But Jim insisted that if he were needed he would be able to do it.
“There’s only one chance,” said Dick. “You’re probably tired out, but you can’t get enough sleep in an ordinary bed to rest you. We’ll go to a Turkish bath, and that may steam you out.”
And when Dick and Jim joined the rest of the team at the hotel just before noon, Jim looked like a new man. Dick’s prescription had worked wonders for him. But the universal coach was very doubtful as to his ability to go through the game. He had decided to let him start, however.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR YALE.
Not for years had the baseball championship of the colleges come down to so narrow an issue. For the first time it was a really national title that was at stake, for the defeat of Michigan, the recognized leader of the West, by Yale, had made it impossible for any team to dispute the honors to be won by the victor of this final battle between Harvard and Yale. It was a fitting test, too, and thousands without an interest in either college rejoiced at the thought that the historic rivals should finally have come to fight it out between themselves. Princeton for years had been the most formidable baseball college in the East. There had been none to dispute successfully the claim of the Tigers to the premier honors for a long time, and the general public was glad to see the Princeton monopoly invaded at last.
That was the reason for the tremendous crowd that filled the famous Polo Grounds. It was a crowd bigger than any that had ever assembled there, except for a professional world’s championship contest. The great arena was a riot of color, and a very bedlam of sound long before the game began. Those who had not been lucky enough, or gifted with sufficient forethought to buy reserved seats, had to come early, in order to get a place, and even out on the bleachers, where the peanut-eating fans sit through the long summer afternoons, pretty girls, glad even of so exposed a place to view the struggle, appeared in swarms.
And in the covered grand stand, where all the seats were reserved, the crowd was just as big, and came just as early. The people there were sure of their seats, but they wanted to see the crowd, to hear the college songs and cheers, and to watch the practice. It was a thrilling and unusual spectacle, certainly, and none of those who had bolted early luncheons, or gone without their mid-day meal altogether, to be at the grounds early, at all regretted their sacrifice when once they had arrived and taken their places.
From one side of the great grand stand, behind third base, and all the way out to left field, the Harvard cheer came constantly—nine long ’rahs, and a long Harvard at the end. That side was a mass of crimson, too. Girls in crimson dresses, crimson hats, with red flags and great red sleeve bands, were to be seen in abundance. And the cheer leaders from Cambridge were busy constantly, urging their fellow students in the stands to renewed efforts, so that the fellows on the field, practicing diligently, might know that the college was with them, rooting as hard as it could for them to win the coveted championship.
Yale was opposite, behind first base and right field. There were just as many Yale men and Yale girls there as Harvard had sent, and it seemed as if they made even more noise. Both teams had had splendid seasons, but the odds favored Yale a trifle. For Harvard, although facing Yale’s weakest pitcher, save for part of one inning, in the great Commencement Day game, had been unable to make any real superiority plain. It had been all that Harvard could do to bat out a victory over Dick Winston, despised as the poorest sort of a match for either Briggs or Wooley before the game began, and the Yale men, who knew that, if only Winston had been able to begin well, he would have won his game, had no idea that Harvard would be able to do anything against the strong right arm of Jim Phillips, and the best efforts of the team that Dick Merriwell had coached so brilliantly through the preliminary season, with its victories over Cornell, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Princeton to prove its class.