By Tony Parker 2005 Baseball Canada Senior Championship- August 28-28th, 2005 Welcome to the web site of the 2005 Baseball Canada Senior Baseball Championship. Baseball history doesn’t always have to be boring statistical analysis. This is a game that began somewhere in the early 1800’s and was increasingly documented after the first major professional league was founded in the United States in 1876 and Canada has been very much a part of that game as you will find below. In addition to this section we have also created a series of baseball trivia and informationals that will allow you to learn more about the game in what we hope is an entertaining fashion. As few boring stats as possible , because few of us are bookkeepers or accountants. Foxy & Tip Marchildon Too Canadian Baseball is alive and well and has contributed greatly to the Major League game, even if Ferguson Jenkins remains the only Canadian born player enshrined at Cooperstown. You may think that Larry Walker is the lone Canadian to win a Major League batting crown and if so, you would be wrong, but if you weren’t alive in 1887 then you didn’t see a Canadian lad named Tip O’Neill become the first ever triple crown winner in professional baseball history or that legendary U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was named after that same Canadian triple crown winner. And did you know that the first player to use a padded glove (Foxy Irwin), the first retired player to start broadcasting games on radio (Jack Graney) and the first no-hitter recorded after the top players returned from service in WW II (Dick Fowler) were also Canadians? Graney also played in the same starting outfield with baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson as well as Hall of Fame player Tris Speaker and batted behind Cy Young in his final big league season when Cy was wrapping up his career record of 51 1 wins (Unquestionably baseball’s most unbreakable Major League mark). Our Yankee brethren would cry with false righteousness if they knew that the great Babe Ruth poled his first professional home run in a Canadian ball park, or that Jackie Robinson’s bid to break the color barrier began in Montreal or worse yet that the first recorded game of baseball was played in 1838 in Beachville, Ontario, a full year before the first reported game in the United States. CANADA EH? In baseball history, no bigger hole had to be filled than the 1935 release of Babe Ruth by the Yankees. The man given the job was one George ‘Twinkletoes’ Selkirk, a Canadian born player who would go on to win six World Series rings with the Yankees, a feat no Canadian is likely ever to equal. You know that Ferguson Jenkins is in the Hall of Fame, but did you know that no power pitcher in baseball history combined more strikeouts with fewer walks, or that Fergie is one of only two quality Major Leaguers who also played basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters (the other is Bob Gibson, a fellow Hall-of-Famer). Page 1 of 18 Jenkins is also the first Canadian baseball player to make the cover of Sports Illustrated (Aug. 1971), but did you know that he should have been beaten by a third-sacker named Pete Ward, whose mug was pulled from the presses to make room for Cassius Clay’s (Muhammad Ali) stunning heavyweight upset of Sonny Liston. Just bad timing for Pete, a rookie sensation with the White Sox whose father, Jimmy, had been a star in the Nationa1 Hockey League. Before Ward, an unheralded and all but forgotten Canadian named Reno Bertoia actually drew mention in Time Magazine when, in 1958, he was hitting .397 six-weeks into the season with the Tigers in a brief challenge to the greatness of Ted Williams. When it comes to sports war heroes, Canada boasts one of the greatest in pitcher Phil Marchildon, from Penetanguishene, Quebec. Marchildon was a quality starter under baseball’s most storied manager ever, Connie Mack, and nobody came closer to cutting short Joe Dimaggio’s legendary 56 game hitting streak of 1941. Marchildon, in his rookie season faced DiMaggio in game 46 and his sharp breaking ball had the Yankee Clipper grounding out meekly his first three at bats, then with the streak on the line, the Clipper tomahawked a home run on a fastball that Marchildon had fired a foot above the strike zone rather then groove a first strike. Go figure! Another Canadian was also involved prominently in the DiMaggio streak when Quebec native Joe Krakauskas gave up the final hit in DiMaggio’s legendary run