The year was 1923.
And the Everett Flabbergasters were a very real baseball team.
Their most hated nemesis wasn’t down the road, but across the Puget Sound and up the Straight of Juan de Fuca. I’m speaking, naturally, of the Victoria Crown Colonists, initially founded decades prior as a company team of the Hudson’s Bay Company — or The Bay, as readers with a more modern sensibility might know them.
Depending on who you ask, one might say this rivalry culminated in a Cascadia Baseball League first round bout where, in the sixth inning, Victoria third basemen Orville Wyckoff was stabbed by Everett right fielder Rutherford “Stabby” Myrvang after Wyckoff kept yelling about Myrvang’s sister every time he loaded his stance to swing.
After the benches cleared and three guys had to go to the hospital where their concussions were treated with blood-letting, Everett and Victoria were temporarily suspended by the league and the fledgling wild card Methow Valley Rail Men were chosen to take their place in advancing. The result of this was Methow Valley getting swept a combined score of 63 - 6 by the powerhouse New Westminster Capitols, who would go on to win the next eight titles in a row. Later they would be discovered to have invented steroids.
Even years after his retirement, the tinny wavelengths of the wireless would often include a local play-by-play announcer reminisce when Everett came to town: “Ooh boy, that Stabby Myrvang sure could drag a bunt down the third base line, couldn’t he?”
But back to the present.
This New Westminster powerhouse was better funded than the rest of the league combined, attracting top West Coast talent with superior salaries and developing state of the art training techniques such as “not smoking a full pack of Lucky Strikes before each game” and “eating a vegetable.” New West’s cash flow was largely due to their benefactor running a hugely profitable operation of rum running from Canada into the US, which was compounded by the fact that much of their supply went to other CBL teams, often right before game time.
In fact, our boy Stabby would later transfer to New Westminster under mysterious circumstances. Those familiar assumed they were paying him unprecedented money from their extensive prohibition network; while he was a slightly-above-average seventh batter up with a wicked arm who never hesitated to sacrifice his body for the play, it was rumored he was mostly valuable to the Capitols’ brass for his adeptness at stabbing those who opposed their racket.
The New Westminster victims were these:
From the Pacific Division…
Port Angeles Juan-De-Rers
Nanaimo Bilge Garglers
Sunshine Coast Fjordsquatches
North Shore Lumber Dunces
Bellingham Pig Punchers
Ballard Pukey Swedes
Tacoma Tugboats
And, from the Interior Division:
Spokane Wobblies
Walla Walla Beer
Pendleton Fightin’ Sugar Tits
Okanogan Border Bandits
Okanagan Ooogo Poogos
Kootenay Gajillionaires
Kamloops Whiskeyjacks
There was ostensibly an official CBL team up in Williams Lake too, but they were forced to fold after two back-to-back undefeated championship seasons. This decision was made not due to an unrivalled, illegally-obtained dominance from Williams Lake (known colloquially as the “Reminderers” because they had to keep reminding other teams they existed), but rather because no visiting club’s transport could make it that far without breaking down en route. This meant each Williams Lake home game resulted in a forfeit victory. Technically speaking, the Reminderers still hold the all-time win-loss record. (The other clubs will dispute this if you bring it up.)
And, of course, the Victoria Crown Colonists and YOUR Everett Flabbergasters.
And then, in the Interior Division, flummoxing everyone, the Methow Valley Rail Men. The Rail Men were an enigma for multiple reasons, not the least of which being that there was no railroad in all of the Methow Valley. Nobody knew why they were called that, including the Rail Men themselves.
Years prior, there had been construction of a railroad nearby-ish that had required men to build it, but if anything that was in the Okanogan team territory. The generally agreed-upon lore between the team members and community — not so much because it was compelling, but rather because they had to come up with something in the face of no better explanation — was that the founders of this club had been former railroad workers from the Okanogan who left for the Methow when their time was done. Although we can’t be sure, in reality the more likely case is that the founding Rail Men just got gnarly drunk one Thursday after a game and started calling themselves that because drunk young men are, in scientific terms, “idiots.”
These were the victims of the New Westminster Capitals.
And these are their 100% true, never made-up, absolutely not fictional, completely real, always historically accurate stories.