Tales from a Dugout

by Arthur Guy Empey

"From that day on, Alex and I led a dog's life. Though on paper everything looked bright, and the candidates were letter perfect in the game, or thought they were, on the field they were dubs of the worst caliber,—regular boneheads. If McGraw had had that mob wished on him, he would have chucked up his job and taken the stump for Women Suffrage, so you can appreciate our fix.

"Alex was a really good pitcher; plenty of curved stuff, having played semi-pro ball in the United States. It was my intention to catch for him, and fill in the other positions with the most likely candidates. This scheme did not work in with the popular version a little bit. Out of the forty trying for the team, twenty-eight insisted on being catcher. They wanted to secure that mask. If there had been a camera, each of the forty would have had a photo taken of himself wearing the 'wire cage.' Here was a great dilemma. At that time I was only a private, and there were Sergeants, Corporals, and even an officer who wanted to catch. Alex again came to the rescue. Calling me aside he said:

"'Leave it to me, Yank, I'll fix 'em. I'll try out each one in turn. Let him wear the mask, and I'll send in some curves, and after the ball cracks them on the shins a couple of times you couldn't pay 'em to put on the cage.'

"The Tommies were strange to curved balls, and Alex had speed. It did my heart good to see him dampen their ardor and dent their anatomy at the same time. The Tommies would see the ball coming to them and would reach up their hands to get it. Then the ball would break and hit them on the shin or knee. After five or six had retired, rubbing sore spots and cussing Alex out, no one else wanted to catch, and the situation was saved.

"Tommy is a natural born soccer player and clever with his feet, but stupid with his hands when it comes to baseball. Several of them had a bad habit of stopping grounders with their feet, especially our shortstop. He would see a hot grass-eater coming his way; then, instead of using his hands, he would put the side of his foot in front of it. The ball would climb his leg and hit him in the chin or eye. After receiving a puffed-up lip and a beautiful black eye, he flatly refused to play unless I would let him wear the mask. (Americans, picture a shortstop wearing a catcher's mask, and then sympathize with Alex and me.) The shortstop was a Sergeant, and through diplomatic reasons I gave the mask to him. At this every infielder wanted to wear it. Alex solved this by putting in another shortstop and giving me the mask. (In England they have a game called 'Rounders,' in which you are supposed to hit the base runner with the ball to put him out. This is generally a tennis ball and does not hurt very much.) Well, those Tommies had a habit of lamming the baseball with all their might at the unfortunate runner. Many an early practice was broken up this way, because the team would lose interest in baseball when they had a chance to view a fight between a giver and receiver.

"After about ten days' practice we had picked two pretty fair teams and arranged for a scrub game. Alex's side won, thanks to his pitching. Then, as is usual in baseball, things began to happen. A jinx seemed to rest on our candidates. Every time we had to go up the line on a working party, one or two of the players would get wounded or killed; in fact, being a baseball player got to be a perfect Jonah, and the Tommies became superstitious. If one of our team happened to be working among ten or twelve other company men, he was sure to get hit, while the other fellows came through without a scratch. Alex and I also began to get frightened, and decided to chuck up the whole thing before we clicked it ourselves.

"Then we went further back behind the lines. During this stay we rounded out a passable team. A Canadian Battalion, just sent out from England on their way to 'Wipers,' went into billets about a mile from us. This was our chance. Alex went over and proposed a game with them for the following Sunday. The challenge was accepted. We had a week's time in which to strengthen some weaknesses and to teach the bunch a little 'inside' baseball. Then the jinx popped up again. On the morning of the game with the Canadians, our cleverest infielder, the first baseman, picked up an old German hand grenade, and brought it to the billet. This man was a great souvenir collector; always hammering at 'dud' shells, trying to remove the nose-caps.

"On seeing him fooling around with the German bomb, I told him to throw it away, saying that one could never trust those things, and that I did not want to take any chances of losing a first baseman; but being of a naturally curious disposition, he refused to do so, and taking the bomb out behind the billet proceeded to take liberties with its mechanism: result, right hand blown off, and another vacancy to be filled at first base. What we said about him would have met with the highest approval of exponents of German Kultur.