Salem Raglans
The Salem Raglans won the only pennant of the 1904 Oregon State League, finishing 27-13 in Salem, Oregon, when the Class D circuit collapsed on July 6. Some sources spell the name Raglands.
The club and the name both date to 1903, when the Raglans opened play in the Willamette Valley League against Albany on May 10 under manager G. H. Irwin. The players had picked up their new uniforms the night before: gray shirts and knickerbockers, gray caps, brown and white striped stockings, and brown raglans for the parade. A raglan was the fashionable overcoat of the day, its sleeves cut in one piece up to the collar, and the club's matching parade coats are the likely source of its name, though no paper found so far says so outright.
The club played at Athletic Park and sorted out its roster there on April 16 with an intrasquad game the paper billed as the Hooligans against the O'Flannigans. Admission to the opening series was 25 cents. On April 28 about 500 fans watched Califf beat Roseburg 4-1 in a game that took an hour and 45 minutes, and on May 1 a crowd of more than 1,000 saw Lucas throw a three-hitter.
Shortstop Fay managed the club (reference sites disagree on whether his first name was Jack or Joe) and sat out part of May with an injured finger. On May 14 Califf held Vancouver hitless for six innings before he was hit on the arm, and Doc Suess tied the game with a ninth-inning home run and won it 4-3 with a double in the tenth. Former Stanford captain Bert Lougheed signed in April. No member of the 1904 club has been found in the major leagues; the Tom Downey on the roster was a Dungeness, Washington, native, not the big leaguer of the same name. After the league folded, Fay and Albany's Fred Gregory arranged games to raise money for the players.
The 1904 Oregon State League was a one-season Class D circuit of four clubs: Eugene, Roseburg, Salem and Vancouver, Washington, whose club moved to Albany on May 18. It opened April 28 and collapsed July 6 when Eugene's board withdrew, its president saying the club was losing about $25 a game; four-game weekly series were more than small-town gates could carry.
