Agatha 'Pete' Doman: At 79, she bopped a Brewer to protect her beloved M's

By Casey McNerthney, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 16, 2007

Agatha Doman was a pastor's daughter, raised on sermons of love and respect and all things good. She wasn't one to pick fights, though one Saturday night in the Kingdome, she didn't back down, either.

A Milwaukee pitcher intentionally pegged a Mariner in the ribs, causing a 20-minute brawl that moved from home plate to first base to the Seattle bullpen. Faces were punched and cut; jerseys were ripped. An umpire later said it was the roughest baseball fight he'd seen.

Mariners first basemen Alvin Davis was being pinned to a wall by a Brewers player, below where Doman sat with her sisters.

"(He) got me so mad that I bopped him," Doman said, recalling how she nailed the player's head with her handbag -- at age 79.

The woman who swung her way into Mariners folklore and rarely missed a Mariners game in the Kingdome died July 11. Doman was 96.

"She said that when the player turned around, he had the most astonished look on his face," her daughter, Sharon Doman, said.

Doman was the youngest of four children born in Kramer, N.D. She was nicknamed Pete, her nearest sister, Viola Pfau, was nicknamed Ole, and the pair was known for bending rules and playing cards with local pastors.

"We danced even when we weren't supposed to," Pfau told the P-I in 1997. "Even danced once with Lawrence Welk when he came to town."

Pete taught in a one-room schoolhouse near her hometown, and after visiting an older sister here in 1946, Doman told her husband she wanted to move to Seattle.

Her husband, who had played ball in North Dakota, bought a Columbia City bungalow and took her to Seattle Rainiers games. When he died in 1984, Pfau moved in with her sister and got bit by the baseball bug. The sisters went to spring training long before it was popular, loving those games as much as cold beers in Dakota wheat country. They wore matching blue-and-white Mariners T-shirts, and the elderly women in white skirts became buddies with bullpen pitchers.

"They had a fondness for the Kingdome," daughter-in-law Beverly Doman said.

Wanting to be closer to her kids, Pfau moved to Arizona during the first season at Safeco and she died in 2005.

Pete remained a regular at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, where the congregation sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in her honor Sunday.

"The pastor also talked about how she and her sister were such fans," Sharon Doman said. "I was thinking she would have beamed at that, but if they were here, they wouldn't have heard it.

"There was a Mariners game on Sunday."