anadians have had their impact on Major League Baseball. Ferguson Jenkins, from Chatham, Ontario, was a Cy Young award-winning pitcher and is the sole Canadian in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In recent years, Larry Walker of Maple Ridge, BC won batting titles and a National League Most Valuable Player award.

To be sure, Canada's baseball history goes back at least as far as it does in the US. In towns and cities around the country, as many people have wielded a baseball bat as handled a hockey stick. It is the international appeal of the game that led to the creation of one of the finest and most colourful Canadian teams from our past: the Vancouver Asahis.

The Japanese who came to British Columbia entered an ugly climate of anti-Oriental prejudice. They settled in fishing villages and farming towns around the province, and in the Powell Street area in Vancouver, but they had a desire to involve themselves with the majority Occidental population. It turned out that the Japanese love for baseball, which they shared with their neighbours, provided a field for interaction. Teams like the Nippons and the Asahis won many fans outside their own community once the white sports fans saw the speed, skill, and daring strategy of the Japanese players.

The Asahis ["Rising Suns"] were formed in 1914. In those early days they played against all comers: firefighters and longshoremen, teams from coastal towns and from the BC Interior. They soon became the most powerful Japanese-Canadian team, and toured Japan in a successful barnstorming tour in 1921.

Their goal was to win the Terminal City league championship against the bigger, power-hitting Occidental teams. Manager Harry Miyasaki built his team around speed and sparkling defence. The Asahis used daring strategy to take advantage of their quickness and discipline. It was not unusual for them to score runners from third and second on a squeeze play. Junji Ito won the nickname "King of Bunting" by bunting his way to a .400 batting average, even though the opposition knew he would bunt his way on base. Roy Yamamura was called "the dancing shortstop" for his spectacular fielding. The diminutive Yamamura, barely five feet tall (152 cm), was also a great baserunner, stealing 50 bases in 1925.

The Asahis won the Terminal City League title in 1926. More importantly, they won the respect of opponents and the affection of fans, Japanese and Occidental. When the Tokyo Giants, a leading team from Japan, visited Vancouver as part of a tour of North America in 1935, they played the Asahis before a large, enthusiastic crowd.

Unfortunately, world events and the precarious position of Japanese-Canadians on the West Coast brought an end to the Asahis' success. Several players were conscripted into the Japanese army when they visited family in Japan or went in search of work during the depths of the Depression. The tense climate leading up to the Second World War overshadowed all fun and games, including baseball.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government interned Japanese Canadians in camps in the BC Interior and the Prairies. The team was scattered, and never reformed. By the time of an Asahi reunion in 1972, the surviving players had made homes in Japan, Toronto, Montréal, Lethbridge, Kapuskasing, Kamloops, and elsewhere. Sadly - and tellingly - few had returned to their former home of Vancouver after the events of the war years. Nevertheless, the Asahis and other Japanese-Canadian teams are remembered as stars of the Vancouver pre-war sporting scene.

n 1886, the Philadelphia magazine Sporting Life published a letter from Dr. Adam Ford containing the earliest full description of a baseball game in North America. The game Dr. Ford describes was held on June 4, 1838, in Beechville, Ontario. The rules were somewhat different than those of the modern game, but the match between the Beechfield Club and the team from nearby Zorra shows that America's "national pastime" is a genuine part of Canadian sporting history, too.

In fact, Canada was a hotbed of early baseball development. By the 1850s, there were teams in Hamilton, St. Thomas, and Woodstock, Ontario playing the "New York Game" that remains the standard today: nine players, three outs per inning. As the game spread on both sides of the border, many of the best players in the new leagues were Canadian. The Guelph Maple Leafs and the London Tecumsehs were among the best teams in North America in the 1870s. In fact, the Tecumsehs won the International Association pennant in 1877. They were the last Canadian team to win a Major League Baseball title until the Toronto Blue Jays, one century later. But the Tecumsehs chose not to join the new National League, and soon disbanded.

Canada has been home to important minor league clubs, including the Montréal Royals, where Jackie Robinson broke organized baseball's "colour barrier" in 1946. The history of baseball in Canada, however, can also be found in the stories of regional teams who symbolized civic pride and local spirit. The reason that the Expos enjoyed such early success in Montréal was because of the historic enthusiasm Québec fans had for the game. In the West in the 1840s, the Red River settlers played a primitive precursor called "bat." By the early twentieth century, professional teams from Winnipeg to Edmonton inspired devoted followings. The RCMP had to be on hand to control the spirited competitions between Yukon gold-rush teams. When the Whitehorse team defeated the Skagway, Alaska Nine, they claimed the northernmost championship ever held on the continent.

Of course, baseball is not only a man's game; women have also always played the sport for fun and for money. Promoters often played up their sex-appeal, however; team names like "Slapsie Maxie's Curvaceous Cuties" were used to attract paying crowds to the games. During World War Two, when many major league players were serving in the military, American baseball promoters organized the All-American Girls' Baseball League, later depicted in the movie A League of Their Own. At one time, nearly a quarter of the players in the league were Canadian, mostly from the Prairies. Perhaps the finest Canadian player was Mary Baker, who was both a catcher and a manager for the Kalamazoo Lassies. Baker-who modeled on the side and represented the league in advertisements and on radio talk shows-was a primary model for Geena Davis' character in the popular movie.

Although Joe Carter's ninth-inning homer in the Blue Jays' 1994 World Series win may be the most vivid Canadian baseball moment in recent years, the story of Canadian baseball is full of amazing players, wonderful teams, and storied games.