Remember Pennant Fever? -- 50 Years Ago, Rainiers Had Seattle Basking In Glory, Pennant Fever

TOMORROW

The Times continues its look into the glory era of Seattle baseball - and the Depression days when money was tight.

"Always a good baseball town - when it had anything to cheer about - Seattle has gone baseball-mad over the stirring victories of Emil Sick's Rainiers." - Seattle Times, Sept. 12, 1938

Long before the Mariners, even before the Pilots, Seattle had the Rainiers.

It also had pennant fever.

A half-century ago, pennant races weren't limited to distant cities such as New York and Detroit and St. Louis.

For Seattle fans, Pacific Coast League victories came by the 100s and championships by the bunch.

The Rainiers were the talk of the town. Baseball fans flocked to Sick's Stadium in record numbers, setting the minor-league mark of 517,657 in 1939. Thousands followed the Rainiers through the radio voice of Leo Lassen, whose home-run call - "back, back, back . . . and it's over" - was imitated by schoolboys throughout the Pacific Northwest.

The '38 Rainiers finished second, 3 1/2 games behind the Los Angeles Angels, after a stirring stretch drive in which they won 28 of 31 games.

But that remarkable finish was only a prelude. The Rainiers won pennants in 1939, '40 and '41. In four consecutive seasons, 1938-41, they ran up a cumulative record of 417 victories and 284 losses, a .601 winning percentage.

Fifty years later, the Rainiers are only a memory, a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings in dusty scrapbooks.

Yet the Rainiers are a wondrous baseball past for a city and region that saw its first major-league team slip away to Milwaukee in 1970 and could lose another, a city that has suffered through 14 straight losing seasons with the Mariners.

The championship era marked the high point of Seattle's 54-year PCL history. Some would call it the pinnacle of Seattle baseball, period.

"Those were the years, the golden years," said Al Niemiec, 80, of Kirkland, second baseman on the 1940-41-42 Rainiers.

A different time

Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to pull the United States out of the Great Depression with his New Deal. Economic conditions were a far cry from today's.

In the PCL, player salaries peaked at about $1,000 a month, and only a few major-league stars made much more. Boston's Ted Williams made $20,000 in 1941, the year he hit .406.

Salaries were low, but prices were low, too. Seattle steakhouses charged 80 cents for a sirloin steak. Ham and eggs cost 30 cents; a milkshake, 15.

The New York Yankees' Joe DiMaggio, Boston's Williams and Detroit's Hank Greenberg were baseball's biggest names. Seattle's stars included Bill Lawrence, Kewpie Dick Barrett, Farmer Hal Turpin and Jo-Jo White.

Sick's Stadium, a concrete-and-steel showplace seating 14,600 fans, was constructed in 1938 for $350,000.

The stadium at Rainier Avenue and McClellan Street had parking space for 1,400 cars - at 15 cents apiece. Box-seat tickets cost $1.15. Bleacher tickets went for 42 cents.

Compared to the cavernous Kingdome, seats at Sick's Stadium were practically on the field. On clear summer days, Mount Rainier loomed in the distance beyond the right-field fence. In Lassen's radio vocabulary, sunset turned it from a giant vanilla to a giant strawberry ice-cream cone.

Above the cabbage patch beyond the left-field fence was "Tightwad Hill," where there was usually a knot of skinflint spectators.

There were rainouts, to be sure, but in most years not as many as might be expected. In 1938, for instance, Seattle's first home rainout of the season came on Aug. 13.

Any Rainier who hit a home run or pitched a shutout at Sick's Stadium detoured to the third-base box of Charles E. Sullivan before returning to the Seattle dugout. Sullivan, a Seattle florist, rewarded such feats with a $10 bill.

But home runs did not come easy in the Rainier ballpark. It was 335 feet down the foul lines and 415 feet to center field, where the manually operated scoreboard rose above the 16-foot fence.

Thus, the Rainiers emphasized the running game, making the most of the hit-and-run ability of Alan Strange and Bill Schuster, the speed of White, Edo Vanni, first baseman George Archie, Dick Gyselman, the "Thin Man" third baseman, and Lawrence.

Train rides and brushbacks

The professional baseball map looked much different in the 1930s. There were only 16 major-league teams, none west of St. Louis.

The Pacific Coast League - then one of baseball's three Class AA circuits - included Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Hollywood and San Diego.

Teams played six-day, seven-game series, ending with Sunday doubleheaders, and traveled by train. Monday was travel day. But the longest trips sometimes stretched from Sunday night until Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before the opening of a series.

Strange, 81, of Seattle, the former shortstop drafted by the St. Louis Browns after batting .335 for the 1939 Rainiers, remembers vividly the midsummer train rides through the Sacramento Valley.

"We didn't have air conditioning. So they'd open the windows and you'd be covered with soot from the engine," Strange said.

Equipment differed vastly, too. Vanni, a fleet outfielder a year out of Queen Anne High School when he joined the Rainiers in 1938, still has one of his old gloves. It looks more like a dime-store model for a second-grader than something used by a pro ballplayer.

"You can put three suits of clothes and two pairs of shoes in the gloves they use nowadays," Vanni quipped.

Batting helmets had yet to be invented. But brush-back pitches were an accepted part of the game, not ignition switches for bench-clearing brawls.

"You'd hit a home run. The next time up the guy would throw at you," recalled Arthur "Mike" Hunt, 82, of Ephrata, PCL home-run and runs-batted-in champion in 1936 and '37 and Rainier home-run leader in 1939. "I got hit plenty of times in the back. You didn't think much of it. You just got your head out of the way."

