The Slogger

Another good day on the Portland baseball history.  It's a slog, but everything is a slog for me, so I accept graciously the small gift I was born with, a matter of DNA and nurture, and an unwillingness to kowtow to fools.

Just as importantly, I've figured out a way to pay the bills for the coming month, which buys me the time to hopefully finish the Beavers narrative and write some more poems for the "Talent" cycle.

At least I have the Internet for another month, and thus a research tool for the baseball book. (You see, I'd rather not work in the library or an Internet Cafe, where there are too many potential distractions for me--like books and beautiful women.)

When you're writing a story about the history of minor league baseball in the West there are a lot of connecting dots, as you might imagine. The trick for me in this project is managing them relative to the pro baseball scene in Portland.

The other day I wrote that there isn't a lot online about the Beavers.

Not true if you examine the material in the context of the early Northwest League as well as the city's long history in the Pacific Coast League. Searching Los Angeles Angels' or San Francisco Seals' websites can boggle your brain.

There are lots of dots, particularly if you compute how important the PCL was to baseball before the Giants and Dodgers moved out here in 1958.

And then along came the curse of television.

Minor league baseball in the early twentieth century was as volatile as any other small business then, or now.

You've got to be heads up to even keep track of it, sharp to catch the business subtleties.

It's interesting.

Okay, perhaps not for you.  But I'm writing something that is borderline fiction as well as an historical piece, and it's sort of fun.

We'll see what happens.


TS