“Give me a chance,” he asked.
“Go in,” answered McGraw, again making up his mind on the spur of the moment. Marquard went into the game and made the Philadelphia batters, whose averages had been growing corpulent on the pitching of the rest of the staff, look foolish. There on that sweltering July afternoon, when everything steamed in the blistering heat, a pitcher was being born again. Marquard had found himself, and, for the rest of the season, he was strongest against the Philadelphia team, for it had been that club which restored his confidence.
There is a sequel to that old Lobert incident, too. In one of the last series in Philadelphia, toward the end of the season, Marquard and Lobert faced each other again. Said Marquard:
“Remember the time, you bow-legged Dutchman, when you asked me whether I was a busher? Here is where I pay you back. This is the place where you get a bad showing up.”
And he fanned Lobert—whiff! whiff! whiff!—like that. He became the greatest lefthander in the country, and would have been sooner, except for the enormous price paid for him and the widespread publicity he received, which caused him to be over-anxious to make good. It’s the psychology of the game.
“You can’t hit what you don’t see,” says “Joe” Tinker of Marquard’s pitching. “When he throws his fast one, the only way you know it’s past you is because you hear the ball hit the catcher’s glove.”
Fred Clarke, of the Pittsburg club, was up against the same proposition when he purchased “Marty” O’Toole for $22,500 in 1911. The newspapers of the country were filled with figures and pictures of the real estate and automobiles that could be bought with the same amount of money, lined up alongside of pictures of O’Toole, as when the comparative strengths of the navies of the world are shown by placing different sizes of battleships in a row, or when the length of the Lusitania is emphasized by printing a picture of it balancing gracefully on its stern alongside the Singer Building.
Clarke realized that he had all this publicity with which to contend, and that it would do his expensive new piece of pitching bric-à-brac no good. O’Toole, jerked out of a minor league where he had been pitching quietly, along with his name in ten or a dozen papers, was suddenly a national figure, measuring up in newspaper space with Roosevelt and Taft and J. Johnson.
When O’Toole joined the Pirates near the end of the season, Clarke knew down in his heart the club had no chance of winning the pennant with Wagner hurt, although he still publicly declared he was in the race. He did not risk jumping O’Toole right into the game as soon as he reported and taking the chance of breaking his heart. Opposing players, if they are up in the pennant hunt, are hard on a pitcher of this sort and would lose no opportunity to mention the price paid for him and connect it pointedly with his showing, if that showing was a little wobbly. Charity begins at home, and stays there, in the Big Leagues. At least, I never saw any of it on the ball fields, especially if the club is in the race, and the only thing that stands between it and a victory is the ruining of a $22,500 pitcher of a rival.
Clarke nursed O’Toole along on the bench for a couple of weeks until he got to be thoroughly acclimated, and then he started him in a game against Boston, the weakest club in the league, after he had sent for Kelly, O’Toole’s regular catcher, to inspire more confidence. O’Toole had an easy time of it at his Big League début, for the Boston players did not pick on him any to speak of, as they were not a very hard bunch of pickers. The Pittsburg team gave him a nice comfortable, cosy lead, and he was pitching along ahead of the game all the way. In the fifth or sixth inning Clarke slipped Gibson, the regular Pittsburg catcher, behind the bat, and O’Toole had won his first game in the Big League before he knew it. He then reasoned I have won here. I belong here. I can get along here. It isn’t much different from the crowd I came from, except for the name, and that’s nothing to get timid about if I can clean up as easily as I did to-day.