The Tacoma Tugboats Tug Boats (and Play Baseball)
And they're doing their best, dang it.
September, 1920.
The Tacoma Tugboats were not, strictly speaking, great at baseball.
At the moment, they weren’t even that great at their first love, tugboats. (“Did she miss a verb there?” you, the reader, wonder.) (“No,” is the answer, and frankly I’m disappointed you would ever question the infallibility of an omniscient god.)
Tacoma Tugboats Baseball Club, LLC, MD, Esq., was founded almost 30 years prior as an athletic outlet for the employees and ownership of Tacoma Tugboats LLC, MD, Esq. (non-baseball club). Their inaugural season was 1893, with a home field overlooking the inlet that would later be known as Foss Waterway, named after the founder of their commercial rivals, Thea Waterway, and her tugboat company, Foss Maritime.
For the Tugboats’ first three seasons, this inaugural field was actually legally the property of a colony of feral dogs, who won it when they beat the local orphan gang in a turf war, who in turn had beat it out of a local waste disposal firm by terrorizing them with Roman candles for a month until said firm realized it would be more productive to simply abandon the site as a tax writeoff. Modern film studios have since adapted this technique with fully-completed movies — sometimes a mere weeks before their planned release — something which is universally agreed-upon to be morally upstanding and a good sign for the health of the American economic system and the societal implications thereof.
Subsequently, the conditions of the Tugboats’ first field was not, to use an industry term, “awesome.” The outfield sod was barely holding on, the dugouts were repurposed shipping containers, and the basepaths were later discovered to contain dangerous amounts of weapons-grade mesothelioma. (“Mesothelioma?” You might ask. “Do you mean asbesthos, the mineral causing mesothelioma?” No. Shut up.)
This history made the Tacoma Tugboats Baseball Club LLC, MD, Esq., eight years older than soon-to-be Everett Flabbergasters icon Rutherford “Stabby” Myrvang. It made them 14 years older than the annexation of Ballard by Seattle. It also made them 10 years older than the Ballard Cow Ordinance and five years older than the Ballard Pukey Swedes.
Despite their humble beginnings, after a couple years the Tacoma Tugboats LLC, MD, Esq. (non-baseball club) found themselves positively overwhelmed from increased commerce in the region, of the tugboat-needing kind. Fiscal quarter two 1895 was so productive they expanded their fleet by three, adding the MVs “Salty Vanessa,” “Lady Winter,” and “Hot Bitch.”
This increased demand for their services meant the Tugboats, tugboat edition were able to put a little money aside to finance some upgrades to the Tugboats, baseball edition.
First, they removed the spines of outfield turf which were so impale-y that, had OSHA existed at that point, they would have ordered it firebombed. In its stead they installed luscious, glorious, real grass. Real™ Brand Grass was state of the art, although I am legally required to make clear that it’s actually specially-treated Samoyed fur, in this case dyed green by the special ops team that does the Chicago River every St. Patrick’s Day. Although Samoyed-sourced fake grass fell out of fashion for sporting fields and thatched roofs due to the lingering wet dog smell and the fact that songbirds wouldn’t stop stealing it to line their nests, Real™ Brand later found success manufacturing toupees and Medieval Times performer costumes.
Then, the Tugboats added genuine seating. Before this, all fans — or “tuggers” as they were known — had to bring picnic blankets and set up on the third and first base lines, all while warding off the field’s feral dog population in the process. Tuggers were actually pioneers in the lawn chair industry due to this. All six of them.
Now tuggers had real-life seats and even real-life concession stands selling real-life hot dogs made out of real-life pig [redacted]! Rumor has it they even had real-life concourses, although we can’t confirm since first that would require figuring out what exactly a concourse is.
They even improved the dugout — still made of shipping containers, but now they were nice shipping containers. There was a Doug Fir bench, there were actual butt cushions, there were… well, that’s it really.
Perhaps most dramatically, the pack of feral dogs had been placated with edible bribery and, while they still popped by often, it was merely to skulk around for scraps instead of their previous go-to moves, “attempting to rip off the base runner’s ankle while he rounded second,” or “table-topping outfielders for sport” or “goose murder.” The latter, in fairness, was actually quite welcome by the Tugboats given the myth of Sisyphus was originally written about their attempts at clearing Canada goose shit from the playing surface.
After starting their first three years as feisty upstarts of the two-star talent, five-star heart variety with questionable health and safety standards and the results to match, by the turn of the century the Tacoma Tugboats LLC, MD, Esq. were looking pretty dang good. They even won the Pacific Division a couple times.
But the tugboat business can be tricky, and so a World War One-based explosion of tuggage followed by a drop to standard peacetime tugboat-demand levels (“TDLs” for short) meant it was poor timing when Rutherford “Stabby” Myrvang knocked on their front office doors in the summer of 1920.
He was exactly what they needed: a player young enough to still be in the “just happy to be here” phase where you can pay them crapall, a versatile outfielder, and a speedy baserunner and contact hitter who’d bring depth to the bottom of the order and who, with luck and development, could potentially even become a leadoff down the line. Best of all, he was just young enough that, unlike many young men of this era, he still had all limbs intact* — he was even free of trench foot, famously The Great War’s version of dysentery, the main character of the iconic 1980s computer game, Oregon Trail.
But for the exact reason they needed him (“too much money unliquid in tugboat operations”) signing Stabby Myrvang was unattainable. Even crapall was too expensive for the Tugboats’ accounting department.
And now, without the funds to sign him, the Tacoma Tugboats Baseball Club LLC, MD, Esq. ended the 1920 season by watching the Everett Flabbergasters climb the standings with the kid who coulda been theirs.
They hoped the maritime industry would stabilize soon.