At the Old Ballgame (14 page)

He'd told me she was stuck on him, and that's the only excuse I had for tryin' to fix it up between 'em; but, b'lieve me, if she was my sister or a friend o' mine I'd just as soon of had her manage the Cincinnati Club as marry that bird. I though to myself:

“If she's all right she'll take acid in a month—and it'll be my fault, but if she's really stuck on him they must be somethin' wrong with her too, so what's the diff'rence?”

Then along comes this letter that I told you about. It's from some friend of his up there—and they's a note from him. I'll read 'em to you and then I got to beat it for the station:

 

Dear Sir:

They have got poor Elliott locked up and they are goin' to take him to the asylum at Kalamazoo. He thanks you for the check, and we will use the money to see that he is made comf'table.

When the poor boy came back here he found that his girl was married to Joe Bishop, who runs a soda fountain. She had wrote to him about it, but he did not read her letters. The news drove him crazy—poor boy—and he went to the place where they was livin' with a baseball bat and very near killed 'em both. Then he marched down the street singin' ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold' at the top of his voice. They was goin' to send him to prison for assault with intent to kill, but the jury decided he was crazy.

He wants to thank you again for the money.

Yours truly,

Jim—

 

I can't make out his last name—but it don't make no diff'rence. Now I'll read you his note:

 

Old Roomy:

I was at bat twice and made two hits; but I guess I did not meet 'em square. They tell me they are both alive yet, which I did not mean 'em to be. I hope they got good curve-ball pitchers where I am goin'. I sure can bust them curves—can't I, sport?

Yours,

B. Elliott.

P.S.—The B stands for Buster.

 

That's all of it, fellers; and you can see I had some excuse for not hittin'. You can also see why I ain't never goin' to room with no bug again—not for John or nobody else!

The Longest Game

Ralph D. Blanpied

The Robins and the Braves celebrated May Day in this
ordinarily peaceful city by staging a prolonged, heartbreaking struggle for twenty-six innings at Braves Field and bombing to bits all major-league records for duration of hostilities. When darkness drew its mantle over the scene, both teams were still on their feet, interlocked in a death clutch and each praying for just one more inning in which to get in the knockout blow.

As far as results in the chase for the pennant go the game was without effect, for the final score was 1 to 1. In the matter of thrills, however, the oldest living man can remember nothing like it, nor can he find anything in his granddad's diary worthy of comparison. Heart disease was the mildest complaint that grasped the spectators as they watched inning after inning slip away and the row of ciphers on the scoreboard began to slide over the fence and reach out into the Fenway.

Nervous prostration threatened to engulf the stands as the twentieth inning passed away in the scoreless routine and word went out from the knowing fans to those of inferior baseball erudition that the National League record was twenty-two innings, the Robins having beaten the Pirates by 6 to 5 in a game of that length played in Brooklyn on Aug. 22, 1917.

The twenty-second inning passed in the history-making clash, and then the twenty-third, with a total result of four more ciphers on the scoreboard and a new National League record.

Now the old-timers in the stands began to whisper that the big-league record was twenty-four innings, established in an American League game in the Hub on Sept. 1, 1906, on which occasion the Athletics downed the Red Sox by 4 to 1. The Robins and the Braves didn't care. They didn't even know it. They simply went along in their sublime ignorance and tied this record, then smashed it, and by way of emphasis tacked on a twenty-sixth session.

At this stage of the proceedings Umpire McCormick yawned twice and observed that it was nearly bedtime. He remembered that he had an appointment with a succulent beefsteak and became convinced that it was too dark to play ball. Thereupon he called the game.

The fielding on both sides was brilliant in the crises. Olson saved Brooklyn in the ninth, when, with the bases filled and one out, he stopped Pick's grounder, tagged Powell on the base line and then threw out the batter.

In the seventeenth inning one of the most remarkable double plays ever seen in Boston retired Brooklyn. The bases were filled and one was out when Elliot grounded to Oeschger. Wheat was forced at the plate, but Gowdy's throw to Holke was low and was fumbled. Konetchy tried to score from second and Gowdy received Holke's throw to one side and threw himself blindly across the plate to meet Konetchy's spikes with bare fist.

