The Higher Education and the Diamond

HEYWOOD BROUN

Showing That a Baseball Player Might As Well Fill His Head With Latin Roots As Anything

COLLEGE baseball remains less intelligent than that played by the professionals, but also more honest. The college batter, upon occasion, may not "look 'em" over carefully enough, but at any rate he does not look under his pillow in the morning and he never has to think about "the wife and kiddies" at all. Of course, intelligence is not really the word for baseball acumen. The man who is spoken of as "a quick-thinking player" may have a brain of negligible quality. Intuition is the motivating force which makes an outfielder cross the base runners by pegging straight to second when a throw to the plate would be more conventional but less successful. Again the infielder who checks his arm after drawing it back and restrains himself from making a useless throw which could not possibly catch the runner, does not stop to reason out his action. The process is fast and deep. It is a rumbling, roaring thing down in the subconscious mind. The professional ball player nearly always has a subconscious mind. Often he has nothing else nor does he very often need it.

One of the baseball correspondents on a southern training trip was struck by the fact that on rainy days most of the players simply sat about in the hotel lobby and did nothing. He investigated and reported to his paper, "Sometimes they sit around and think and sometimes they just sit."

Be that as it may, college baseball is taking on to an increasing degree the methods of the professionals. Ten or twelve years ago the professional coach was rather rare. Now he is taken for granted. Lauder at Yale, Slattery at Harvard, Bill Clarke at Princeton, Jeff Tesreau at Dartmouth, Andy Coakley at Columbia, Jack Barry at Holy Cross, Bezdek at Penn State, Lush at the Naval Academy, comprise only a few of the well known professional players now engaged in teaching college men the fine points of the game. I am inclined to think that college baseball of today is a little smarter than that of fifteen and twenty years ago.

The Pathos of. Distance

COLLEGE nines now work plays such as the squeeze and the hit and run which were not known in the earlier days. It also seems that supremacy of the pitcher has been shaken. There was a time when the pitcher was practically everything in a college game. Now there is more hitting. But, of course, it is impossible to say whether this development in batting represents an increased skill in hitting or a waning of great college pitchers. Certainly there is no one of the present-day twirlers who stands out as Walter Clarkson of Harvard once did, or Dutch Carter of Yale or Hildebrand of Princeton. At that it is a good year which has seen such capable pitchers as Carney of Lafayette, Margetts of Princeton, Chittenden and Coxe of Yale, Horan and Tunney of Holy Cross.

Perhaps the men of the past have grown mythical with age. After all Clarkson had his ups and downs and once he lost to Princeton after his team had given him a six-run lead. But looking from a distance these pitchers of antiquity seem giants. They are glamourous with legends. There was Dutch Carter, for instance, whose speed was so terrific that the batter had to begin his swing at the moment the ball left Carter's hands or thereabouts. It was in a Princeton game and the batter had twice swung vainly. He knew that he must hit for there was a runner on second base, sent there perhaps by a base on balls or a missed third strike. Carter faced the batter and the man at the plate tightened every muscle. Then suddenly Carter whirled and threw to second to catch the runner napping and at that instant the batter, who had nerved himself to be ready for the pitcher's first move, struck out.

Though the pitchers stood out in the years of Stagg, Trudeau, Bowers, Coburn, Laurence Young, Harry Bates, Felton (much more recent) and Downer, there were also a few conspicuous hitters. One of the best of college batters was Orville Frantz who played first base for Harvard. The Yale first string pitcher of the year was sent to one of Harvard's minor games to observe the team and to jot down in his notebook such weaknesses of the batters as he was able to detect. Frantz singled the first time up and then followed with a double and a triple. Next he walked, but he rounded out the afternoon by hitting to deep centerfield for a home run. The Yale pitcher took out his notebook and ran down his list in which he had "keep 'em low on the inside," "feed him with slow balls" and like entries, but when he came to the name of Frantz he wrote "Put your back and shoulders into it and trust in God."

College baseball of a decade ago, I have maintained, was a less scientific pursuit than the game today. Still it would be most unfair to leave the impression that in these days the students were reserving all the fine processes of their minds for mathematics and Greek and devoting no thought to baseball. Cerebration was going on upon the diamond and it resulted in one of the greatest discoveries of the game coming from a college man. It was a discovery which has revolutionized modern baseball. Jim Tyng, Harvard '76, who generally caught but sometimes pitched for the varsity, was the inventor and his discovery was the catcher's mask. He was the first player to use one and, like Columbus, Robert Fulton and the others, there was first of all a period of mocking laughter; but in the end the mask was universally adopted and the catcher no longer played far back of the plate.

It was time that something was done for the catcher, the most heavily worked and unfortunate of players. His fingers will betray him in any company. Damon Runyon tells the story of the battered professional catcher who accepted a job to coach a college team and gathered the catching candidates about him to instruct them in the fine points of work behind the bat. He illustrated each point with gnarled and knotty fingers.

"Mister," one of the young collegians finally interrupted, "didn't they have any gloves when you played ball?"

"Why sure," said the professional, "what did you ask that for?"

"I was wondering," answered the freshman, "why you didn't catch a few in your glove instead of using the ends of your fingers."

The Burden of Wisdom

THE oldest reproach against the college baseball player is that he tries too hard. "He gave it the old college try," professionals used to say when some youngster ran tearing into the grand stand after a foul which was plainly headed over the roof. But in the long run this is the spirit which wins baseball games in the big leagues as well as the colleges. Our colleges have no reason to reproach themselves for their showing in connection with professional baseball. The universities have shown that every now and then a man from their halls, in spite of his Greek and his Latin, has been able to go out and take his place beside youngsters from the sandlots without disgracing his alma mater.

In these days when summer baseball is frowned upon, the contribution of the colleges to the professional, leagues is somewhat less than it used to be, but it is not to be forgotten that such great stars of the game as Arthur Devlin, Christy Mathewson and George Sisler came to the diamond with degrees in their hands. Indeed one institution of learning can boast that no less than three of its recent graduates are now employed in the American League, for the University of Alabama has sent Sewell and Stephenson to Cleveland and Derrill Pratt, after several previous stops, to the Red Sox. In the long run a player can manage to get about the diamond even if he is burdened by education.