Play Ball, Eh?

Just because a certain neighbouring country claims baseball as its national pastime doesn’t diminish our two-centuries-long love affair with the game here in Canada. Granted, we have just one major-league team, the Toronto Blue Jays, which played its first season in 1977.

Although the Montreal Expos were the first non-American team to play major-league baseball in 1969, they were ignominiously relocated to Washington, D.C., after the end of the 2004 season and renamed the Nationals.

Look beyond the big leagues, though, and since the earliest days of the 1800s you’ll find enthusiastic Canadian fans besotted with the thinking person’s sport. Today there are thousands of Canadians playing ball, whether on minor-league professional teams, in beer leagues, or with amateur organizations for kids.

So, with the season well underway, it’s time to step up to the plate and swing for the fences of Canadian baseball history with a full game’s worth of lore.

1. We helped to invent the game

Cooperstown, New York, no longer claims to be the legendary place where baseball was invented — in fact, as with so many historical assertions, it’s pretty much impossible to state definitively where the game was born. The term “base ball” appears as early as 1744 in England to describe something we would recognize as a forerunner of today’s game.

By the early 1800s, regional variations of a sport akin to modern baseball were being played across much of both the United States and what would become Canada.

Canadian historians point to the detailed early account of a game of baseball, albeit under somewhat different rules, played in Beachville, Ontario, on June 4, 1838. That game took place a full seven years before a match in Hoboken, New Jersey, that is often referred to as the first official, or first officially recorded, baseball game.

An uncharitable (read “American”) nitpicker might point out that the record we have of the Beachville game comes from memories set down in a letter to Sporting Life magazine by Dr. Adam Ford nearly forty-eight years later. However, Canadian sports historian Bill Humber notes that there is evidence that baseball (or base ball) had been played on June 4 at community celebrations in Beachville since at least 1819.

Although it’s fun to speculate regarding whether Canada deserves credit for inventing the great American pastime, that’s really not the point. “There was no first game,” said Humber, who wrote the authoritative Canadian baseball history Diamonds of the North.

Rather, the sport evolved in different ways in different regions at the same time. Humber points to historical documents that describe baseball-like games being played in the Ontario communities of Port Hope and York (now Toronto) as early as 1803. “All of this says to me that the passage of the game from its folk origins to the modern incarnation was happening here as well as in the U.S.,” Humber said. “We are co-creators with the Americans.”

2. The Babe owes it all to Canada

Perhaps George Herman Ruth Jr. isn’t indebted to the Great White North for all of his well-earned fame. But Ruth, later known as “Babe” and perhaps the greatest baseball player ever, made it clear that without the coaching of a Canadian he would never have amounted to anything. “He was the father I needed,” Ruth said of Brother Matthias, a member of the Roman Catholic Xaverian Brothers who recognized Ruth’s gifts.

Running their bar in Baltimore took all of Ruth’s parents’ attention. George Jr. was left to raise himself, and he didn’t do a very good job. Even when he was a very young boy, it was obvious that George needed firmer guidance if he was to avoid a future of petty crime. A police officer who was also a family friend recommended St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys to Ruth’s parents.

They agreed, and the officer accompanied George, who was just seven years old, to the place that would change his life. Originally created to house and to educate orphans, the school later accepted boys whose parents simply couldn’t afford to keep them as well as delinquents who were sent there by the courts.

Although the school focused on religious education and on training its students for the workplace, St. Mary’s also believed in strength of body and boasted excellent sports facilities. And that’s where Brother Matthias came in. Born Martin Leo Boutilier in Lingan, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, in 1872, Matthias moved to Boston with his family and eventually entered the religious order.

At six feet six and three hundred pounds, Matthias had a physical presence that belied his quiet, introverted nature. He was the school’s head of discipline and also coached baseball. Matthias quickly recognized young Ruth’s talent, suggesting that the boy try pitching rather than catching — which was never the best position for a left-hander, anyway.

He also showed the future “Bambino” the uppercut swing that would eventually become standard for batters (at the time it was thought that a level swing would produce more consistent hitting) and taught him to run the bases faster.

