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Sports Columnist
North Shore Outlook
(Walls brothers photos)
Jun 16 2005
Back in the days when kids relied on imagination — you know, before there were television sets in every home and adults had not yet organized every conceivable sport for youngsters six years old and up — John and Doug Walls invented the Confederate Baseball League.
The Walls brothers, now approaching 70 years old, have encyclopedic recall of their growing-up years in North Vancouver in the 1940s and '50s.
If their memories are right on, it just might have been 54 years ago today on June 16, 1951 (a Saturday near the end of school that year) that their Confederate Baseball League was officially" founded.
John had just turned 15. Doug was almost 14.
The Walls had been enthralled by a highlight film of the 1946 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox shown at Ridgeway school when John was in Grade 5 and Doug was in Grade 4.
So they began playing scrub ball during the summers of '47 through '50 on the Ridgeway grounds, then on a vacant lot near their home at 802 East 4th Street, until they entered Sutherland Junior High when it opened in September 1950.
Playing scrub (a game with no teams, just two or three at bat and the rest in the field) was fine, but the Walls boys wanted much more.
So they created the Confederate Baseball League. For short, they called it Confedi ball.
In Confedi ball, two players batted. A pitcher and outfielder opposed them.
The playing area, marked out by jackets and tee-shirts, was narrower than a regular baseball diamond. The left field foul line was the same, but the right side boundary was an imaginary line through the pitcher, the base at second and out to centre field.
There was also a hit line stretching from just past third base to just beyond second. Balls hit on the ground in front of the hit line were outs.
The hit line and right side foul line were adjusted as they and their friends got older and could cover more territory.
But they didn't just play Confedi ball, which were five inning games. They kept standings and detailed statistics, which is another reason they sometimes adjusted the hit and foul lines. They didn't want astronomical batting averages. They wanted numbers that reflected major league stats.
Best of all, they typed up accounts of the games, laid it all out like a real newspaper — complete with artwork — and printed up to 30 copies on a hectograph duplicator, a predecessor to mimeograph and Gestetner machines.
"Each player represented a team," Doug was recalling this week, projecting himself back to his boyhood days. "I was the Indians. John was the Giants and later the Yankees; Don Duplissie, the Dodgers; Ross Clarke, the Phillies; Cece Stevenson, the Braves; and Ralph Bower, the Yankees.
"So if John and I played against Duplissie and Clarke and we won, the Giants and Indians would both get a win. The Dodgers and Phillies would get losses."
John points out, "We'd rotate the players so you'd play with different fellows each game."
Others, like Vic Larson, Larry Harris, Ron Powell, Mickey Bryant, Bud Richardson, Joey McMillan, Tony Pawlett, Johnny Robinson, Tom Andrews and Robin Tarr joined in at times during the Confederate League's six-season existence.
They played that first year — and thus the league's name — at Confederation Park, which is what the field just north of Mahon Park was then called before it became Kinsman Stadium.
Of course Confederation Park's beautiful emerald green field was reserved exclusively for all the community's important soccer, rugby and football contests.
It was surrounded by an imposing, eight-foot-high wooden fence.
"We just climbed over it," confesses Doug. "The biggest guy would boost you over and then you'd kind of pull the next one up.
"The day school got out, we'd meet there at 10 o'clock every morning and play right through 'til dinnertime. We didn't take time out for lunch. We'd play three or four games.
"If we could get four guys to come back after dinner, we'd ride our bikes home to where we were living then in the 300-block East 20th, have a quick dinner and jump back on our bikes and race back to the park and play until it got dark. We could squeeze in a couple more games.
"After every game, we'd sit down and work out the box score and the batting averages so everybody would know what they were hitting."
Eventually they got caught inside the park and were booted off. But they convinced City parks staff to cut the grass — "weeds really," John notes — at North Van High's lower field (now Norsemen Park) so they could play there.
Later the Confederate League moved to Mahon Park.
During the life of the league, the record for home runs in one season was 37 by Don Duplissie in 1951, the same year John Walls established the all-time won-lost pitching record of 15-4. John hit .386 that season, Duplissie .358 and Clarke .309.
John and Doug actually remembered these stats as they reminisced about their pseudo-big league this week. They didn't have to look them up.
Major league record books show that Duplissie would have ranked behind the 1951 National League home run leaders (Ralph Kiner had 42 dingers and Gil Hodges 40) but ahead of the 33 that Gus Zernial hit to top the American League. Stan Musial's .355 and Ferris Fain's .344 led the NL and AL in batting in 1951.
Doug Walls was the Confederate League's only .400 hitter, batting a Ted Williams-like .402 in 1952.
The Walls' baseball publications that included stories and Confedi ball statistics were fashioned after The Sporting News, the baseball weekly that gave you all the averages and info about the grand old game that you'd ever want to know; and SPORT, which was the sports periodical long before Sports Illustrated appeared.
"Everybody," explains John, "would get a paper and they all loved to see their name in headlines. We'd have a major writeup and then small ones and we'd have the batting and pitching leaders. Doug and I did all that."
Sadly, not one of their several dozen baseball papers has survived, but I have seen a copy of their 12-page, 1953 pre-season football magazine (yes, they devised a football league each fall too).
It's remarkable what they produced in print using the rudimentary tools of those long-ago days.
In fact, the Confedi papers helped John land a job at The Vancouver Sun as a copy boy, which in turn led to Ralph "Railbird" Bower's livelihood as a photographer and Arv "Ole" Olson's career as a journalist.
It all started when John, after graduating from North Van High in 1955, applied for a position with the Vancouver daily.
He showed copies of the papers he and Doug had made to sportswriter Dick Beddoes. Beddoes passed them on to sports editor Erwin Swangard who was so impressed he hired John.
Later, when The Sun was looking for more copy boys, John called Bower and Olson, two of his North Van High buddies, and they were subsequently hired too.
Ultimately, John was offered a job as a photographer at the paper, but he turned it down and decided to go in for a teaching career instead.
Bower got the photo job which lasted 42 years. Olson became a sportswriter with The Sun for 38 years, specializing in rugby, hockey and golf.
The Walls both ended up as teachers in Burnaby for 25 years or more.
Both still love the game. John, who's been a devoted Red Sox fan for years, has "Fenway" on his car's license plate.
Doug, now 67, still plays softball on a team called the Veterans.
A few years ago the two of them took in games in New York and Boston together.
Ahh, but the days of Confedi ball were the greatest.
(This is episode 180 from Len Corben's treasure chest of stories — the great events and the quirky — that bring to life the North Shore's rich sports history.)
Post Game photos from Earl's Restaurant