Kewpie, Farmer and Jo-Jo

The Rainiers made up for any shortcomings with pitching, speed and a daring style that forced other teams into mistakes.

"We didn't have any power, as compared to the present day, but we could run," recalled George Archie, 77, of Nashville, Tenn., who played every game at first base for the Rainiers in 1939 and '40. "We'd hit-and-run, scramble around for runs, and the pitching would hold us."

Kewpie Dick Barrett, a roly-poly right-hander, and Farmer Hal Turpin were the aces of the pitching staff. Barrett's curve "dropped off the edge of the table," said former teammate Ira Scribner, 79, a West Seattle High School graduate.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, Barrett's pitching, three and two," was a familiar Lassen saying.

The 5-foot-9 Barrett, who had a 206-136 record in 10-plus seasons with Seattle, always seemed to be pitching with a 3-and-2 count. He frequently walked the bases loaded, but often struck out the side, too.

Archie, who was drafted by the Washington Senators after being named PCL Most Valuable Player in 1940, said, "Barrett would get three balls on a hitter, then throw 15 straight strikes."

Vanni said Seattle planned its weekend around its two aces. "Barrett was our Saturday-night pitcher," he said. "They wanted to sell as much beer as possible and knew his games would last till midnight. Turpin was our Sunday afternoon pitcher. It was get-away day, and we wanted to get the game over as soon as possible."

Turpin, a sidearm pitcher with an elusive knuckleball and superb control, won 203 PCL games, more than 150 of them with Seattle. A 20-game winner four consecutive seasons from 1939-42, he didn't care about strikeouts.

"All you had to do was throw the ball. You knew somebody was going to catch it," said Turpin, 87, a lifelong resident of Yoncalla, Ore.

Decades before Ken Griffey Jr.'s kamikaze catches, the long-legged Bill Lawrence thrilled Seattle fans for 13 seasons with his defensive wizardry in center field.

When Lawrence announced his retirement in 1944, The Times called him the "greatest outfielder ever to play Pacific Coast League baseball."

Pitcher Dewey Soriano, who went on to become Rainier general manager and PCL president, said the 6-foot-4 Lawrence "could catch fly balls no one else could even get to. He could go get that ball as well as Willie Mays. He was a taller man. He took longer strides."

Though sometimes overlooked as a hitter, Lawrence was at his best in the clutch.

"Yeah, I was pretty good when the men got on base," said Lawrence, 85, of Redwood City, Calif. "If you couldn't get that man in from third with less than two out, I thought you were a bum."

The outfield was formidable, with Lawrence in center, the crowd-pleasing Jo-Jo White, the team's top base stealer, in left and little Vanni in right.

White, acquired with Archie, catcher Buddy Hancken and pitcher Ed Selway in the December 1938 trade that sent Fred Hutchinson to Detroit, had the crowd chanting "go, go" almost every time he reached first.

"If he's on first, I'd lay the ball down the third-base line and he'd go clear around to third - stuff like that," Vanni said. "None of this sitting back and waiting for some guy to hit it over the fence."

Impossible pennant

The Rainiers finished last in the PCL in home runs in all three championship seasons, hitting 46 in 1939, 35 in 1940 and 43 in 1941.

But they won the 1939 pennant by 4 1/2 games over San Francisco and finished 9 1/2 games ahead of Los Angeles in a 1940 runaway.

And 50 years ago, in the third week of September 1941, the Rainiers were nearing the climax of an improbable run for their third straight pennant - improbable for several reasons.

Jack Lelivelt, the Rainiers' popular manager, had died of a heart attack in January. Bill Skiff, a little-known troubleshooter in the New York Yankee farm system, was named to replace him.

On June 15, Seattle trailed Pepper Martin's Sacramento Solons by 15 1/2 games.

Sacramento, which had a 50-19 (.725) record in mid-June, couldn't keep up the sizzling pace. The Rainiers played 70-36 (.660) ball after June 15.

Still 10 1/2 games behind in mid-August, the Rainiers turned up the heat. They climbed into first place for the first time Sept. 7, with two weeks remaining in the season.

Seattle clinched its third straight championship Sept. 19.

The Rainiers capped the storybook comeback with a second straight President's Cup playoff championship. They made it three President's Cups in a row the next season, although they dropped to third in the pennant race.

Seattle teams won three more pennants - in 1951, '55 and '66 - before dropping out of the PCL after the 1968 season to make way for the ill-fated Pilots.

But those years just before World War II remain the golden era for baseball in Seattle.

Jo-Jo White. Forty-three cent seats. Tightwad Hill. The signature radio signoff: "Uh, this is Leo Lassen speaking. I hope you enjoyed it."

Baseball fans did.

----------------------------- SEATTLE'S PCL PENNANT WINNERS -----------------------------

Year Manager W L Pct. GA

---- -------------- --- --- ---- -----

1924 Wade Killefer 109 91 .545 1 1/2 .

1939 Jack Lelivelt 101 73 .580 4 1/2 .

1940 Jack Lelivelt 112 66 .629 9 1/2 .

1941 Bill Skiff 104 70 .598 3 1/2 .

1951 Rogers Hornsby 99 68 .593 6 .

1955 Fred Hutchinson 95 77 .552 3 .

1966 Bob Lemon 83 65 .561 6 .

GA - games ahead.