With Mask and Mitt

by Albertus T. Dudley

In those early days of June, while all Seaton was either gloomily anticipating or dolefully bewailing the disastrous Hillbury baseball game; while Wolcott Lindsay, fired by Laughlin's example and spirit, was throwing himself enthusiastically into the captain's projects for the football season, two lads in a town in western Pennsylvania were eagerly discussing plans for the next school year. They had sent to various institutions for catalogues; with the catalogues had arrived circulars, pictures, and letters. But catalogues and pictures are at best but lifeless things; they suggest many questions and answer few. A far better persuader is an enthusiastic alumnus, who puts personality into dull pages of names, and pours a rosy poetic haze over the groups of sombre brick barracks called the school. Such an enthusiastic alumnus had the entrée of the Owen household, with the natural result that Mr. Owen soon became a convert, and a room was engaged for Robert in a Seaton dormitory.

Ned Carle was longer in uncertainty. His father was not as well able as Mr. Owen to bear the expense of boarding-school life, which, like many other luxuries of these modern days, often seems to cost more than it is worth. Ned himself had not long manifested an intense ambition to go beyond the bounds of the Terryville High School for his education. He was a light-hearted, quick-witted, intelligent fellow, easy-going and friendly, generally liked in town and liking to be liked. He would naturally have been popular if he had never had a baseball under his two fingers; but the fact that he was a pitcher,—and a good pitcher,—not merely established his popularity on a definite basis, but made him in a way a public character.

When Ned Carle pitched on the High School nine and Robert Owen caught, the nine could generally be counted on to win. The battery was well-known outside the limits of the town, which was, in its way, a miniature baseball centre. The standard of play in Terryville was high. Mike McLennan, the famous professional, had once pitched on a Terryville nine; and Mike, when he was at home, took an interest in the "kids" of his native place and gave them the benefit of his instruction. Both Carle and Owen were started in their careers with professional advice of unquestioned competency.

That Owen received a smaller share of the professional's favor than Carle does not signify that he was an unpromising pupil. For easily imagined reasons Mr. Owen did not regard McLennan as a wholly desirable patron for his son. While he did not object to the boy's learning what the expert had to teach, he distinctly discouraged an intimacy which would expose him to questionable associations and false ideals. Robert, too, was reserved and quiet. The great player valued himself too highly to waste much of his attention on one who showed but small enthusiasm for his teacher.

With Ned Carle, however, the case was different. His father cherished no such inconvenient views as to his son's associations; if he had done so, it would have made no difference, for it usually happened in the Carle family that what Ned wanted the rest of the family ultimately wanted too. Ned took to McLennan and McLennan to Ned as naturally as if they had been born neighbors with only a low fence and a few years' difference in age between them. The boy hailed the ball player as Mike, chatted with him on the street corners, and listened, credulous and admiring, to all the tales of great deeds on the diamond—McLennan bragged like a Homeric hero—without being shocked by the language or dazed by the improbabilities of the narrative. In return, McLennan laid himself out to make the boy a pitcher, taught him to use his arm properly and to care for it, helped him to acquire effective curves, and coached him in many of the devices by which pitchers outwit their batsmen.

With this tuition and a natural aptitude, Ned Carle made rapid progress as a pitcher. The arts which he had not mastered, he knew something about, and he could talk baseball with the best. As citizens of Terryville will recall, while the "spit-ball" was still in harmless infancy, and only a few master pitchers were experimenting with it secretly, before the newspapers had seized upon the mystery as a means of filling daily paragraphs, Ned Carle was already making sage prophecies as to the tricky new curve, and the havoc it would wreak on batting averages and catchers' fingers.

Indirectly Owen profited by this coaching. When McLennan, as occasionally happened, stopped over a day at his home and gave Carle a few points behind Fosdick's stable, Owen was, of course, called on to do the catching. When McLennan was one summer laid off a whole fortnight for assaulting the umpire, and wished, during this period of idleness, to keep his own arm in condition as well as assist his protégé, Owen was given another and more serious privilege. On eight afternoons the lad faced the professional's fire, guessed at the sweep of his curves, and bravely struggled to grip the ball. There were times when the man pitched at his amateur catcher as if he held the latter responsible for his enforced vacation. The balls came hissing hot, now a high jump that he had to reach for, now a vicious sweep toward his feet, now a wide out that threw him off his balance, now a straight, swift shot that sped like an arrow, looked like a marble in the air and struck his mitt like a blow from a club. Owen worked hard that fortnight, and his hands suffered; but he stood up to his task without a murmur, and had the satisfaction of feeling that he gained from day to day. He really could not hold McLennan and he knew it, but he had lost his fear of the man; and he never again faced a pitcher with the slightest semblance of timidity.

From much of the baseball wisdom that the professional lavished upon Carle, Owen apparently got little benefit, though the time was to come when he should try hard to recall details of the coaching. One thing, however, he had received directly. It was McLennan who showed him how to snap the ball down to second. The theory only he owed to the veteran; his mastery of the trick was due to his own long and diligent practice. It was not a very swift throw, at least in these early years, but he got rid of the ball with such extreme quickness and placed his throw so accurately that few base runners whom the Terryville battery had to watch found it possible to steal second.

One more circumstance as to this Terryville battery, and we are ready for our story. As a pitcher, Carle, like many another good man, had one serious weakness. At critical times his judgment was prone to be at fault. Three balls and one strike, especially if there were men on bases and not more than one out, worried him badly. He could usually put the ball where it was wanted even when a failure to do so meant passing a man; but he possessed a strange faculty for trying the wrong ball. It was here that Owen's good sense and cool head served the pair. Owen knew by instinct what kind of a ball promised most in the particular case; Carle could pitch the ball that Owen wanted, and, strange enough, was willing to do so. The combination worked so smoothly, and the pitching was so very effective, that Carle, and even Owen himself, failed to appreciate how much of the strategy of the battery originated behind the bat.