Once, when I first broke into the League, Jack Chesbro, then with Pittsburg, threw a fast one up, and it went behind my head, although I tried to dodge back. He had lots of speed in those days, too. It set me wondering what would have happened if the ball had hit me. The more I thought, the more it struck me that it would have greatly altered my face had it gotten into the course of the ball. Ever afterwards, he had it on me, and, for months, a fast one at the head had me backing away from the plate.
In contrast to this experience of mine was the curing of “Josh” Devore, the leftfielder of the Giants, of being bat shy against left-handers. Devore has always been very weak at the bat with a southpaw in the box, dragging his right foot away from the plate. This was particularly the case against “Slim” Sallee, the tenuous southpaw of the St. Louis Nationals. Finally McGraw, exasperated after “Josh” had struck out twice in one day, said:
“That fellow hasn’t got speed enough to bend a pane of glass at the home plate throwing from the box, and you’re pullin’ away as if he was shooting them out of a gun. It’s a crime to let him beat you. Go up there the next time and get hit, and see if he can hurt you. If you don’t get hit, you’re fined $10.”
Devore, who is as fond of $10 as the next one, went to the bat and took one of Sallee’s slants in a place where it would do the least damage. He trotted to first base smiling.
“What’d I tell you?” asked McGraw, coaching. “Could he hurt you?”
“Say,” replied “Josh,” “I’d hire out to let them pitch baseballs at me if none could throw harder than that guy.”
Devore was cured of being bat shy when Sallee was pitching, right then and there, and he has improved greatly against all left-handers ever since, so much so that McGraw leaves him in the game now when a southpaw pitches, instead of placing Beals Becker in left field as he used to. All Devore needed was the confidence to stand up to the plate against them, to rid his mind of the idea that, if once he got hit, he would leave the field feet first. That slam in the slats which Sallee handed him supplied the confidence.
When Devore was going to Philadelphia for the second game of the world’s series in the fall of 1911, the first one in the other town, he was introduced to “Ty” Cobb, the Detroit out-fielder, by some newspaper man on the train, and, as it was the first time Devore had ever met Cobb, he sat down with him and they talked all the way over.
“Gee,” said “Josh” to me, as we were getting off the train, “that fellow Cobb knows a lot about batting. He told me some things about the American League pitchers just now, and he didn’t know he was doing it. I never let on. But I just hope that fellow Plank works to-day, if they think that I am weak against left-handers. Say, Matty, I could write a book about that guy and his ‘grooves’ now, after buzzing Cobb, and the funny thing is he didn’t know he was telling me.”
Plank pitched that day and fanned Devore four times out of a possible four. “Josh” didn’t even get a foul off him.