“Brother Matthias played a key role in developing Babe as a baseball player, but he also played a key role in developing him as a man,” said Brian “Chip” Martin, a Canadian baseball researcher and retired journalist whose book The Man Who Made Babe Ruth: Brother Matthias of St. Mary’s School will appear later in 2019. “Without Matthias, Babe’s future was dismal. They shared an incredible bond that I think was good for both of them.”

Ruth never forgot his mentor, buying Matthias a Cadillac and then, when that car was hit by a train, buying him another. Although much of what we think we know about the Babe is pure invention, his love and respect for the towering man of God from Cape Breton Island is beyond doubt. “I saw some real he-men,” Ruth once said, “but I never saw one who equalled Brother Matthias.”

5. Baseball was an essential pastime during the wars

Amid the uniforms and guns and heartbreaking letters on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the much-used baseball bat and cap seem out of place. However, “baseball was an officially sanctioned part of the war effort,” said Stephen Dame, a Toronto teacher and amateur baseball historian. “It was something you could play in large numbers. It didn’t need a special surface.”

The sport gave soldiers something to do in their downtime that kept them fit, boosted morale, and allowed for individual accomplishment as part of a team effort, Dame added.

In the First World War, soldiers played whenever they could, whether in pickup games or in organized leagues. “The moment our men get out of the trenches, they are playing baseball,” noted Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, a British-American novelist who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Indeed, it was Canadians who popularized baseball in Great Britain, playing before large and enthusiastic crowds at legendary locations such as Lord’s Cricket Ground, in London, and Windsor Great Park, south of Windsor, the latter with King George V among the spectators.

Dame has amassed persuasive evidence that members of the all-black No. 2 Construction Battalion and white players from the Canadian Forestry Corps took the field as an integrated team in a game played at Windsor — something that would have been unthinkable at the time back home.

Both baseball and softball continued to be sources of relaxation and comfort during the Second World War, but they served other purposes, too. Military baseball leagues in Britain pitted Canadians and, later, Americans against each other in games that were both public-relations stunts and effective fundraisers.

Soldiers recuperating from injuries circulated through the crowds to explain the game. With British professional sports such as cricket and soccer suspended, wartime fans welcomed the new pastime.

The games raised money for a wide range of causes, from the Merchant Navy Comfort Service and the Red Cross to the purchase of warplanes and tanks. At one game between Canadian and American teams in 1943, a Lancaster bomber sat on the outfield, and attendees could purchase stamps to stick on a bomb destined to be dropped over Germany.

“Baseball played a real and significant role in raising money for the war effort,” said Dame, estimating that in 1943 alone ball-playing North Americans helped to raise an amount equivalent to $5.5 million dollars today.

Baseball was also a lifeline for soldiers in unhappier circumstances. For instance, in the long, tension-filled hours before launching the August 1942 raid on Dieppe, France, Canadians played ball. And as the war crawled to its finish Canadian soldiers continued to play during breaks in the action.

“On the west bank of the Rhine, north of Cleve, Canadian soldiers are playing baseball where just days ago German shells were falling,” said a story in the April 2, 1945, Liverpool Daily News. Even in Nazi prisoner of war camps, Canadians kept their spirits up through inning after inning of their favourite sport.

Baseball’s ability to divert and to entertain was rarely more important than at the end of the Second World War, noted Dame. “When there was a concern that soldiers were going to have to wait a while before they could go home, they turned to baseball.”

6. Canada has the world’s oldest ballpark

Just ask the record-keeping folks at Guinness — London, Ontario’s Labatt Memorial Park has been hosting games longer than any other ballpark. It was originally known as Tecumseh Park and was named after the title-winning team that played there, which was itself named after the legendary Shawnee chief.

The first game played in the ballpark located beside the Thames River took place in May 1877, a year before any American contenders for the historical title were in operation.

In 1936, when the park faced financial trouble, the Labatt brewing family stepped in, buying the property and donating money for its upkeep. There were two conditions: The donors requested that the facility be kept for public use and that it be renamed Labatt Memorial Park.

