bamberger, a fan favourite of the Vancouver Mounties

The total annual attendance during the four incarnations of the sport in Vancouver will show just how much of a roller-coaster the fan base has been. To briefly review: the Capilanos started off big and lost attendance – from 164,000 to 55,000 in the four years from 1951 to 1954. The next team and the first incarnation of the Vancouver Mounties (1956 to 1962) started off low, batted to a height in 1957 (under the irrepressible Charlie Metro) and, after two more years at approximately 250,000, fell to under 140,000, and then rose to about 200,000 before dying at just under 90,000. The next incarnation of the Mounties (1965-1969), managed by (among others) Mickey Vernon, had three relatively healthy years (1965, 1966 and 1967), followed by two years of significantly lower attendance (1968 and 1969). The next semi-professional team for Vancouver, the Vancouver Canadians (1978 to 1999) had a very interesting graph: from its inception, attendance rose steadily (except for the two exceptional years of 1981 and 1984) from 1978 to 1988. From 1989 to 1998, it never fell below 280,000. Managers when these numbers reached their peak were Marv Foley (1989-91) Rick Renick (1992), Max Oliveras (1993), Don Long (1994-96), Bruce Hines (1997) and Mitch Seoane (1998).

Very often in the United States baseball audiences have been said to mirror the perspectives of society at large but, in the great scheme of things, only age matters. Here is a quote which applies to baseball and youth:

The whole reason little boys always bring gloves to baseball games and old boys never do: Because through baseball, they have learned what they can reasonably expect from life.
– David Hinckley

Another aphorism in praise of using baseball to save youth from itself is this one:

I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart would rather steal second base than an automobile.
– Tom Clark

Lefty O'Doul, one of the 1956 Mounties

METRO, MAYHEM AND METEORS:
EPISODES IN VANCOUVER BASEBALL

I think that Charlie Metro would have agreed with Tom Clark. I say that because I am reminded of one of my favourite stories in Ken's book. Remember how, in the late 1950's, only punks and greasers had really long hair? In 1958 Mounties Manager Charlie Metro's eyes, all the kids who had been stealing balls after they had been hit over the Nat Bailey fence had long hair and were probably well on the road to juvenile delinquency. So, inviting them in for saving, he made them all get crew cuts. Then the real fun started: one of the boys turned out to be a girl and now she had a crew cut!

There is a sense in many of the quotations about baseball that the sport takes place in a peaceful world, where all is harmony, graceful athletes and finely tuned plays. Just as elsewhere, this has not always been the case in Vancouver. For example, the most memorable event of May 1966 was when a hotheaded player named Santiago Rosario wound up in the halls of baseball infamy for bashing Merrit Ranew, from the opposing team, over the head with a baseball bat.

Charlie Metro, Mounties Manager in late 1950s

As I worked through Ken's book, I came to see that, amidst the dozens if not thousands of players, coaches, managers and owners who trod the baselines or surveyed the scenes from the dugouts from 1951 forward, there was one man who really lit the baseball flame here in Vancouver. Bob Brown, who had built Vancouver's very first baseball stadium, Athletic Park, hit a lot of home runs in Vancouver. Brown was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, near the heartland of baseball, on July 5, 1876. During his early and middle years in the city he built a brand new baseball facility called Athletic Park. He cleared the land for it by placing sticks of dynamite in the numerous tree stumps, lighting the fuses, and running like hell.

Another event which should never be forgotten in Vancouver's baseball history concerns one in which the Heavens or a small part of them at least, came to earth or passed over it very closely! This was The Great Meteor/UFO Flyby of May 28, 1962. The stellar spectacle occurred during a game when suddenly, from the heavens north of the Stadium, came a fiery ball that appeared over the North Shore Mountains and seemed headed directly towards the Stadium. Pandemonium ensued: both teams fled the field, heading to the dugouts and the sparse crowd of 660, the third lowest crowd of the season, scattered from the stands and scrambled for the parking lot – many choosing not to return for the game's conclusion. This is an event that has taken on, in Vancouver baseball circles, the gravitas of Halley's Comet.

1962 Mounties Manager Jack McKeon later managed the Florida Marlins to their
2003 World Series Championship over the New York Yankees

Roles, if not characters, repeat themselves in Vancouver's baseball history. That of the rich benefactor started with White Spot millionaire Nat Bailey. He was a natural for leading a baseball enterprise. After all, he had started out selling popcorn and peanuts at Bob Brown's old Athletic Park after arriving in Vancouver from Seattle in 1911. From 1956 onwards Bailey would be the one to bankroll the Mounties. He has been replaced in modern times, so far as a role in the Vancouver baseball enterprise, by A&W magnate Jeff Mooney.

One of the most lovable old devils I have met in Ken's book is groundskeeper Gene Edlund, the great wily one. As Metro explains it, groundskeeper Edlund knew every inch and every mechanical oddity of the park by heart – including a big field clock that could be speeded up or slowed down! "So what?" Metro wondered on being told the news. Edlund's response: "I can slow it up if we're having a rally on Sunday or speed it up if the other team is about to score and tie or win," he smirked.

Brooks Robinson, who irritated Coach Charlie Metro
by wanting to date Metro’s teenage daughter

Ken McIntosh writes two blogs on BC baseball – vancouvermilb.blogspot.com and newwestsbest.blogspot.com. The first is about Vancouver's professional baseball history as played at Nat Bailey Stadium (originally called Capilano Stadium) and the second is about the short-lived New Westminster Frasers, the city's 1974 entry in Northwest League.