A cast of cast-offs, former minor leaguers and local ball players made up the Single-A Portland Mavericks of the mid-to-late 1970’s.
“The Battered Bastards Of Baseball,” which debuted earlier in 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the arrival and eventual sale of the Portland Mavericks and is coming out on exclusively on Netflix on Friday.
The documentary follows the Mavericks and specifically their iconic owner Bing Russell, a Hollywood actor, father of movie star and former Mavericks player Kurt Russell.
One player whose name you won’t hear mentioned in the documentary is Mavericks third basemen and Evergreen High School graduate Bob Edwards, who wound up being the head coach of the Evergreen baseball team for 17 years.
“I hold the distinction of being the final out for the Mavericks,” Edwards said. “I didn’t like it at the time.”
They show footage of the final out with no mention of Edwards’ name. But he’s OK with that.
The ending for the Mavericks in their final game in 1977 wasn’t what made them special. They were an independent baseball team that was made up by having open tryouts.
The Oregon Historical Society, partnering with Netflix and the NW Film Center, are hosting a one night only screening of the documentary at 8 p.m. Friday at the Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum.
Online tickets are no longer available for the event but according to the NW Film Center website, rush tickets will be available for purchase 30 minutes prior to showtime.
Edwards grew up playing little league in Vancouver with Jim “Swannie” Swanson, who graduated from Fort Vancouver and is frequently shown in the film, referred to only as “Swannie.”
He was the left-handed catcher for the Mavericks from 1975 through 1977, something that is almost never seen in baseball.
“Our group of guys were just freelancing guys that couldn’t make it and they wanted to win and play,” said Swannie, who ended up owning a comedy club in Seattle where he still lives. “We played hard and we played hard, if you know what I mean.”
Swannie had the ear of Bing Russell and was the “personal bodyguard” of then-manager Frank Peters, and helped Edwards get on the team.
“Bing Russell came up to me in ’75 and said ‘Swannie you got any infielders you know that can play?’ I got a guy I grew up with in Vancouver, Washington that’s better than anyone I’ve seen out here,” Swanson said.
Peters also owned restaurants and bars in Portland. Mavericks would often tend bar for if they didn’t play that day.
“Our farm system was my bars and I had two of them,” Peters said.
During one of the open try outs in 1976, Swannie helped get the eyes of the men in charge in the right place.
Edwards still remembers being surprised of how things were when the team hit the road. The comparison from the old Mavericks is often made to the book that revealed the road culture of baseball players in the 60’s and 70’s called “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton, who ended up reviving his baseball career in Portland.
“I tried out after my first year of teaching,” Edwards said. “There was a lot of stuff that went on, I had to step back and say woah and draw the line a little bit.”
“I was just going to say if you throw my name out I could tell you a lot of stories,” he jokes. “When it came to being on the field, guys just wanted to win in the worst way.”
“My management style was somewhere between Bouton’s book ‘Ball Four’ and George Patton,” said Peters.
They played against the Single-A affiliates of teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and Edwards recounts playing against Hall of Famers Ozzie Smith and Ricky Henderson.
They often played teams with superior talent but got by on their willingness to take risks and their baseball savvy.
“We had a plan. It was planned chaos,” said Peters of the Mavericks ways.
Edwards remembers the bus rides to Eugene and Boise and arriving at 4 a.m. to play a game the next day. They were “U.O.B., unorganized ball,” as Edwards describes, a derogatory term. But the Mavericks didn’t care once they hit the diamond.
“You didn’t want to be referred to as U.O.B., but it was,” Edwards said. “When it came to play on the field we were as good or better as all those teams.”
Edwards remember their latest reunions with fondness even though many of the Mavericks went their separate ways, never to be heard from again.
“We played like a team,” said Edwards.
“It was the real deal,” said Swannie.
Edwards would later go on win an Oregon State title as the head coach of Vale High School in Vale, Oregon. He also coached a Babe Ruth team called the Vancouver Mavericks to two Southern Washington titles.
