“You think you’re smart, don’t you?”
“Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!” was the only reply. But now we knew we had him. When a pitcher starts to talk back, it is a cinch that he is irritated. So the deadly chorus was kept up in volleys, until the umpire stopped us, and then it had to be in a broken fire, but always there was the “Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!” When Coveleski looked at McGraw coaching on third base, the manager made as if to beat a snare drum, and as he glanced at Latham stationed at first, “Arlie” would reply with the “rat-a-tat-tat.”
The team on the bench sounded like a fife and drum corps without the fifes, and Coveleski got no peace. In the fourth inning, after the game had been hopelessly lost by the Philadelphia club, Coveleski was taken out. We did not understand the reason for it, but we all knew that we had found Coveleski’s “groove” with that “rat-a-tat-tat” chorus. The man who had beaten the New York club out of a pennant never won another game against the Giants.
“Say,” said McGraw to “Tacks” Ashenbach the next time the club was in Cincinnati, “there are two things I want to ask you. First, why does that ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ thing get under Coveleski’s skin so badly, and, second, why didn’t you mention it to us when he was beating the club out of a championship last fall?”
“Never thought of it,” asserted Ashenbach. “Just chanced to be telling stories one day last winter about the old times in the Tri-State, when that weakness of Coveleski’s happened to pop into my mind. Thought maybe he was cured.”
“Cured!” echoed McGraw. “Only way he could be cured of that is to poison him. But tip me. Why is it?”
“Well, this is the way I heard it,” answered Ashenbach. “When he was a coal miner back in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, he got stuck on some Jane who was very fond of music. Everybody who was any one played in the Silver Cornet Band down in Melodeon Hall on Thursday nights. The girl told Coveleski that she couldn’t see him with an X-ray unless he broke into the band.
“‘But I can’t play any instrument,’ said the Pole.
“‘Well, get busy and learn, and don’t show around here until you have,’ answered the girl.
“Now Coveleski had no talent for music, so he picked out the snare drum as his victim and started practising regularly, getting some instruction from the local bandmaster. After he had driven all the neighbors pretty nearly crazy, the bandmaster said he would give him a show at the big annual concert, when he tried to get all the pieces in his outfit that he could. Things went all right until it was time for Coveleski to come along with a little bit on the snare drum, and then he was nowhere in the neighborhood. He didn’t even swing at it. But later, when the leader waved for a solo from the fiddle, Coveleski mistook it for his hit-and-run sign and came in so strong on the snare drum that no one could identify the fiddle in the mixup.