RUBBERY SHRUBBERY Post 44
This is the Rubbery Shrubbery blog, where you’ll learn how Yachats (YAH-hots), Oregon, acquires a Major League Baseball franchise. To learn more about Yachats and its inhabitants—called Yachatians (yah-HAY-shuns)— please go to this page or go to GoYachats.
Now for something completely different. Yachats’s mayor, Ron Brean, has agreed to join us in writing this post. Ron has contributed the basic ideas for it, and he’s done most of the writing. The Rubbery Shrubbery staff has fiddled with it slightly to fit it to our usual format, but be assured, all the good stuff is Ron’s.
A New Smelt Farm Team
by Ron Brean
Naturally, the soon-to-be famous Smelt will have farm teams. Like every other team that aspires to greatness, they need a pipeline of new players. Naturally, the farm teams are placed in locales with much smaller markets so as not to interfere with the draw to the Smelt games.
Given the current level of the Smelt’s newest developmental club, however, there is little worry of that. The team is composed of has-beens trying to make their way back to the show, never-weres that probably never will be, and young prospects. They are all wanna-bes.
That’s not to say they don’t have a following. They do. In fact there has been some sort of a following since the team was first conceived. “Conceived” may be the operative word there. It seems there are an inordinate number of pregnant ladies proudly wearing the team’s puce and mauve colors in the stands (not that a puce paunch isn’t very fetching). Market surveys have also shown the crowd to comprise a surprising number of bill collectors, IRS auditors, and bounty hunters. Odd though it may be, it is a following. “Following” may be the operative word there.
This farm team, like most franchises, has moved around a bit, its current location and status being a step up the ladder…or at least up the valley. They started somewhere kind of near the lower reaches of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, somewhere near the confluence of the Great Columbia and the almost as great Willamette Rivers. They have now moved about 3 hours up the watershed.
The specific location of origin, like everything else about the team remains obscured in the team’s history. There isn’t one. No one chronicled the team formation, early players, the origin of the name (yes, the team has a name and I’m getting to that), or anything else. No diaries have been unearthed to shed light on the team’s past. Local newspapers didn’t bother to mention their games.
The only record is word of mouth that has passed down from generation to generation of team fans. Since many of those mouths in the early years were so stuffed with tobacco products as to make speech both undistinguishable from sounds made by a sleeping bag in an industrial sized washing machine, and dangerous to be in front of, even that history which came to us orally is of questionable value.
Nevertheless, the story is this: The first rendition of the team was a bunch of pioneer types that got together to play baseball. They knew their team needed a name—a team can’t win a game (or lose one, for that matter) without a name.
Like sports teams of all types everywhere, they tried to come up with a name that was suggestive of spirit, of courage, of prowess, and of …well, I guess marketability. Now, most of the animal names with enough panache to fill the bill had already been spoken for so they continued past the menagerie to historic heroes. However, being a relatively uneducated lot (perhaps explaining the lack of a written history) they didn’t know any heroes they could agree on. See Fig. 1. Fast moving pieces of machinery like, say, “jets” hadn’t been invented. So they were a bit stuck for a while until a fad of the time brought forth an idea. The fad was “dare-deviling”.
Figure 1. Alexander the Great. One of the historic heroes they couldn’t agree on.*
In those days, before technology advanced dare-deviling equipment into bungee jumping and parasailing, daring devils were forced to devise less equipment-centric means of defying death. Dare devils were much respected and looked up to and thus fulfilled most of the requirements of a good team name choice. Just calling yourselves the “Dare-devils” wasn’t adequate, though. Too vague. You had to be specific and find some tie to the local community.
It turns out that while waiting for equipment technology to advance, dare devils were forced to use natural phenomena, scary tall buildings, and low-tech equipment to dare the devil. Flagpole sitting arose as one of those, but it seriously lacked the required heart thump of a team name. See Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly flagpole sitting. Mr. Kelly started the flagpole sitting fad in 1924. Notice how lacking in heart thump this is.**
A widely publicized thrill-seeking, crowd-awing endeavor of the time was the attempt to ride a wooden barrel (very low-tech equipment) over Niagara Falls. That was too “eastern” for the locals, and frankly too high-tech. So, to prove themselves gutsier than the eastern namby-pambies, local dare devils took to launching themselves off the tops of waterfalls without barrels, a feat far superior to that of mollycoddles in other time zones. They splashed into the shallow plunge pools at the base of the waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge, and none ever bragged about it. See Fig. 3. Plenty of pizzazz and moxie there.
Figure 3. Dare devils at Acapulco, Mexico. Very similar to Oregon dare devils.***
That’s why the team became the Multnomah Falls Plungers. Of course, they might not have been all that near Multnomah Falls, but everyone knew where Multnomah Falls was, and nobody then or to this day knew where the team’s real roots were. See Fig. 4.
Figure 4. Multnomah Falls, Oregon. High but not at all similar to Niagara Falls.
So the team was proud to be called the Plungers. Each time the franchise moved it always kept that name. The latest move of these nomads was when they were acquired by the Smelt and moved up the Willamette Valley to their new home. No one seemed to realize there might be some consternation with keeping the same name while moving to Drain, Oregon. Consequently, the Drain Plungers have become the pipeline of the Smelt. When first introduced to the new farm team, long time Yachats fans took one look at the Plungers and simply said “Oh, those Smelt!”
* Detail of the Alexander Mosaic, representing Alexander the Great on his horse Bucephalus. Naples National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy.
** From HistorybyZim.com.
*** Photo by James Huckaby. From Wikipedia.
**** In case you are anxious to find Drain on a map, it is seven or eight miles west of Yoncalla and a hop, skip, and a jump southwest of Naughty Lady Meadow.
Next time: We’ll take a look at how Yachatian entrepreneurs are grabbing the Smelt brass ring.
NOTE: The Stadium Committee has not yet heard from Willamette University Professor of Chemistry J. Charles Williamson. An experienced LEGO architect and construction project foreman, Dr. Williamson would be the perfect selection to take charge of the youthful labor force working on building Rubbery Shrubbery Stadium. If the committee can’t get Dr. Williamson for this task, out of desperation it might have to resort to asking Donald Trump to do it. (Dagnabbit!)
NOTE AGAIN: Dave Baldwin and Eric Sallee are very grateful that Mayor Ron Brean joined us in writing this post of the Rubbery Shrubbery blog.