Heck Of A Guy

Is McHenry The New Mudville?

In Baseball, Hot Dogs, Community College, and County Seals, yesterday’s post on the campaign by McHenry Community College and some McHenry County officials to build a stadium to rent to a minor league team to be recruited along with a blogger to be named later, I revealed what is, in all modesty, the most profoundly appropriate name of all time for a baseball team,¹ The Great Seals of McHenry County.

Today’s post, as promised, focuses on the grand tradition of Seals baseball, which I suggest appropriating for the local boys of summer.

Readers who have followed the evolving story of the redesign of the McHenry County Seal may recall that this topic was introduced by Cal Skinner’s McHenry County Blog which included a visual pun based on the artwork above, which was created in 1977 by a public information officer in the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

1949 San Francisco Seals Logo

After several posts referencing county seals of the sort typically used to officially certify documents and used here as a baseball team’s appellation, we’ve now come full circle, linking the future Great Seals of McHenry County Baseball Club to perhaps my favorite of the minor league baseball teams, the San Francisco Seals.

From 1903 until 1957,² the San Francisco Seals were a San Francisco professional baseball team that, together with the Los Angeles Angels, Portland Beavers, Oakland Oaks,³ Sacramento Solons, and Seattle Indians, created the first iteration of of the Pacific Coast League.⁴ The Seals won their first PCL pennant in 1909, finishing 13½ games over the runner-up Beavers. They won flags also in 1915, 1917, 1922, 1923, and 1925.

According to the Seals website maintained by Todd Hawley, a stalwart Seals fan like his father and grandfather, the Seals were successful financially (at least until the early 1950s) because there were no televised major league games and no major league teams west of St. Louis. In fact in 1948, the Seals set a season attendance record of 670,000, a minor league record that stood for almost 40 years.

The San Francisco Seals Stadium

In 1931, the Seals moved to their own park, Seals Stadium, an 18,600-seat facility located at 16th and Bryant Streets. Seals Stadium was unusual in that it boasted not two but three clubhouses: one for the visitors, one for the Seals, and one for the Missions, another minor league team that moved into the stadium with the Seals and were the Seals’ tenants from 1931 through 1937,⁵ after which the team moved back to Los Angeles to become the Hollywood Stars in 1938.

Seals Stadium - 1950s

The Players

The Seals featured a number of stellar players, such as Paul Waner, who had a Hall of Fame career in the majors in the 1920s and 1930s, and Lefty O’ Doul, who was hired in 1917 to pitch for the Seals and rehired in 1931 to manage the teams, which he did until 1951.

The best known Seals, however, were the three DiMaggio brothers.

From left to right: Dom, Joe, and Vince DiMaggio

Vince, the oldest of the three, arranged a tryout for Joe, who was signed at the end of the 1932 season and played three games at shortstop. In 1933, DiMaggio hit safely in 61 games, an all-time professional baseball record that still stands, presaging his 56-game hitting streak for the New York Yankees in 1941.

Joe DiMaggio playing for the San Francisco Seals

AAAA Status

Hawley also notes that in the late 1940’s, the Pacific Coast League, urged on by the management of the Seals, lobbied major league baseball to be elevated to the third major league. The PCL was successful only in winning a special classification of “AAAA” (the highest rank of minor league teams otherwise has been triple A), which seems the equivalent of an employeee being given a more exulted title in the company without a concomitant increase in salary or authority.

I Left My Seals In San Francisco - or Phoenix or Tacoma or Fresno or …

In 1956, the Seals won their last Pacific Coastal League title. During the 1957 season, the New York Giants announced their move to San Francisco for the 1958 season, and the Seals were forced to relocate as a result. The Seals team and the Giants AAA team in Minneapolis swapped franchises, with the Seals team moving to Phoenix and becoming a minor league affiliate of the new San Francisco Giants, and were renamed the Phoenix Giants. This franchise then moved to Tacoma, Washington from 1960 to 1965; but returned to Phoenix for the 1966 season. The team remained in Phoenix until the MLB expanded in 1998 with the Diamondbacks. This forced a move of the former Seals franchise. In a complicated deal the franchise became today’s Tucson Sidewinders, displaced the existing Tucson Toros, and affiliated with the Diamondbacks. The Giants’ affiliation was transferred to the displaced Tucson AAA franchise, which became today’s Fresno Grizzlies.⁶

Got that?

The Giants played their 1958 and 1959 home games in Seals Stadium, moving to Candlestick Park in 1960. Seals Stadium was subsequently torn down to make way for a car dealership and later a Safeway grocery store. The legacy of the seals lives on in the Giants’ mascot Lou Seal, as well as in a statue of the Seals’ cartoon mascot at AT&T Park.

Uniformly Cool Uniforms

To top things off, the Seals uniforms are retro-stunning.⁷

San Francisco Seals uniforms from the 1930s-50s, now available at sports apparel retailers (note the "V" on the sleeve of the World War II era shirt second from the right on the bottom row)

Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

So, there it is, baseball fans - a great professional baseball team legacy and namesake have fallen, as far as I can determine, into disuse in the U.S.⁸ and are ready for revival. All McHenry County has to do is pick up the ball and run with it hit it out of the park.

Footnotes

1. This is no small boast, given the plethora of impressive monikers that have been or still are in use for minor league teams, including the following: Lansing Lugnuts, Traverse City Beach Bums, Toledo Mud Hens, Buffalo Bisons, St. Paul Apostles, Binghamton Bingoes, St. Paul Freezers, Oswego Starchboxes, Jersey City Skeeters, Zanesville Kickapoos, Lincoln Tree Planters, Dallas Hams, Kalamazoo Kazoos, Davenport Onion Weeders, Wheeling Nailers, Saginaw-Bay City Hyphens, Des Moines Prohibitionists, New Haven Nutmegs, Terre Haute Hottentots, Portland Webfeet, Lebanon Pretzel Eaters, Kalamazoo Celery Eaters, Bangor Millionaires, Youngstown Puddlers, Reading Coal Heavers, Troy Washerwomen, Montgomery Biscuits, Winston-Salem Warthogs, Joliet Jackhammers, Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Modesto Nuts, Cedar Rapids Kernels, Beloit Snappers, Asheville Tourists, Savannah Sand Gnats, Sioux City Soos, Lima Lushers, Crookston Crooks, Columbus Discoverers, Waterloo Lulus, Lyons Lions, Hickory Crawdads, Kansas City T-Bones, Vermont Sea Monsters, Tacoma Raniers, and the Walla Walla Walla Wallas.↩
2. The divestiture of the Seals from San Francisco in 1957 was the result of the New York Giants of the National Baseball League moving to San Francisco↩
3. The Seals and the Oaks had an intense rivalry and what seems to have been a wonderful tradition of Sunday doubleheaders, with one game in the morning at Seals Stadium and the afternoon game played across the bay in Emeryville at the Oaks’ home park.↩
4. Wikipedia↩
5. Perhaps McHenry County could bring back the 3 (or more) clubhouse stadium by recruiting more than one baseball team and modifying the stadium to accommodate the additional teams. If having one team as a tenant is such a good deal, two tenant teams should be even better.↩
6. Wikipedia↩
7. To make the McHenry County Seals unique and identifiable, I suggest incorporating the Red Tape logo into the uniform, as is shown in this model of the cap.
   

   ↩

8. There have been a variety of Seals hockey teams.↩

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