Bremerton Bluejackets
Bremerton, Washington got its first and only professional baseball team in 1946, when the Bremerton Bluejackets joined the Class B Western International League. The name needed no explanation in a Navy town. A bluejacket is an enlisted sailor, and Bremerton had grown up around the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The club played at Roosevelt Field, a 4,500-seat park at Warren Avenue and 16th Street, and opened league play on April 26, 1946.
The first manager was Sam Gibson, a former Tigers, Yankees and Giants pitcher who had gone 22-4 for the 1935 San Francisco Seals with a young Joe DiMaggio in the outfield behind him. His Bluejackets finished third at 73-63 on the strength of one enormous season: Bill Barisoff led the league with 40 home runs and 155 RBI, and Clarence Federmeyer led it with 21 wins. The pitching staff also included Hub Kittle, who went 15-10 as a player-coach, then threw seven shutouts in 1947, a league record for a single season.
Alan Strange, a former St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators shortstop, took over in 1947 and ran the club for its final three years. The 1947 team went 86-68 and finished one game behind Vancouver. The 1948 team won 95 games, the most in franchise history, and still finished second, two and a half games behind Spokane. The league held no playoffs in those years, so neither near-miss produced anything but a second- or third-place finish. Kittle left during 1948 after the league ruled a player could no longer double as a coach, which cost him $50 a month (roughly $650 today), so he went home to Yakima to run his restaurant. Three of his customers happened to own the Yakima club, and they traded for him. Kittle went on to pitch in six different decades, retiring the side at age 63 in 1980, and was pitching coach of the 1982 World Series champion Cardinals.
The Bluejackets arrived in a city that was already emptying out. Bremerton had swelled to an estimated 80,000 people during the war; by the 1950 census, 27,678 remained. Attendance fell from 86,522 in 1947 to 75,195 in 1948 to 35,440 in 1949, about 476 a night. The 1949 club, operating under a working agreement with Oakland's West Coast league team, went 60-89 and finished last, 38.5 games out, even with John Marshall leading the league with 22 wins. Bremerton did not return in 1950, when the league placed a new club in the Tri-Cities instead, and no professional team has played in the city since. A collegiate summer team briefly revived the Bluejackets name in the 2000s.