Joe Oeschger and Leon Cadore were the real outstanding heroes among a score of heroes in the monumental affray of this afternoon. The two twirlers went the entire distance, each pitching practically the equivalent of three full games in this one contest, and,
mirabile dictu
, instead of showing any sign of weakening under the prolonged strain, each of them appeared to grow stronger. In the final six innings neither artist allowed even the shadow of a safe bingle.

The Braves' twirler had rather the better of the duel in some respects. Fewer hits were made from his delivery than from that of Cadore. Oeschger practically twirled three 3-hit games in a row, while Cadore pitched three 5-hit games in the afternoon's warfare. In only one inning, the seventeenth, did Oeschger allow two safe blows, and Cadore let the local batters group their hits only in the sixth and ninth.

At the receiving end of the batteries, O'Neil gave way to Gowdy for the Braves before hostilities were concluded, and Elliott took Krueger's place behind the bat for Brooklyn.

Robbie's men got their tally in the fifth inning. Krueger was walked by Oeschger, who offended in this way very seldom this afternoon. Krueger went to second while Oeschger was fielding Cadore's little pat and getting his man at first. Ivy Olson slashed a line drive over Maranville's head for a single, on which Krueger crossed home plate. Olson went to second on a wild pitch but was left there as Oeschger tightened up and fanned Neis and Johnston lined to Mann in left field.

The Braves tied the score in the succeeding inning, jamming over the final run of a game which was destined to go on for twenty scoreless innings thereafter, equaling the existing record in this respect. Cadore threw Mann out at first. Cruise came along with a mighty drive to the scoreboard for three bases. Holke popped up a short fly to left which Wheat caught. Boeckel delivered the goods with a single to center upon which Cruise tallied. Maranville followed with a double to center but Boeckel was caught at the plate in the effort to score on the Rabbit's blow, Hood, Cadore and Krueger participating in the put-out.

After this session, save for the Braves' flash in the ninth and the Robins' effort in the seventeenth, the two twirlers were entire masters of the situation.

Fullerton Says Seven Members of the White Sox Will Be Missing Next Spring

Hugh S. Fullerton

Cincinnati's Reds are champions of the world. The
Reds turned yesterday and gave the dope the worst upsetting it has had during all this surprising and upsetting series. They slashed away at Claude Williams' pitching and before the big crowd had settled to see the contest, it was over. The knockout punch was landed by Duncan, the kid who is the hero of the series and Williams was driven to his retreat and elected to the office of false alarm of the series.

The close of the series was discouraging. Wednesday the dopesters all agreed that the Reds were on the run. The Cincinnati fans who have been canonizing a lot of mediocre athletes turned upon them and declared that they were dogs, yellow curs and German quitters. Yesterday these same Reds swarmed upon the cocky White Sox and battered them into the most humiliating defeat of any world's series.

There will be a great deal written and talked about this world's series. There will be a lot of inside stuff that never will be printed, but the truth will remain that the team which was the hardest working, which fought hardest, and which stuck together to the end won. The team which excelled in mechanical skill, which had the ability, individually, to win, was beaten.

Everything Goes Backward

They spilled the dope terribly. Almost everything went backward, so much so that an evil minded person might believe the stories that have been circulated during the series. The fact is that this series was lost in the first game, and lost through over confidence. Forget the suspicious and evil minded yarns that may be circulated. The Reds are not the better club. They are not even the best club in their own league, but they play ball together, fight together and hustle together, and remember that a flivver that keeps running beats a Roll Royce that is missing on several cylinders. The Sox were missing on several. They played the game as a team only through one game, and part of another, and they deserved defeat.

It is not up to me to decide why they did such things. That all probably will come out in the wash. They were licked and licked good and proper, deserved it, and got it.

Yesterday's game in all probability is the last that ever will be played in any world's series. If the club owners and those who have the interests of the game at heart have listened during this series they will call off the annual inter-league contests. If they value the good name of the sport they will do so beyond doubt.

