A celebration of "base ball"

The Marysville Owls were an early-1900s amateur baseball team that regularly played the Tulalips, the team from the reservation. And there were plenty of other teams in the Puget Sound region, as evidenced by a new book about the game as it was played in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Dave Larson will give a free slide talk about Northwest Washington baseball teams at 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Marysville Library. He'll sign copies of his new book: "Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers: Early Baseball in Tall Timber Country." (Kirk House, $25; discounted to $20 at the signing.)

Journalism is "the first rough draft of history," according to Phil Graham, a publisher of The Washington Post, and newspaper accounts bring these games to life in Larson's pages. The book reprints many full accounts of matchups as they were first reported — in Seattle, Tacoma, Blaine, Bellingham, LaConner, Port Angeles, Stanwood, Silvana, Arlington, Granite Falls, Everett, Snohomish, Mukilteo and Edmonds.

Starting at Army camps, the game had been played as early as 1859 at Fort Vancouver, Washington territory.

In Whatcom County, on a sand spit in Bellingham Bay, baseball saw one of its first published reports in 1875.

A team called The Wide Awakes — a bunch of clerks, mining engineers and two trappers — played against coal miners of the Black Diamond Mine.

"Wide Awakes, Invincibles, & Smokestackers: Early Baseball in Tall Timber Country"


What, when: Free slide talk and book signing by Dave Larson, baseball historian, at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

Where: Marysville Library, 6120 Grove St.

Information: Dave Larson: 360-588-8080. Marysville Library: 360-658-5000.

A leader had to explain some aspects of the new game to his teammates, and the town shut down the sawmill and coal mine for the day so everybody could go. The umpire was the editor of the Bellingham Bay Mail.

In 1877, the year the Seattle Alkis were formed, The Northern Star published the first accounts of "base ball" in Snohomish County:

"No fatal case of Base Ball yet. One member discovered several new planets by attempting to catch a sky flyer on the top of his head, and another, failing to jump high enough to catch the ball in his mouth, took it in the eye, and saw clusters of stars not marked in the geography of the heavens, besides several new comets."

By 1879, the Blue Jays Base Ball Club had formed in Snohomish — a ladies team on which the catcher capturing the ball with her apron, "and the runner announces her arrival at each base by a shrill shriek," reported the Washington Standard.

Then there was a 22-inning game between Seattle and Tacoma in May 1891, the longest professional game played at the time.

More than 50 photos support the book's stories, some dating back to 1878. Looking at these long-ago players, hunched in the grass or standing with caps and bats, you wonder what it felt like to be around in those days, when the game was in its infancy. The stories tell us.

Newspapers hit the Washington territory about the same time as baseball, Larson points out, and the writers of the day embellished their reports with puns, outrageous exaggerations and even political asides.

George E. MacDonald, who co-edited The Eye newspaper in Snohomish in the early 1890s, wrote about games in Biblical prose, in free verse, even in rhyme:

"Walt Thornton fired to center field

And crowded all the bases,

Next Roll came up and made an out

That left them in their places ... "

His analogies were vivid: the Seattle Teamsters' crimson uniforms, he wrote, "looked as though they had been dyed in the blood of victims slain upon the field of battle."

His similes were Homeric: First baseman Clemons "had merely to put out his hands and the ball froze to them like drops of winter rain on an apple tree."

And a game between Port Gamble and Snohomish revealed a religious bent as MacDonald wrote, "The umpire's decisions on balls were errors, on strikes they were crimes, on fouls they were outrages, and at the bases they were sins against the Holy Ghost."

Larson said the fun of the research "was the discovery of writers like MacDonald. Nobody else had done a project like this before. Damon Runyon started in the 1920s, but I discovered writers in the 1870s were wonderfully entertaining. And they weren't exclusively sportswriters at that time."

Illustrator Gary Daum makes some of the taller tales in the book visual with 20 cartoons.

Larson, a retired CPA, is used to poring over documents. But to research the rough-and-tumble life of early Western Washington baseball, he spent hundreds of hours among yellowing newspaper archives and at microfilm machines, mainly at the Everett Public Library.

Library historian David Dilgard wrote the preface to the book, calling it "the story of the regional roots of the great American sport, from the dawn of 'Base Ball Fever' in the 1870s through that triumphal 1905 season of Everett's intrepid 'Smokestackers,' told almost entirely in the words of the original scribes who witnessed and recorded it."

Larson spent a decade researching baseball history for prerecorded spots broadcast on KSER-FM (90.7) during the seventh-inning stretch of Everett AquaSox games.

"Baseball was my first love, before I discovered girls," Larson quipped. "And my wife says I'm now in my second childhood."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com