of hitting in 56 straight games. Marchildon joined the R.A.F. and was flying on a Halifax bomber at the dangerous tail-gunner position when the aircraft was shot down by a Messerschmidt 110 on his 26th mission while laying mines in the Atlantic. Marchildon bailed out and rescued the navigator, swimming for nearly three hours in the process. The rest of the bomber crew was lost and Marchildon sat out the duration of the war in a German prison camp. Did you know that oudielder Terry Puhl boasts the finest career fielding percentage ever at his position, not to mention hitting .545 in two appearances in the National League Championship series? Or that Penticton, B.C. born Ted Bowsfield tossed a no-hitter for six innings in his 1958 Major League debut against the World Champion New York Yankees, and was 3-0 that year against the Yankees while playing as a late-season call-up by the Boston Red Sox. A few years later, Bowsfield came the closest that a Canadian has ever come to a perfect game in the Majors, losing the bid on an 8th inning on a Vic Power single. Did you know that a Canadian stopper named Ron Taylor was an integral part of perhaps the biggest World Series upset ever, when the New York Mets shocked Baltimore in the 1969 Championship. Taylor played on World Series winners in St. Louis and New York and in 10 1/3 innings of work allowed just three hits and no runs. When his playing career was finished he would long be the team physician for the Toronto Blue Jays. Page 2 of 18 Yet another Canadian, pitcher Kirk McCaskill, won over 100 Major League games after turning his back on a promising pro hockey career when he was named runner-up for the Hobey Baker award as the top college hockey player in the U.S. McCaskill had poster boy looks and graced the pages of Entertainment Magazine with other playboys such as Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Ryne Sandberg during various publications. McCaskill also holds the strange distinction of being the man who gave up home runs in the same game to Ken Griffey Jr. and Ken Griffey Sr., the only time a father and son have homered off the same pitcher in a Major League game. A little known Nova Scotian catcher named Nig Clarke holds an organized baseball record that will never be broken. About the turn of the century he slugged eight homers in a single Texas League game in Texarcana. Clarke went on to play in the Majors where he caught games by the legendary Cy Young and became teammates with such other legends as Shoeless Joe Jackson, player-manager Nap Lajoie and pitcher Addie Joss. It was Clarke who would catch Hall of Famer Addie Joss when he threw the greatest perfect game ever recorded in regular league history. Joss dueled with fellow Famer Ed Walsh in a 1-0 perfecto. And let it not be said that Canadians lacked heart. In 1971 a Detroit reliever named John Hiller suffered a severe stroke and had his career written off by all medical experts. Instead of giving up, Hiller passed up risky open heart surgery in favor of an experiment that would see seven feet of his large intestine removed. He would then go on to become Canada’s first great closer. No relief pitcher ever recorded more decisions in one season. In 1974 Hiller went 17- 14 in relief with 13 saves. Baseball legend Willie Mays said in his autobiography that the greatest at bat in his career came in 1965 against a reliever named Claude Raymond. In that at bat Mays fouled off 17 pitches before hitting a homer. Raymond of course, was a Canadian who would also become the first Canuck to play for a Canadian based team when he played for the Montreal Expos in 1969. He later became a broadcaster with the club. And then their was Frank ‘Blackie’ O’Rourke, who leads everyone with years in pro baseball. O’Rourke, who lived to 95 years of age, was 70 years in the game as a player, manager, coach or scout, including 30 years scouting for the powerhouse New York Yankees. Let us not forget Jeff Heath, a Cleveland outfielder from 1936-49 who slugged 194 career homers, was an all-star in 1941 & 1943, in the top ten batting several times and scored the only run for Bob Feller when Feller pitched the only opening day no-hitter in Major League Baseball history. Or how about infielder Dave McKay, who is the only Canadian to homer in his first Major League at bat and the only Canadian on the inaugural Blue Jays. McKay would later gain strange fame as Mark McGwire’s personal batting practice pitcher en route to his memorable 70 homer season of 1998.