THE NEW WESTMINSTER FRASERS

Some dreams of youth took shape one summer 35 years ago on the fields of New Westminster’s Queen’s Park Stadium. The year 1974 was a time when professional baseball had departed the Lower Mainland. Vancouver’s Nat Bailey Stadium had said goodbye to the second (and final version) of the Vancouver Mounties in 1969 and the Vancouver Canadians would not make their first appearance there until 1978. Trying to step into the gap by locating themselves in New Westminster was an independently owned team of the Northwest Minor Baseball League, the Frasers. A young American sports entrepreneur named Dean Taylor was the  spark plug behind the team and his father-in-law was the man who bankrolled the idea.

As lasting members of the baseball community, only three Frasers really had staying power: Dean Taylor ended up as a Vice-President of the Kansas City Royals; Jeff Cox is currently Third Base Coach with the Chicago White Sox and Lee Sigman was a General Manager of the Vancouver Canadians in 1981.

As a young man, my co-author Ken McIntosh saw the Frasers play once or twice and has wondered ever since who was behind them, why their playing record had been so abysmal and if things could have turned out differently. Digging up the roots of the Frasers has been a fascinating exercise of discovery for Ken and me. Over the last year or so, I have assisted Ken McIntosh in writing the story of the New Westminster Frasers.

You can order this book for $19.95 from Ken McIntosh by contacting him at blackrat09@gmail.com or by going to his baseball blog at http://newwestminsterfrasersbaseballclub.blogspot.com