Talkin’ baseball

Call yourself a baseball fan?

Ever heard of Walter Thornton?

Did you know that the first professional baseball game in Everett was played in 1905, not in 1984, and that more than 5,000 fans attended?

Or that in 1924 the Everett Seagulls semi-pro team beat the Brooklyn Dodgers and future Hall of Fame pitcher Burleigh Grimes in an exhibition game?

Or that Earl Averill – another future Hall of Famer – was a complete bust in his first spring training?

Didn’t know any of this? What kind of baseball fan are you?

Actually, you could be fairly knowledgeable and still draw a blank on most – if not all – of these questions. That is, unless you’re a student of baseball history, specifically northwest Washington baseball history.

After eight years of researching a book, Dave Larson of Anacortes is a walking, talking authority on the Grand Old Game up in this neck of the woods.

His book, which centers on Snohomish County, will consist of two volumes – No.1 to be called “Early Baseball in Tall Timber Country,” covering the years 1875 to 1905. No.2 – as yet without a title – will be from 1906 to World War II.

Baseball may be a game of numbers, but in Larson’s book, the reader will get to know the characters who played the game and who provided a rich lore that’ll make for some lively reading. “I wanted the stories,” he said, and, lo, there were many stories to be had, stories told in colorful prose that probably wouldn’t get past an editor today.

“I asked Dave Dilgard of the Everett Public Library how I could improve on them,” Larson said. “He said, ‘Don’t try. Just use them.’ I will write the bridge that goes between them.”

Appropriate to the “Tall Timber” title, the cover of the first volume will have an artist’s rendition of Paul Bunyon with a baseball bat on his shoulder.

If there was a Paul Bunyon of Snohomish County baseball, it was Earl Averill, the original “Earl of Snohomish,” the only ballplayer from the state of Washington in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. That is, until this summer, when Ryne Sandberg will be inducted.

A left-handed hitting outfielder who spent most of his career with the Cleveland Indians, Averill became the first American League player to hit a home run in his initial at-bat on Opening Day in 1929, and went on to compile a .318 lifetime batting average with 238 homers and 1,165 RBI.

Quite a finish to a career that had a rough start.

A sensational semi-pro player, Averill – with financial help from fans in his hometown of Snohomish – went to spring training with the Seattle Indians of the Pacific Coast League in 1924. He was anything but a smash hit.

One newsman observed that Averill could neither hit nor field. “Averill was quoted as saying, ‘It was the worst two weeks of my life,’” Larson said.

So humiliated was Averill that he thought about shipping out on a tramp steamer, but instead joined a semi-pro team in Bellingham.

Things got better, a lot better. Two years later, he signed with the San Francisco Seals, spent three years in the Pacific Coast League in which he batted .300 or better, then was sold to Cleveland for a reported $50,000 and was in the Opening Day lineup in 1929.

Larson has dug up so much material on Averill that he believes he has enough for a book, if he were so inclined to write one, which he is not. Right now anyway. “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility,” he said.

He has his hands full with his current project, which he hopes to publish by the summer of 2006, in time for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) national convention in Seattle.

“To most of those guys, Snohomish doesn’t mean anything,” Larson said, “so I’ll tout it as a souvenir from the Pacific Northwest.”

Raised for the most part in the Pacific Northwest, Dave Larson grew up at a time when, as he puts it, “baseball was truly the national game. Before TV. Before computers.”

And, of course, before the Mariners. His team: the Seattle Rainiers of the PCL. His boyhood hero: Earl Torgeson, a left-handed hitting first baseman who, like Averill, was from Snohomish and who, like Averill, went on to a long career in the big leagues.

“When I was a boy in Seattle, Torgeson was the first baseman for the Rainiers,” Larson said. “He wore glasses and I wore glasses. I figured if Earl Torgeson could play baseball for the Rainiers, so could I. Boy, was I mistaken.”

Larson was, however, a teammate of a man who would break the most hallowed record in major league history. Living in Fargo, N.D., at the time, Larson played on the same American Legion team with Roger Maris. “Just another kid,” as Larson remembered him. “Not until I was in the service did my mother start sending me clippings of this kid who was burning up the minor leagues.” And who would one day break Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.

Larson spent 20 years as a certified public accountant, which he said served as good training for his current avocation. “I’ve got an auditor’s nose for obscure facts,” he said wryly.

He also has a wonderfully resonant voice, one made for radio, which he has delved into. For two years, he delivered historical anecdotes on Northwest Washington baseball during the seventh-inning stretch of Everett AquaSox games on KSER. “Each spot was one minute and 49 seconds and at 1:50, (AquaSox announcer) Pat Dillon came back on,” Larson said with a chuckle. “I wrote my own spots, sat there with a stopwatch recording them. Halfway through the season, I found that 1:49 was a good time spot to tell one story. I was comfortable with that.”

He is also comfortable spending a couple of days a week in the Northwest Room of the Everett Public Library looking through old newspaper files and microfilm to enrich his book.

This, you can tell, is a labor of love, a man who appreciates a good story and the flavorsome use of the language that was common to newspapers in the early 20th century. “The early sportswriters were great entertainers,” Larson said.

One writer who must have been paid by the word wrote three columns on one game, including two of a fight preceding the game.

His prose was almost Biblical. Like to see what he could have done with David and Goliath.

The first Goliath-like baseball figure to emerge from Snohomish County was Walter Thornton, a Midwestern boy who came to Snohomish to live with his older brother in 1890. Three years later, at the age of 18, Thornton pitched the Snohomish town team to the mythical state championship, then, in Larson’s words, was “shanghaied” by the Seattle Athletic Club, which he led to the mythical championship of the West Coast. A year later, he was pitching and playing the outfield for the Chicago Colts (forerunners of the Chicago Cubs), with whom he would spend four seasons, compiling a 23-18 record and batting .312.

After his major league career ended, Thornton returned to the Northwest, coming to Everett in 1900, where he built a baseball field that was home to the city’s first professional team, the Everett Smokestackers, who played their first home game on May 11, 1905, before an overflow crowd of more than 5,000. Many of them – along with the Everett team owner’s goat – sat in the outfield, just as the fans did for the first game of Everett’s next professional team, the Giants in 1984.

Everett has also played host to some big-time players. Grimes and the Dodgers – who had finished second in the National League that year – came here on a barnstorming tour in 1924 and were roughed up by the Seagulls, 15-3.

It was their only loss on the tour.

In 1940, another legendary pitcher came to Everett to face the semi-pro team.

Leroy “Satchel” Paige of the Kansas City Monarchs was his usual dominating self, and one of his victims was Merlin “Boody” Gilbertson, a 17-year-old student at Everett High School.

In his one at-bat against Paige, Gilbertson hit the ball to the second baseman. “And I felt pretty good about that,” he said.

Just as anyone who reads Dave Larson’s book is likely to feel.