Yesterday's game also means the disruption of the Chicago White Sox as a ball club. There are seven men on the team who will not be there when the gong sounds next Spring and some of them will not be in either major league.

His Own Stuff

Charles E. Van Loan

It's a mighty fine thing for a man to know when he's
had enough, but there's a piece of knowledge which beats it all hollow.

That's for him to know when his friends have had too much.

This is no temperance sermon, so you needn't quit reading. It's the story of a baseball player who thought he was funny and didn't know when to quit the rough-and-tumble comedy that some idiot has named practical joking.

Before I tell you what happened to Tom O'Connor because he didn't know when to quit being funny, I want to put myself on record. I don't believe that there is any such a thing as a practical joke. As I understand the word, a thing in order to be practical must have some sense to it and be of some use to people. To play it safe I looked up in the dictionary definition of the word to see if I could stretch it far enough to cover the sort of stuff that Tom O'Connor pulled on us at the training camp last season. I couldn't make it answer. Here's what I found in the dictionary:

 

“
Practical
—
pertaining to or governed by actual use or experience, as contrasted with ideals, speculations and theories.”

 

That's what the big book says it means, and I string with the definition whether I understand all of it or not. Show me anything in there that applies to sawing out half the slats in a man's bed or mixing up all the shoes in a Pullman car at three o'clock in the morning!

You can call it practical joking if you want to, but it won't go with me. I claim there's nothing practical about it, or sensible either. Practical joking is just another name for plain, ordinary foolishness with a mean streak in it. The main thing about a practical joke is that somebody always gets hurt—usually an innocent party.

I'm strong for a good clever joke. I get as much fun out of one as anybody and I can laugh when the joke is on me; but when it comes to the rough stuff I pass.

Take 'em as a whole, baseball players are a jolly bunch. They've got youth and health and vitality. They call us the Old Guard, but we're really nothing but a lot of young fellows and we have the reputation of being the liveliest outfit in the league; but even so, we got sick of the sort of stunts that Tom O'Connor handed us at the training camp and in the early part of the season.

We didn't have much of a line on Tom when he joined the club. He'd been in the big league only part of the season previously, and he came to the Old Guard as the result of a winter trade. We needed a first-baseman the worst way, and Uncle Billy—he's our manager—gave up a pitcher, an infielder and an outfielder to get Tom O'Connor away from the Blues. The newspapers made an awful roar about that trade, and so did the fans. They said Uncle Billy was out of his head and was trying to wreck the team by letting three good men go. The noise they made wasn't a whisper to the howl that went up from the other manager when the time came to get some work out of those three good men.

When it comes to a swap, Uncle Billy is a tougher proposition than a Connecticut Yank, and a Connecticut Yank can take an Armenian pawnbroker's false teeth away from him and give him Brazil nuts in exchange for 'em. Uncle Billy always hands the other managers three or four men for one. He's so liberal and open-hearted that they feel sorry for him, and they keep right on feeling sorry after they see what he's slipped them in the trade.

In this case the pitcher had a strained ligament that even the bone-setter couldn't fix, the infielder's eyes were giving out on him and the outfielder had a permanent charley-horse in his left leg. As big-league ballplayers they were all through, but as bench-warmers and salary grabbers they were immense.

Even if they had been in condition I think that Tom O'Connor would have been worth the three, for he is a cracking good first-baseman, and now that he has settled down to business and quit being the team comedian he'll be even better than he was last year.

He joined us at the spring training camp in Louisiana. We've been going to the same place for years. It's a sort of health resort with rotten water to drink and baths; and the hotel is always full of broken-down old men with whiskers and fat wives to look after 'em.

O'Connor turned up in the main dining-room the first night with a big box of marshmallows in his hand. He is a tall, handsome chap with a tremendous head of hair and a smile that sort of warms you to him even after you know him. He stopped at every table and invited folks to help themselves.

“These are very choice, madam; something new in confectionery. Prepared by a friend of mine. Won't you try one?”

