Whenever folks from out of town ask about the history of Nat Bailey Stadium, folks normally point them to Sir Bud Kerr, Esq., the self-appointed club historian.

Bud’s routine never gets old, as he perches himself behind home plate, kicks off the oxygen mask, pats the bench next to him and regales Chuck from Brooklyn or Hank from Peoria, or Suki from Osaka with stories of watching ball through the knothole in the fence as a kid, or being a ’switch-pitcher’ as a teen, or watching that fireball zoom towards a rapidly-emptying stadium as an adult. 

Tales of radio-controlled pitchers and the first night game and ‘Scotsman’s Hill’ and ‘the infield Babe Ruth spat tobacco juice on’ keep the tourists enthralled and grinning, and more than a few locals lean in, even if they’ve heard the tales of Satchel Paige ‘tossing nothing but junk’ a hundred times before.

But Bud relies a lot on memory, and as he gets older, those memories get a little more opaque, which leads many to wonder, what will happen when Bud (heaven forbid) is no longer with us? Will those stories pass with him?

Jim Bennie may well be the solution - not just to retaining those stories, but to finding new ones, and confirming the hazy details of those that have been around for a while. Bennie, for those that don’t know him, has been backup scorekeeper, announcer, radio guy - you name it - at Nat Bailey Stadium for a lot of years (not as many as Bud, but still). And in his spare time, he likes to read the paper.

Not today’s papers, mind you. I’m talking newspapers from 1906 and 1942 and 1965.

But he may just keep a copy of The Province from Feb 5 2008, for that’s the issue that saw Ken Gilchrist  profile Jim Bennie:

The fact CKWX newsman Jim Bennie has written A Short History of Vancouver Pro Baseball but couldn’t remember the Internet address is not germane to anything, really. More interesting is that he caught historian and former Mounties play-by-play man Jim Robson by surprise with the nugget that there was a pro team called the Vancouver Canucks playing baseball in 1907.

 

It wasn’t a very good team, finishing with a record of 34-106 and a whopping 53 games behind the pennant-winning Aberdeen Black Cats. Not surprisingly, they changed their names to the Beavers the next year and won the Northwest League title. 

"Why am I doing it?" Bennie asked rhetorically. 

"I guess because it has never been done by anyone. There’s all kinds of information on the Internet about the Pacific Coast League, but hardly anything on the WIL, and the league the C’s now play in mirrors the Western International pretty closely. I’ve been going to the library looking stuff up from old newspaper articles."

This would probably be a good time to point out that, according to Bennie, there was never a team called the Vancouver Horsedoctors in the early 20th century, and the fact that people think there was is down to a research error.

To wit:

Here’s a little note about the name “Horse Doctors” for 1905. The team wasn’t actually named that.

John McCloskey was brought in as manager of Vancouver first pro baseball team. Coming along with him were some players with a fair bit of experience in a variety of leagues. So the team was named the Vancouver Veterans.

Vancouver had three newspapers in those days - the World, the Province and the News-Advertiser. They were all extremely competitive and quite jealous of their independence, it appears. One of the papers used ‘Veterans’. Another paper shortened it to ‘Vets.’ The third took the shortened term, twisted the meaning and decided to call them the Horse Doctors. Apparently, this sort of thing passed for clever sportswriting 100 years ago.

A number of years ago, I started going through old papers and making notes on our old ball teams. I mentioned to various people in the press box that I had found that in ‘05, our first team was named the Horse Doctors. At this point, I hadn’t seen all three Vancouver papers; just the one. Some time later, someone in the press box passed on information to a book on minor league nicknames that the club was called the Horse Doctors. This was picked up by the Encyclopedia of Minor League baseball, which still has it listed that way.

It seems fairly obvious in reading through the different papers that wasn’t
the name of the team… Once the club became known as the Beavers, it stayed that way until (I think) 1922, when the first incarnation of the WIL folded.

I don’t think I’ve ever said more than three words to Jim Bennie around the Nat Bailey Stadium press box, but I wanted to take a moment to give the guy his props. It’s folks like him, and others like him, who dig through browned pages of old newspapers and scan acres of library microfilm, that will keep the memories of the Bud Kerr’s of this world alive for generations to com.

Stuff like this:

The 1952 [WIL] pre-season had four main stories:
• Tacoma moved to Lewiston and talk of Alberta expansion remained little more than talk;
• The league jumped from Class B to Class A;
• Victoria came close to folding due to chronic undercapitalisation;
•
The league decided make a pile of knee-jerk reactions, including a rule
limiting the number of veterans in an effort to save money.

The
last one caused something completely unexpected—massive integration.
Vancouver’s canny-and-miserly G.M. Bob Brown got around the "rookie"
rule by signing experienced Negro League players; organised baseball
considered them rookies. Others teams saw this and rushed to do the
same thing.

You can find Jim’s work at Vancouver Baseball History and the WIL Baseball blog, and I strongly advise you to do so.