Bert Wilson's Fadeaway Ball. Duffield J. W.
the advantage of having faced before many of the players on the other teams. That counts for a lot, but you must remember that Hinsdale has caught for the last two years, and he knows these things as well as the pitchers. He knows their weak and their strong points, the ones that simply kill a low outcurve, but are as helpless as babies before a high fast one. He could quickly put you on to the batters’ weakness. But outside of that you’ve got them faded. You have more speed than Winters and more endurance than Benson. Neither one of them has a license to beat you at any stage of the pitching game.”
“Perhaps it’s your friendship rather than your judgment that’s talking now, Tom,” smiled Bert.
“No,” said Dick, “it isn’t. Tom’s right. You’ve got everything that they have, and then some. Winters’ rise ball is certainly a peach, but it hasn’t the quick jump yours has just before it gets to the plate. My eye isn’t so bad, but in practice I bat under it every time. Even when I don’t miss it altogether, I hit it on the underside and raise a fly to the fielders. It’s almost impossible to line it out. And your fast high one is so speedy that a fellow backs away from the plate when he sees it coming. I don’t know that your outcurve is any better than Benson’s, but you certainly have it under better control.”
“On the dead quiet,” he went on, “I’m rather worried about Winters this year, anyway. I think he’s gone back. He’s in with a fast bunch, and I fear has been going the pace. His fine work in the box last year made him a star and turned his head. It brought him a lot of popularity, and I’m afraid he isn’t the kind that can stand prosperity. He doesn’t go at his work in the right spirit this year. You all saw how he shirked the other day when we were training for wind.”
They readily recalled the incident to which Dick alluded. The practice had been strenuous that day, but the coach had been insistent. As a wind up, he had called for a run around the track to perfect their wind and endurance, as well as to get off some of the superfluous flesh that still interfered with their development. The players were tired, but, as the trainer didn’t ask them to do what he was unwilling to do himself, they lined up without protest and trotted behind him around the track.
At one place, there was a break in the fence which had not yet been repaired. Twice they made the circuit of the track, and some of them were blowing hard, when the relentless leader started on the third round. As they came abreast of the break, Winters, with a wink, slipped out of the line and got behind the fence. Here he stayed, resting, while the others jogged along. They made two circuits more, and when they came to where he was, Winters, fresh as a daisy, and grinning broadly, slipped into line again, and trotted along as though nothing had happened. The joke seemed certainly on the coach, who hadn’t once turned his head, but pounded steadily along, in apparent unconsciousness that one of his sheep had not been following his leader. At the bench, after the sixth round, he slowed up.
“Good work, boys,” he said pleasantly, “that makes six full laps for all of us except Winters. We’ll wait here, while he takes his other two.”
The grin faded from Winters’ face, to be replaced by a hot flush, as his eyes fell before the steady look of the coach. There was no help for it, however. He had been caught “red-handed,” and with a sheepish glance at his laughing comrades, he started on his lonely run around the course while they stood and watched him. Twice he made the circuit and then rejoined his companions. The coach said nothing more, as he felt that the culprit had been punished enough, but the story was too good to keep, and Winters was “joshed” unmercifully by his mates. The incident deepened the general respect felt for the coach, and confirmed the conviction that it was useless to try to fool him, as he had “eyes in the back of his head.”
He certainly needed all his keenness, in order to accomplish the task he had set himself. The time was wearing away rapidly, and before long he would have to rejoin his own team for the championship season. There had been a good deal of rain, and practice in the field had been impossible for days at a time.
To be sure he had the “cage” for use in rainy weather. This was a large rectangular enclosure, perhaps twice as long as the distance from the pitcher’s box to home plate. The sides were made of rope that stopped the batted balls. There was ample room for battery work, and here, in bad weather, the pitchers and catchers toiled unceasingly, while the other players cultivated their batting eye, and kept their arms limber by tossing the ball about. But, at best, it was a makeshift, and did not compare for a moment with work in the open air on the actual diamond. And the days that now remained for that were distressingly few.
So he drove them on without mercy. No galley slaves worked harder than these college boys for their temporary master. He was bound that not an ounce of superfluous flesh should remain on their bones at the beginning of the season. Gradually his work began to tell. The soreness and lameness of the first days disappeared. Arnica and witch hazel were no longer at a premium. The waistbands went in and the chests stood out. Their eyes grew bright, their features bronzed, their muscles toughened, and before long they were like a string of greyhounds tugging at the leash.
He noted the change with satisfaction. Superb physical condition was the first essential of a winning team. His problem, however, was far from solved. It was only changed. He had made them athletes. Now he must make them ball players.
Individually they were that already, in the purely mechanical features of the game. They were quick fielders, speedy runners and heavy batters. But they might be all these, and yet not be a winning team. They needed team work, the deft fitting in of each part with every other, the quick thinking that, in a fraction of a second, might change defeat to victory.
His quick eye noticed, in the practice games, how far they came short of his ideal. Flynn, the other day, when he caught that fly far out in center, had hurled it into the plate when he had no earthly chance of getting the runner. If he had tried for Ames, who was legging it to third, it would have been an easy out. A moment later Ames counted on a single.
Then there was that bonehead play, when, with Hinsdale on third and Hodge on first, he had given the signal for Hodge to make a break for second, so as to draw a throw from the catcher and thus let Hinsdale get in from third. Hodge had done his part all right, but Hinsdale had been so slow in starting that the catcher was waiting for him with the ball, when he was still twenty feet from the plate.
He hated to think of that awful moment, when, with the bases full, White had deliberately tried to steal second, where Dick was already roosting. The crestfallen way in which White had come back to the bench, amid ironical cheers and boisterous laughter, was sufficient guarantee that that particular piece of foolishness would never be repeated. Luckily, it had only been in a practice game. Had it happened in a regular contest, a universal roar would have gone up from one end of the college world to the other, and poor White would never have heard the last of it.
The coach was still sore from this special exhibition of “solid ivory,” when, after their bath and rubdown, he called the boys together.
“Now, fellows,” he said, “I am going to talk to you as though you were human beings, and I want you to bring your feeble intelligence to bear, while I try to get inside your brain pans. They say that Providence watches over drunkards, fools and the Congress of the United States. I hope it also includes this bunch of alleged ball players. If ever any aggregation needed special oversight, this crowd of ping-pong players needs it. Now, you candidates for the old ladies’ home, listen to me.”
And listen they did, while he raked them fore and aft and rasped and scorched them, until, when he finally let them go, their faces were flaming. No one else in college could have talked to them that way and “gotten away with it.” But his word was law, his rule absolute, and, behind his bitter tongue, they realized his passion for excellence, his fierce desire of winning. It was sharp medicine, but it acted like a tonic, and every man left the “dissecting room,” as Tom called it, determined from that time on he would play with his brains as well as his muscles.
As the three chums went toward their rooms, they were overtaken by “Reddy,” the trainer of the team. With the easy democracy of the ball field, he fell into step and joined in the conversation.
“Pretty hot stuff the old man gave you, just now,” he said, with his eyes twinkling.
“Right