The Tacoma Amocats: The Team Too Good for Walter Johnson? It's a Good Story.

The limits of research, memory, and story telling. Plus, Galloping Gertie rides again and Joan Jett's Seattle baseball connection.

Sometimes you’re clicking through old newspapers online, just casually looking around and you come across a headline that makes you gasp in excitement because it sounds too good to be true. Take, for example, this one from 1926:

The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA), March 3, 1926, page 14.

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Walter Johnson is. In case you don’t, he’s a Hall of Fame pitcher who pitched for the other Washington from 1907 until 1927. Nicknamed “The Big Train” he’s one of the best pitchers of all time. The claim that he wasn’t good enough to play for one of Tacoma’s amateur teams just before he hit the big time sounds like a really great baseball story.

In the newspaper story, Amocats manager Frank Leslie writes of beating a famous Seattle Rainiers team two out of three games in 1906:

In one of these games in August, we had the great Walter Johnson, now of Washington, D.C., on the bench. Not fast enough for us—so we thought! In fact, we were pretty cocky.¹

Here’s the funny thing about the word “story”. It can be a recounting of something that’s verifiably true, or it can be entirely fabricated, or somewhere in between. It’s simply a telling of a thing.

So, before we get to the Walter Johnson bit, let’s begin with the Tacoma Amocats.

‘Amocat’ is Tacoma spelled backwards. The baseball team wasn’t the first to turn the city’s name around. Based on a number of newspaper items from the 1890s, it appears to have been used by Seattleites as a derogatory term of sorts for Tacoma. Tacoma-based West Coast Grocery also used the Amocat name on their line of canned goods (and those old cans can still be found on the internet for a hefty price!)

The origins of the Amocat baseball team are a bit fuzzy. The 1926 newspaper article mentioned above as well as a couple books about baseball in Tacoma claim they began playing in 1901, the year before West Coast Grocery introduced their Amocat product line. However, the newspapers in Tacoma do not mention either the Amocat baseball team nor the food products until 1903. Newspapers should, of course, be taken for what they are: imperfect sources of information. So the absence of either doesn’t mean they didn’t exist prior to 1903. It’s here that we come up against the limits of historical research, particularly when it’s done from home. The limited non-newspaper writing I’ve been able to find on the Amocats echoes the wording of that 1926 article, making me wonder if it’s the source of all the information about the team.

In 1903, the first year I found game stories, they lost the city amateur championship to the aptly named Tacoma Amateurs after winning 12 of 16 games that season. In 1904, they finished second in the city again, this time to Fort Steilacoom. Their uniforms are described as “bright red knickerbockers and shirts, green caps, belts and stockings, with Amocat in white letters across the shirt front.”² (Sounds a lot like a City Connect uniform to me.) In 1905, there was tight race between the Amocats, Fort Steilcoom, Puyallup Bears, and South Tacoma Lions for the championship. The end of the season is a little unclear in the Tacoma papers, but they appear to finish third. Which brings us to 1906, the year described in the 1926 article, and the year of Walter Johnson in Tacoma.

From what I’ve found, the Amocats played the Rainiers twice in 1906, in May and July, splitting the series. I couldn’t track down a game in August, but if Walter Johnson were to have been on the Amocat bench it could have been during the May game.

Johnson came to Tacoma in April 1906 to play for the Class-B minor league Tacoma Tigers. He didn’t last long with the Tigers, however. In a season preview, the Daily Ledger described him as a “promising lad.”³ But the Tigers released Johnson after one game. It’s possible he stuck around town for another week, joining one of the city’s best amateur teams until he figured out his next move.

The 1906 Amocats were one of the top Tacoma teams, but lost the city championship to the Cigarmakers’ International Union. After leaving Tacoma, Johnson pitched in Weiser, Idaho. And the year after, he was signed by the Washington Senators. The rest, as they say, is history.

But this history and this story brings up a lot of things I find myself thinking about when I’m researching stories. First, I’m limited by the sources I can find. There are many days of newspapers missing from the online collection. Other accounts and stories may have existed at one time, but they’ve either been lost or aren’t easily findable by amateur historians, trying to solve mysteries from the past. So, we find what we can and when there’s a story that presents itself in sources we have, we put it together. But I think it’s important to remember those stories are always incomplete. We can never have all the information.

And when we read through sources, we’re filtering them through our own life experiences and views of the world. The sources we’re reading were filtered through that writer’s perceptions and views of the world. Newspapers are hallowed as primary source documents, but they have their limitations. We all know that people dispute the way they are portrayed and quoted all the time. That dispute doesn’t get saved along with the primary source. Sometimes newspapers are completely wrong. I think often of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article published the day after the Great Seattle Fire misattributing the source of the fire. Articles and books were written, and are still written! with the false information. The P-I issued a correction in a later issue, but somehow that is constantly missed.

