Becoming Vancouver by Daniel Francis

Author:Daniel Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Vancouver, British Columbia, History, Biography, Anecdotes
ISBN: 9781550179170
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2021-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Asahi ball club, shown here in 1929, was the pride of Japantown until it disbanded in 1942 with the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians. The team won ten city championships during the interwar period. Stuart Thomson photograph, Vancouver Public Library 11750 Organized pro ball fell on hard times in the 1920s, when the league folded and the team disbanded, but it reappeared thanks to the efforts of Con Jones, a tobacconist known for his “Don’t Argue!” chain of pool halls and his enthusiasm for local sport, whether it was soccer, lacrosse or baseball. Prior to World War I he built the ten-thousand-seat Con Jones Park (later Callister Park) in East Vancouver, and it was there that he fielded the Vancouver Maple Leafs of the Western International League (WIL) in 1937. After fifteen years, professional baseball was back in Vancouver. The team only survived two seasons, but it was at this point that liquor and sport converged. Emil Sick, a Seattle brewer and owner of the Seattle Rainiers of the WIL, purchased the club, bringing on Bob Brown as a partner. The revamped team was named the Capilanos, after the brewery Sick owned in Vancouver. It was a name that would survive for almost two decades, during which time the franchise moved to a new home, Capilano Stadium at the base of Little Mountain (later named Nat Bailey Stadium after the founder of the White Spot restaurant chain), generally conceded to be one of the prettiest baseball venues in North America.

The Beavers/Maple Leafs/Capilanos were not the only baseball team in Vancouver, not even the most popular. That title belonged to the Asahi, an amateur club founded by a dry cleaner named Matsuhiro Miyasaki in Japantown, in 1914. The team was infamous for playing a style known as “brain ball,” compensating for their relatively small stature by spraying hits all over the field and running the bases with flair and intelligence. The team won several championships, including the Pacific Northwest League five years in a row. In 1942, when the city’s Japanese population was removed from the coast, the Asahi disbanded. The club was later inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

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