History
As a Northwest League franchise (dating back to 1979 in Medford, Oregon), the Canadians have had players such as José Canseco, Pat Britt, Rod Beck, Rickey Henderson, Scott Brosius, Jason Giambi, Tim Hudson, Nick Swisher, Jeremy Brown, Troy Glaus, Sammy Sosa, Jason Windsor, Joe Blanton, Rich Harden, Travis Buck, local Sean Triplett, Danny Putnam, Dallas Braden and Miguel Tejada. The team formed after Medford, Oregon's Southern Oregon Timberjacks relocated to Vancouver.
Vancouver was a heavy player in the early history of the Northwest League, a charter member in every version of the league that would eventually form the NWL, notably as the sole team that survived the collapse of the Western International League in 1922 when it reformed in 1937, winning four pennants in the WIL (1942, 1947, 1949, 1954) as the Vancouver Capilanos (1939–1954). However, even though they were the final champions of the WIL, Vancouver was not part of its reformation into the Northwest League, due to the NWL's shedding of all of its Canadian teams in order to focus on the American Pacific Northwest. Vancouver was without professional baseball in 1955, but in 1956 the highest calibre of minor league play, in the form of the Open-Classification Pacific Coast League, came to British Columbia when Oakland Oaks transferred there as the Vancouver Mounties. The Mounties played in the PCL from 1956 through 1962, and from 1965 through 1969.
A Triple-A franchise named the Vancouver Canadians played for 22 seasons (1978–99) in the Pacific Coast League at Nat Bailey Stadium. Following the 1999 season, in which they won the Triple-A World Series, the team was purchased by a group led by Art Savage and moved to Sacramento, California for the 2000 season and became the Sacramento River Cats.
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“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)