Seattle Drydockers
The Seattle Drydockers of Seattle, Washington, were the city's entry in the 1919 Northwest International League, the continuation of Dan Dugdale's Seattle Giants under a wartime name for one season. They played half a season. The league opened on April 23, 1919, with two Washington clubs, Seattle and Tacoma, and two in British Columbia, Vancouver and Victoria. Tacoma folded on June 5 with a 5-17 record, the league disbanded three days later, and Seattle finished 16-12, one game behind Vancouver.
The league was the same Class B circuit that had been the Northwestern League through 1917 and the Pacific Coast International League in 1918, when the Giants were in first place at 40-28 before the season was suspended on July 7. It used the Northwest International name only for 1919 and went back to Pacific Coast International League in 1920. Dugdale had sold his majority interest that January to the group that took Seattle back into the West Coast's top minor league, and the two clubs shared Dugdale Park in 1919.
The Drydockers name came out of Seattle's shipyards. In 1917 the Seattle Construction and Drydock Company fielded a team called the Drydockers in the Seattle Shipbuilders' League, one of several company clubs in a circuit that drew professional players, since shipyard work was an essential war industry. Outfielder Ten Million, a former Tacoma Tigers player once sold to Cleveland, was playing for those Drydockers in September 1917 when he was among the first draftees to report to Camp Lewis. The 1919 professional club's use of the name has not yet turned up in period papers, but it arrived in a city where 35,000 shipyard workers had walked out on January 21, 1919, the strike that led into the Seattle General Strike that February.
Record books list Joe Devine, then about 24, as Seattle's 1919 manager. Devine had managed a Seattle shipyard team during the war and later became one of baseball's best-known scouts, credited with signing or recommending Joe Cronin, Paul and Lloyd Waner, and Joe DiMaggio. His SABR biography instead places him with Tacoma in 1919, so his role here is not settled. League statistics credit Seattle pitcher Babe Gibson with an 8-3 record.