The memory and recollections of people looking back at the past are also imperfect. The gist of a historic event will come through in the stories, but the details are often lacking. I run across this all the time when I’m researching stories about the Mariners. Blog posts and articles lean heavily on memories about the past. There are often really easily fact-checkable errors; the wrong starting pitcher, conflating plays in different games, misremembering the order of events. It doesn’t always matter much, but sometimes it does. I had several history teachers who had us play the telephone game to demonstrate the limits of oral history. Written history doesn’t do much better.

So, did Walter Johnson sit on the Amocats’ bench? I don’t feel like I have enough information to answer that question one way or another. I lean towards no, because it sounds too similar to his brief time with the Tacoma Tigers. But maybe he did. And if he did, it’s a great baseball story.

Galloping Gertie As You’ve Never Seen Her Before

Speaking of missing historical sources, Grit City Magazine had a story last year about newly discovered footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. (Shameless self-promotion: I had a story in the same issue about the South Tacoma Tigers, who made national headlines in 1915. It’s print only, something you don’t see much these days!) The editor of the magazine, Sierra Hartman, helped put together a short documentary on the new footage, which is being shown with other local history films in Gig Harbor this weekend. Hartman says he made the film for the type of people who hang out in the Northwest Room at the Tacoma Public Library, sifting through random drawers trying to solve history’s mysteries. It’s me, hi, I’m that person. And since you all read about my discoveries, I thought it might be of interest to you too:

Joan Jett, Seattle Baseball Legend

A few weeks ago a video was going around of Joan Jett demonstrating her screwball grip. Then, earlier this week, while scrolling Facebook (please don’t judge me for still having a Facebook, my kids’ school has a FB group that’s very helpful, and it’s good for tracking people down for interviews, and it’s nice to share the occasional kid picture with far flung family) I happened to see this picture of Joan Jett playing baseball in Seattle:

Link to original post here.

And this picture:

She played in a benefit softball game at Lower Woodland Park near Green Lake on July 22, 1982. Along with Jett, members of Foreigner, Loverboy, and Blue Oyster Cult faced off against employees of the radio station KISW.⁴

I couldn’t find a newspaper recap of the game, but there’s a brief mention in a Seattle Times article a week after the game that a fan tried to tackle Joan while she was playing.⁵ A comment on the Facebook post by the post’s author describes it further, after saying Mike Reno of Loverboy was encouraging fans to run on the field to hug him:

…several fans then charged the field again, rushing Joan who was playing 2nd Base. As things and control started to collapse, Joan decided she had to "beat it out of there" even without her Security. The Band's Bus was parked at least a 100 yards away (across another ballfield) but Joan took off at a Dead Run towards the bus with about 50 "fans" running after her in hot pursuit, but lagging behind her by about 10/15 yards. She could run fast. It was like watching a scene of Beatlemania. [ The baseball game was "called" with Joan's sudden Exit.]⁶

I couldn’t find any articles to back that up, but he comments that the signed photo above mentioning memories was a reference to it.

The day after the game an 8-hour concert called the Summer Rock ‘n’ Roll Grand Slam was held at the Kingdome. Five acts performed: Bryan Adams, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Blue Oyster Cult, Loverboy, and Foreigner. Before the show the Seattle Post-Intelligencer bemoaned the Kingdome acoustics, accusing it of swallowing up the Rolling Stones, who played there in October 1981, writing, “Those attending should bring earplugs and opera glasses.”⁷

The Kingdome was great in the mid-90s when the Mariners were good, it made the crowd noise extremely loud. Exactly the sort of thing that’s terrible for a concert. The Kindome had a concert capacity of 71,000. About 40,000 showed up for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Grand Slam.

Luckily, Jett made it out of Seattle unscathed. In another clip of her visit to the Oriole’s broadcast booth. She talks about her first game and they show several pictures of her with Jim Palmer. My word association with Jim Palmer is my mom talking about how much she enjoyed his underwear ads, which came up in our house every time his 1990s Money Store commercials advertising adjustable rate mortgages (side note: Yikes!) aired. So I literally laughed out loud when they shared a picture of Joan Jett holding a poster of him in his underwear. (Hi, Mom! Thank you for reading everything I write, even when it's that!)

Baseball can often feel like a very uncool sport, so it’s always fun when someone who is very super cool turns out to be a baseball fan.

1. “Recalling a Team That Was Too Good for Walter Johnson, The Tacoma Amocats of 1901-1906 and Led by Frank Leslie”, The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington), March 2, 1926: 14.

2. “Amocat Team Organizes”, The Daily Ledger (Tacoma, Washington), April 18, 1904: 6.

3. “Huston Handles Indicator Here”, The Daily Ledger (Tacoma, Washington), April 26, 1906: 3.

4. “Rock for Food Banks”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Washington), July 18, 1982: 38.

5. Lacitis, Erik. “Spend Saturday with Joan and ‘the family’”, Seattle Daily Times (Seattle, Washington), July 29, 1982: 38.

6. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10225054315006705&set=gm.10161156785552630&idorvanity=2257797629

7. Stout, Gene. “The Kingdome will rock ‘n’ roll.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Washington), July 22, 1982: 37.