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New video history of Rainiers touches all the bases of magical ballclub

Monday, August 23, 1999

By WILLIAM ARNOLD Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
MOVIE CRITIC

Few memories persist in such a rosy sentimental glow to longtime Seattle residents than its extinct minor-league baseball team, the Rainiers. And few attachments are more mystifying to newer Northwest residents who have no personal or family links to the team's last great era in the 1950s.

The best thing about "The Seattle Rainiers," a splendid new video history of the team, is that it treats its subject less as some quaint chapter of the local past and more as one of our area's greatest cultural icons and a thrilling legacy of baseball purity and excellence.

As it guides us through the Rainiers' spectacular rise and fall, it joyously communicates just how and why the team's memory would become so cherished that, decades after its demise, you still can't go to a sports event in Seattle without seeing a Rainiers hat or jacket somewhere in the crowd.

The video was produced by a local documentary film company (with financing provided mostly by Safeco) and presents the saga of the Rainiers in the style of the celebrated 1994 Ken Burns history of major league baseball: mixing stills, newsreel footage, re-created quotes, interviews and narration.

But it also goes beyond the 27-year Rainier reign to tell the entire pre-Mariner history of professional baseball in Seattle, which began when an ex-pro-player named Daniel Dugdale came to town in the late 1890s, organized our first pro team, and built the first stadium, Dugdale Park.

Seattle was a charter member of the Pacific Coast League in 1903, and its team hobbled through the decades with several names (Giants, Indians), uninspired ownership (especially from the greedy and gutless Bill Klepper, who bought the team from Dugdale in 1920) and only one PCL pennant, in 1924.

In late 1937, Klepper sold the near-bankrupt franchise to millionaire brewer Emile Sick, who renamed the team the "Rainiers" after his beer (a move that was much resented at the time) and promised to give Seattle "the best baseball possible."

He also gave the city a new ballpark -- not just a ballpark, but a field of dreams: a "sleek art-deco marvel of steel and concrete" called Sick's Seattle Stadium, seating 15,000 and built on the site of the old Dugdale Park, just a stone's throw from Franklin High School.

The Rainiers' 1938 inaugural season was a magical one, sparked by its rookie mound hero -- a 19-year-old recent Franklin grad named Fred Hutchinson who won a phenomenal 25 games and had the league's lowest ERA. The Rainiers finished that first season in second place, its best finish in 14 years.

Hutchinson was grabbed by the Detroit Tigers, but the Rainiers used the money and personnel obtained from the Hutch trade to become a dynasty, taking the PCL pennant in 1939, and repeating the feat in both 1940 (winning 112, its best season) and 1941.

World War II crushed the dynasty, as the draft depleted the ranks of players and played havoc with the game schedule. Yet the Rainiers' magic endured, and through the '40s, the team drew a half million fans a year -- a statistic that made it "the most popular minor league team in the country."

The 1951 Rainiers were managed by one of baseball's all-time great players, Rogers Hornsby, who delivered another pennant that year. But when Hornsby left, Seattle finished third in '52, and for the first time since Sick bought the team, attendance started to slip and continued to do so in '53 and '54.

For the 1955 season, general manager Dewey Soriano talked his old friend Hutchinson into coming back to manage the Rainiers. Given a free hand and a hero's welcome after his distinguished major-league career, Hutchinson made 82 player changes, and went to war.

The 1955 season was the most magical of all Rainier seasons. Without a single .300 hitter or 20-game winner, Hutch simply out-managed and out-fought the competition and won the pennant in a climactic series with Seattle's loathed arch-rivals, the Los Angeles Angels.

At the time, P-I sports writer Royal Brougham called that season "the greatest pulse-jumping, eye-popping pennant race in Seattle baseball history," and veterans of that summer claim Seattle has never been so completely caught up in anything, before or since. (See accompanying story.)

But it was a last hurrah. Hutch left Seattle the next year to manage the Cincinnati Reds, and the Rainiers never had another championship season. In 1958, the New York Dodgers and Giants moved west to effectively gut the Pacific Coast League, and in 1960 Sick sold the Rainiers to the Boston Red Sox.

The story gets even sadder with the cancer death of Hutchinson at age 44, and a series of pathetic last gasps by the team before Gene Autry bought it in 1965 and dropped the Rainiers name.

In 1970, after one year as the home of the ill-fated Seattle Pilots -- the city's first major-league team -- Sick's Stadium was abandoned. It was demolished in 1979.

All told, it's an extraordinarily dramatic story that comes alive in a nostalgic rush of still photographs, newspaper headlines, documentary footage (including pristine color film of the opening day of Sick's Stadium in 1938) and the memorabilia collection of baseball historian Dave Eskenazi.

Among the two dozen or so interview subjects are ex-Rainiers Edo Vanni, Larry Jensen and Ed Basinski; columnist Emmett Watson (who actually had two at bats for the '43 Rainiers, going one for two and retiring with a .500 lifetime batting average) and Gov. Gary Locke, who was a Rainiers fan as a kid.

What the video does especially well is establish how the Pacific Coast League in its heyday was never a farm league. In all but name, it was a third major league, with its own traditions and records, and players who often turned down major-league offers because they were paid more in the PCL.

(In the late '40s, Hollywood Stars owner Bob Cobb -- the guy the Cobb Salad is named after -- mounted a campaign to have the PCL officially made America's third major league. He failed, but it would have been a visionary move, avoiding baseball's decades of heartbreaking moves and expansion fights.)

The video also makes the case that the Rainiers had unusually strong local roots, drawing many players from the city's neighborhoods who actually lived here off season; and that it may have had the best "voice" of any team ever in Leo H. Lassen, the brilliant, staccato-voiced announcer who did radio play-by-play from the early '30s to 1956.

Above all, the Seattle Rainiers have one of the all-time great baseball myths: two fairy-tale bookend seasons -- '38 and '55 -- both dominated by a hometown hero who looked like Dick Tracy, played with the determination of Knute Rockne and died as publicly and as well as Lou Gehrig. In baseball, that kind of legend lives forever.

Seattle Rainiers (1938-1965)

Principal owner: Brewer Emil Sick (1938-60), one of most inspired owners in the history of minor-league baseball, was never hesitant to open his pocketbook and was in the game "for the fun."

Principal venue: Sick's Seattle Stadium: constructed 1938, demolished 1979.

Pacific Coast League championship seasons: 1924 (as the Seattle Indians), 1939, 1940, 1941, 1951, 1955.

Three greatest managers: Jack Lelivelt (1938-1940); Rogers Hornsby (1951); Fred Hutchinson (1955).

10 great players: Fred Hutchinson, "Kewpie Dick" Barrett, Jim Rivera, Bob Boyd, Lou Kretlow, Edo Vanni, Hal Turpin, Bill Lawrence, Jo Jo White, Bill Schuster.

Game schedule: 178-game season, played in seven-game weekly series (five games and a Sunday double-header, with Monday off).

First season admission price: 42 cents a game.

Average length of game: In 1955, the average PCL game was 2 hours, 12 minutes (due to moderate use of relief pitchers, and umpires who were instructed by the league president to "keep the game moving at all times").

No-hitter: Rainiers' all-time greatest pitcher, "Kewpie Dick" Barrett pitched the team's only perfect game, May 18, 1948, at age 40. (Seventeen years later, shortly before Christmas, "Kewpie Dick" -- out of work and on relief -- was arrested for shoplifting, attempting to steal food to stay alive.)

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