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Walter McCredie - Baseball |
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Born in Manchester, Iowa, in 1876, McCredie found his way into professional baseball around age 20, and eventually moved up to the National League for part of the 1903 season with Brooklyn. In 56 games, McCredie hit .324 with 20 RBIs and 10 stolen bases, but the team traded him and future Hall of Famer Hughie Jennings (nearing the close of his career) to Baltimore of the Eastern League in midseason. In 1904, McCredie moved to Portland, where the local team, the Browns, rarely won and were a financial mess. After batting .335 in ’04, McCredie and his uncle William McCredie, a lawyer in Vancouver, Wash., bought the team and Walter McCredie began a stretch of five seasons as the starting right fielder and manager in 1905. In 1906, the McCredies changed the team nickname to Beavers and, just two seasons after losing 136 games, the team went 115-60 and won the Pacific Coast League title. Walter McCredie hit over .300 three times made no fewer than 466 plate appearances as a player or player/manager in his first six years in Portland. In 1910, he began concentrating on managing and guided the team to PCL titles four more times: 1910, ’11, ’13 and ’14, helped in part by a relationship with Cleveland of the American League. The McCredies owned the Beavers into 1921, when they sold the team after a string of losing seasons led to financial woes. Walter McCredie spent several more seasons managing various teams in the Northwest and also worked as a scout for the Detroit Tigers before passing away in 1934 at age 57. In all or parts of 18 seasons in the minor leagues, he batted .282 with 1,516 hits. He is credited with having managed teams in 20 seasons, including 17 with the Beavers. Walter McCredie was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and into the PCL Hall of Fame in 2003. |
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