A second edition of The Golden Days of Baseball, a book of baseball history around turn of the 19th century, is coming out soon.

The book, written by Alaskan Larry Johansen, covers the birth of baseball in Alaska and the Klondike until its swan song around 1917.

Johansen visited the Star recently with a copy of the book and explained how it came about.

“I worked in tourism for many years. I was Director of Operations for a small cruise line called Cruise West. They had eight vessels that operated throughout Alaska. I was based in Juneau ... and we started doing a walking tour downtown, about 30 years ago. I would do the research for it and I kept running across stories about baseball. So I started a file – baseball.

“Just the way they wrote about the stories was really interesting. Different journalistic styling back then. They were at a little more liberty to say what they wanted to say and words that were put together in different ways than we do nowadays ... these guys let everything go. Interesting descriptions of the games.

“As the file grew, I started to realize I might have a story here. And then I started seeing the pictures of the game; there were thousands of people watching ... how they were dressed, in fine suits, ladies in dresses

“I realized that these baseball stadiums – the front cover shows the baseball stadium in the middle of town ... so they would hear the baseball game played throughout the whole city, I imagine.

“I saw one clip of Whitehorse where there was six or seven thousand people at this game. It was out of control. They had to get the cops in – the Mounties, just to straighten out things. I realized I had a story then.”

According to Johansen, the popularity of the American national pastime grew along with the population of the Klondike gold rush towns.

“There was nobody here before the gold rush in 1898 ... I looked at these towns and they were all less than 1,000 people. After 1898, and 1901 each one of these towns along the way was more than 1,000 people, all about the same size ... and the sport that was being played by everybody was baseball.

“Why baseball? Well, look at now. The sun is shining at 10 o’clock at night. You don’t need (artificial) light to play baseball. You can play anytime. All night long.”

Johansen talked about some of the history in the book.

“1908 they played the first midnight game in Fairbanks and they’ve been playing ever since ... the Midnight Classic. They play at midnight without any lights just because they can. So it made for a very short and intensive baseball season.

“But obviously, who do you play? Well they play local baseball ... the cruise ships would come up and they would take the crew and they would come up and say ‘let’s go play baseball’.

“The U.S. Navy had a baseball league. Each (ship) had a baseball team ... so they would come into Juneau and Skagway and play these guys on their home field. So they would play anybody – anything for a game.

“So I got to realize that these guys were into baseball so much that they would go as far as Dawson City down to Ketchikan to play these teams. They centred most of their travels around the holidays.

“They said it could get very competitive. They would hire ringers from out of town to come in and play on teams. Some of these mines in Juneau ... they’d go out and recruit from the baseball leagues ... they’d give them desk jobs during the day, then at night they’d come out with fresh arms.

“There’s lots of scandal, lots of stories of baseball ... I didn’t take the clippings out. I wanted to keep the clippings in, because I thought that was a big part of the story, telling the story of how baseball took off in these environments,” he added.

“In 1917, 1918, things started to go downhill, which is a 20-year period baseball was king in Alaska.”

That 20-year period is what the book covers.

“It starts from the beginning of baseball in Alaska. I’m working on the second edition. The first edition is sold out ... I hope to reprint this, and they should be available in a month ... so I’m going to add a few more stories.

Johansen described some of the highlights of The Golden Days of Baseball.

“I try to do it a certain way. I try to do narration, along with the stories telling themselves, the games.

“There’s a couple of passages in here that are really interesting. One by Hugh Fullerton. He was a famous writer in the United States ... he was ... the first sportswriter to use a box score ... he was responsible for covering the Chicago Black Sox scandal in 1919.

“He was up in Alaska and saw the teams play. And he wrote a really interesting account of it that I just had to print verbatim.

“Haines actually did a play with it. Had a guy that dressed up as the southpaw that was interviewed by Hugh Fullerton and he played it in character.”

Johansen said the literary work contains more intriguing facts.

“The first team to represent Haines was an all-Black team. That was really unusual ... they were there for two years. They mostly played the White Pass railway builders.

“Some of the players up in Irving got so upset with the marshal in Juneau and petitioned Teddy Roosevelt. He was accused of bringing ringers in and giving them high-paying jobs with the government,” he added.

Johansen obtained the content for the book, including pictures, from various sources.

“Most of them I got from museums but I got some from Whitehorse, from the museum here ... little bits of stories from the national newspapers – accounts of local players coming back home and telling about lots of baseball. They would highlight stories about their experiences in Alaska ... they would give everyone else a perspective of what was going on.

“They were pretty good, actually. Some of the players ... went and played for the hockey team that played for the Stanley Cup.”

A team from the Klondike traveled to Ottawa and lost to the Ottawa Invincibles in 1905.

The Golden Days of Baseball has been written up in the Toronto Star and the Seattle Times.

The book is available in Whitehorse at Mac’s Fireweed Books. It is also available online at rowdydogimages.com

A second edition of the book is scheduled to come out in about a month.

“I know how to do these now ... the most important thing for me is to get the story out,” related Johansen.

“I had fun with it and I hope people will pick it up and have fun with it too.”