The ballpark has hosted players ranging from the great Satchel Paige to a young Wayne Gretzky and was declared a historic site by the province in 1994. Supporters are campaigning for a national historic designation.

8. But racism also destroyed a beloved team

Starting in the early 1900s, almost anywhere in British Columbia that was home to communities of Nikkei — people of Japanese descent — also had a baseball team. The Vancouver Asahi club formed in 1914 and quickly came to dominate its amateur Japanese-Canadian competitors. In an era of big men slugging big hits, the Asahi players instead relied on tactics such as bunting and aggressive base-running to create what the newspapers dubbed “brainball.”

In 1919 the team won its first Vancouver International League championship, and it went on to win multiple titles in various city leagues in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as several Pacific Northwest Japanese baseball championships — including in each of the team’s last five seasons, from 1937 to 1941.

The Asahi baseball team was a source of pride for British Columbia’s Nikkei, who at the time were prevented from voting, holding office, or entering many occupations. Baseball was a rare place where Japanese Canadians earned respect among all types of fans. But when Canada declared war against Japan in 1941 all Nikkei were designated as “enemy aliens.”

The government seized their homes and businesses and sent them to internment camps. In a cruel twist of fate, during the process many were detained at Vancouver’s Hastings Park, where the Asahi team had trained. Some players took their equipment with them, forming teams and continuing to play baseball while interned.

The Vancouver Asahi team was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at an emotional ceremony in 2003 and then into the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2005. Historica Canada released a Heritage Minute celebrating the team earlier this year. Today the Asahi Baseball Association in Vancouver fields teams of Nikkei youth while sharing the history of Japanese-Canadian baseball.

9. We’ve contributed legendary players

A highly unscientific poll of baseball historians and überfans in Canada, with a contribution from John Thorn, chief historian for Major League Baseball (the organization that oversees higher levels of the professional game in North America), reveals a remarkable consensus on the bestever Canadian male players. Here’s how we rank them:

1. Ferguson “Fergie” Jenkins (born in Chatham, Ontario)
Still the lone Canadian in the U.S. National Baseball Hall of Fame, Ferguson Jenkins started his career in 1965 with the Philadelphia Phillies but achieved his greatest renown as a player for the Chicago Cubs. The 1971 Cy Young Award winner had six consecutive seasons with twenty or more wins and retired in 1983 as the only pitcher with three thousand strikeouts and fewer than a thousand walks.

2. Larry Walker (born in Maple Ridge, B.C.)
Debuting with the Montreal Expos in 1989, but released by the cash-strapped club in 1994, Larry Walker eventually picked up seven Gold Glove Awards for his fielding, three Silver Slugger Awards, three batting titles, and the coveted National League Most Valuable Player Award before retiring in 2005.

3. James “Tip” O’Neill (born in Springfield, Ontario)
James O’Neill, known as the “Woodstock Wonder,” is sometimes called Canada’s Babe Ruth and was a household name during a pro career that started in 1875. A strong pitcher and outfielder, he was an even stronger batter and in 1887 won baseball’s first triple crown — an honour that involves one player achieving the highest batting average, the most home runs, and the most runs batted in. He still owns the secondhighest batting average in major-league history. A trophy in his name is awarded annually to the best Canadian player in the major leagues.

4. Joey Votto (born in Toronto)
Hard-slugging Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto came second in rookie-of-the-year voting in 2008. In 2010 he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award while sharing the Hank Aaron Award for top hitter. The sixtime all-star has been open about the anxiety and depression that led to him briefly leaving the game in 2009 following his father’s untimely death.

5. Tie: Russell Martin (born in Toronto) and James Paxton (born in Delta, B.C.)
We refuse to choose between present-day players Russell Martin, the affable and bilingual former Toronto Blue Jays catcher who grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, and James Paxton, the man they call “Big Maple” and who on May 8, 2018, became the first Canadian to throw a no-hitter on Canadian soil as his Seattle Mariners beat the Blue Jays.