That was his spiel, but the smile and the little twinkle of the eye that went with it was what did the business. The fat ladies didn't stop to think that it was rather unusual for a strange young man to be offering them candy. They smiled back at Tom and helped themselves to the marshmallows, and some of them insisted that their husbands should try one too.

Tom was a smooth, rapid worker and he kept moving, not stopping long at a table and never looking back. Perhaps that was just as well, for the marshmallow had been dipped in powdered quinine instead of powdered sugar. Quinine ain't so bad when you expect it, but when your mouth is all fixed for marshmallow the disappointment and the quinine together make a strong combination. The fat ladies went out of the dining-room on the run, choking into their handkerchiefs, and the old men sent C. Q. D.s for the proprietor. He came in and Tom met him at the door and handed him one of the marshmallows, and then of course everybody laughed.

I admit that we might have begun discouraging his comedy right there. We would have done it if he'd been a minor-leaguer trying to break in, but he wasn't. He'd been five months with the Blues—a bad ball club, but still in the big league. That made him one of us. We knew and he knew that he was going to be our first-baseman and he settled down with as much assurance as if he had been with us ten years instead of ten hours.

He saw right away that we were going to be a good audience for him. Not all of his stuff was on the rough-house order. Some of us were not long in finding that out.

A couple of nights afterward we were having a nice, quiet little game of draw poker in my room on the third floor of the hotel. Any poker game running after ten o'clock in the same hotel with Uncle Billy has got to be a quiet one—or it's a case of a fifty-dollar fine all round.

Uncle Billy is a great baseball manager but he's awfully narrow-gauge on certain subjects, and one of 'em is the American indoor national pastime of draw poker. He doesn't like the game for seven hundred different reasons, but mainly because he says it sets a bad example to the kid players, who get to gambling among themselves and lose more than they can afford. That's true of course, but if a kid is born with the gambling bug in his system you can't fine it out of him, not even at fifty a smash. One season Uncle Billy tried to shut down on poker altogether, and there was more poker played that year than ever before. Then he took off the lid, and now we're allowed to play twenty-five-cent limit until ten o'clock at night. Think of it! Why, if a man had all the luck in the world and filled everything he drew to he might win as much as four dollars!

I'm not saying that the rule isn't a good one for recruits and kids, but it comes hard on the veterans, especially at the training camp where there isn't a thing to do after dark. We used to sneak a real game once in a while with a blanket over the transom and paper stuffed in the cracks and the keyhole. We had to do that because we couldn't trust Uncle Billy. He was just underhanded enough to listen outside of door, and to make it worse the poor old coot has insomnia and we never know when he's asleep and when he's not.

Well, this poker party in my room was the real thing: Pat Dunphy, Holliday, Satterfield, Meadows, Daly and myself—all deep-sea pirates. It was table-stakes of course, every man declaring fifty or a hundred behind his stack in case he should pick up something heavy and want action on it.

It got to be about two in the morning, and Dunphy was yawning his head off and looking at his watch every few minutes. He was two hundred ahead. The rest of us were up and down, seesawing along and waiting for a set of fours or something. The elevators had quit running long ago and there wasn't a sound in the hotel anywhere. What talking we did was in whispers because we never knew when Uncle Billy might take it into his head to go for a walk. I've known him to bust up a poker game at four in the morning.

Dunphy was just scooping in another nice pot—like a fool I played my pat straight against his one-card draw—when all of a sudden a board creaked in the hall outside, and then came a dry, raspy little cough that we knew mighty well.

“Holy Moses!” whispered Dunphy. “Uncle Billy! Don't move!”

Then somebody pounded on the door. We were sure there wasn't any light showing through the cracks, so we sat quiet a few seconds trying to think what to do. The pounding began again, louder than before—bangety bang-bang!

Well, our only chance was to keep Uncle Billy out of the room, so I motioned to the boys and they picked up their money and chips and tiptoed into the alcove in the corner. I whipped off my shirt, kicked off my pants, put on a bathrobe, tousled up my hair to make it look as if I'd been asleep a week, switched out the light and opened the door a few inches. Then I stepped out into the hall.

