EVERETT — Well over a century ago, pioneers in far-flung Washington Territory towns like Snohomish and Lowell were crazy about baseball.
Nearly two decades before Everett was even a city, fans from these towns would pile on slow-moving paddle-wheel steamers for baseball excursions to see their teams compete against rivals in places like Port Gamble and Seattle.
“The game runs very deep here, and it seems worthwhile to pause for a moment to acknowledge that and to invoke the names of dead heroes and tales of forgotten teams,” local historian David Dilgard says in his new podcast, “Baseball Among the Stumps.”
In the nearly hourlong audio recording, available on the Everett Public Library’s Web site, Dilgard looks back at the roots of baseball in Everett and Snohomish County, exploring its lore, color and drama.
He talks about Industrial League baseball favorites like the zany infielder Angelo “Razz” Canonica and gives career highlights of local major leaguers Walter Thornton and the two Earls of Snohomish, Earl Torgeson and baseball Hall of Famer Earl Averill.
Dilgard did much of the research in the late 1990s when he recorded 40 local baseball history stories for KSER, 90.7 FM. The 90-second spots were aired to fill breaks during broadcasts of Everett Aquasox games.
In addition to accomplishments on the ballfield, Dilgard takes note of the amusing and innovative journalism that accompanied early baseball here.
Sportswriters wrote flowery, often poetic prose, turning small-town baseball games into epic battles of historic proportion.
Even exhibition games, like the one pitting Everett bankers against Everett lawyers on July 13, 1894, were written about with a flair seldom seen today.
The Everett News put the game on the front page with the headline: “Money Power Triumphant, The Cunning of Attorneys Availeth Nothing: Bankers 22, Lawyers 14.”
The writer described a high infield pop-up in the fourth inning as a ball “smashed square in the nose … up into the blue imperium, beyond the range of human vision, then the immutable law of gravitation kicked in and the ball dropped like a dislodged meteor to Mother Earth.”
When the Snohomish Pacifics, the area’s first organized team, was founded in 1877, settler teams played with handmade bats on fields pocked with mountain-beaver holes.
Snohomish was still the county seat at the time, and its team dominated local sports for a decade. The team’s chief rivals in the early days were the Port Gamble Unknowns.
The podcast mentions Lushootseed tribesmen who grew up playing chuts-wheelch, a summer stick-and-ball game, who took to baseball with great skill.
The Everett Smokestackers, Everett’s first professional team, won the Northwestern League pennant in their first and only season in 1905. The team was defeated in its home opener against the Bellingham Hamburgers in front of an overflow crowd of thousands, including the team owner’s goat, which sat in the outfield.
Snohomish native Averill, who was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1975, hit a home run in his initial Major League at-bat for the Cleveland Indians in 1929.
The center fielder, whom Dilgard describes as the kind of hitter “pitchers have nightmares about,” had a career .318 batting average and smacked 238 home runs during his 13 years in the big leagues. He was elected to the American League All-Star team six times, including the 1937 All-Star Game, when he knocked a line drive off Dizzy Dean’s left big toe and ended Dean’s career.
Walter Thornton, a southpaw who played for the Chicago Colts, now the Chicago Cubs, for four consecutive seasons starting in 1895, is connected with Snohomish County. Thornton pitched a no-hitter in 1898 against the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. Before making the majors, he pitched Snohomish’s town team to the state championship in 1893. After his career in the big leagues, he returned to Snohomish County to play baseball before eventually moving to Los Angeles to become a street minister.
About a year ago, the Everett Public Library began producing audio recordings that can be downloaded to computers and digital audio players.
There are now 11 such podcasts posted, including lectures from authors who visited the library and an update from the library’s director Eileen Simmons.
Simmons said the library began digitizing much of its local history collection under the initiative of retired Northwest Room historian Margaret Riddle early this decade.
Since then, its Web site has grown to include downloadable audiobooks, historic photos and oral history interviews with longtime Everett residents that were recorded in the 1970s. “It is nice to be able to leverage what we have and get it out there in as many other forms that we can,” Simmons said.
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429, dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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