Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest
by Mark Armour (Editor)

This is a collection of more than 170 photos and two dozen essays, which tell the 120-year history of baseball in the Pacific Northwest. The stories range chronologically from the origins of the professional game in the region in the 1890s through the account of the 2001 season of the Seattle Mariners and focus on baseball in Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Tacoma, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Steve Steinberg contributed to Rain Check, with the article “Spitballing to the Hall of Fame.” It covers the years of 1913 to 1915, when future Hall-of-Fame spitball pitcher Stan Coveleski played minor league ball in the Pacific Northwest. It captures baseball in that time period and includes many of the colorful players “Covey” crossed paths with.

Released in conjunction with the 2006 national convention of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest is a keepsake to pore over and share for decades to come. For more than a century, leagues, teams and star players and managers have sprinkled and drenched the region with athletic talent, entrepreneurship and characters from the garrulous to the goofy, much like the rains that Northwesterners are always watching for.

Here, for the first time, is an attempt, with lively prose and breathtaking photography, to bring all of that history alive in one place. Inside, you will savor:

• A wide swath of the key baseball figures in the Northwest, from "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity to Juan Marichal, from Rogers Hornsby to Bobby Valentine, from Stan Coveleski to Fred Hutchinson, from John Barnes to Emil Sick.
• The highs and heartbreaks of teams in cities throughout the region, from the early 20th century "war" of leagues to the fitful Seattle Pilots and today's Mariners.
• A stunning sampler of the region's ballparks as they shone in their heyday, long before many of them met with the wrecking ball.

Open the pages. Can you hear it? "PLAY BALL!"

Mark Armour, editor of Rain Check, is the award-winning co-author of Paths to Glory, the director of SABR's Baseball Biography Project, and a contributor to many baseball journals, magazines, and web sites.  He writes from his home in Corvallis, Oregon.

Dave Eskenazi, photo editor of Rain Check, is a Seattle-based Investment Advisor and native. He has a keen interest in Northwest baseball history, and collects and displays Seattle, Northwest, and West Coast baseball artifacts and ephemera, some of which illustrate the National SABR Convention publication: Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest.

For more information on Rain Check, go to the web site of the publisher, the University of Nebraska Press at www.unp.unl.edu.