It was empty from end to end. There wasn't a soul in sight.

We had a long discussion about it. We all agreed that it was Uncle Billy's cough we heard; but why had he hammered on the door so hard and then gone away? That wasn't like him. Had he been round to the other rooms checking up on us? Was he so sure of us that he didn't need the actual evidence? Perhaps he was going to switch his system and begin fining people fifty dollars apiece on circumstantial evidence. It began to have all the earmarks of an expensive evening for the six of us.

“Did anybody else know about this party?” I asked.

“O'Connor knew,” Holliday spoke up. “I asked him if he didn't want to play a little poker. He said he couldn't take a chance of getting in Dutch with the boss so soon. That was his excuse, but maybe he was a little light in the vest pocket. He already knew about the ten o'clock rule and the fifty-dollar fine.”

“Did he know we were going to play in this room?”

“Sure, but I don't see where you figure him. He wouldn't have tipped it off to anybody. Probably Uncle Billy couldn't sleep and was prowling round. You can't get away from that cough. And he's got us dead to rights or he wouldn't have gone away. I'll bet he's had a pass-key and been in every one of our rooms. We'll hear from him in the morning.

It did look that way. We settled up and the boys slipped out one at a time, carrying their shoes in their hands. I don't know about the rest of 'em, but I didn't sleep much. The fifty-dollar fine didn't bother me, but Uncle Billy has got a way of throwing in a roast along with it.

I dreaded to go down to breakfast in the morning. Uncle Billy usually has a table with his wife and kids close to the door, so he can give us the once-over as we come in.

“Morning, Bob!” says Uncle Billy, smiling over his hotcakes. “How do you feel this morning?”

“Finer'n split silk!” says I, and went on over to the main table with the gang. That started me to wondering, because if Uncle Billy had anything on me he wouldn't have smiled. The best I could have expected was a black look and a grunt. Uncle Billy was a poor hand at hiding his feelings. If he was peeved with you it showed in everything he did. I didn't know what to make of that smile, and that's what had me worried.

Dunphy and Holliday and the others were puzzled too, and the suspense was eating us up. We sat there, looking silly and fooling with our knives and forks, every little while stealing a peek at each other. We couldn't figure it at all. Tom O'Connor was at one end of the table eating like a longshoreman and saying nothing. Dunphy stood the strain as long as he could and then he cracked.

“Did Uncle Billy call on any of you fellows last night?” said he.

“No! Was he sleep-walking again, the old rascal?”

“Was anything doing?”

“He never came near the fourth floor. If he had he'd 'a' busted up a hot little crap game.”

“What was he looking for—poker?”

None of the boys had seen him. It was plain that if Uncle Billy had been night-prowling we were the only ones that he had bothered. Peachy Parsons spoke up.

“Did you see him, Pat?” says he.

“Why, no,” says Dunphy. “I—I heard him.”

For a few seconds there was dead silence. Then Tom O'Connor shoved his chair back, stood up, looked all round the table with a queer grin on his face and coughed once—that same dry, raspy little cough. It sounded so much like Uncle Billy that we all jumped.

O'Connor didn't wait for the laugh. He walked out of the dining-room and left us looking at each other with our mouths open.

II

I knew a busher once who tore off a home run the first time he came to bat in the big league, and it would have been a lot better for him if he had struck out. The fans got to calling him Home-Run Slattery and he got to thinking he was all of that. He wouldn't have a base on balls as a gift and he wouldn't bunt. He wanted to knock the cover off every ball he saw. Uncle Billy shipped him back to Texas in June, and he's there yet. In a way O'Connor reminded me of that busher.

He had made a great start as a comedian. The stuff that he put over on the poker players was clever and legitimate; there was real fun it in. His reputation as a two-handed kidder was established then and there, and he might have rested on it until he thought of something else as good. He might have; but we laughed at him, and then of course he wanted to put the next one over the fence too.