Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/529

520 lawyer, who was then reporting on the Oregonian. McColloch (7) recalled the sort of thing the sporting editor used to run into in those days. That, incidentally, was the first of Walter McCredie's several championship Coast years at the head of the Portland Seattle, League baseball club. He had a scrappy club, and so did with such stars as Jay Hughes and Oscar Jones in the Indianslineup. One of McColloch's stories involves Jones, ex-big leaguer just down from Brooklyn.

"He hit Mike Mitchell (Portland left fielder) with a fast one that Mike thought was purposely thrown too close. Mitchell threw his bat at Jones; if Jones hadn't jumped I'm sure both his legs would have been broken. The bat went to second base.

Jones asked me to say for him in the Oregonian that he had no reason to pitch "close" to Mitchell on purpose, "because Mike couldn't hit him, even if the ball was down the middle." They could "give it" and "take it" too in those battling baseball days."

Another of his stories dealt with big Larry McLean, Portland's great catcher that year. Larry was a bit eccentric—not quite a Rube Waddell, but odd enough. So, McColloch wrote:

". . one week, just before he was to leave the Beavers to report with Pitcher Bill Essick to Cincinnati, he asked me to announce in the Sunday Oregonian that he was going to make a hit every time up in the Sunday double-header. He did, too, except that I had to help him as scorer on one long fly on which a Seattle player loafed, I thought, to help Larry and the crowd."

Roscoe Fawcett goes down in journalistic history as the man who put a lot of the life into modern sports reporting in the Pacific Northwest. The sort of thing that L. H. Gregory, Billy Stepp, George Bertz, and Harry Leeding are doing today, the incidental, off-the-routine gossip, bringing out athletes sometimes in their off-the-field personalities, as well as their workaday conduct, was given a great impetus by Fawcett. It is perhaps too much to say that he "started" that trend, but he did develop it. Here's an example of what Fawcett introduced on the Oregonian:

On Sunday, May 14, 1911, there appeared in the paper a 3-column illustrated story headed "Two Northwestern League 'Umps' Seen at Different Angles by Fans." The two were Steve Kane, who had been a big-league partner of Bill Klem in the National and who died a few years after, and George A. Longanecker. Fawcett interviewed Pug Bennett, ex-big leaguer then second-basing in the Northwest League, about Longanecker, and Pug told him this one good enough for "Believe It or Not."