“How do you hold a curve?” a young fellow asked me last spring.
“Do you think Hans Wagner is as good as Ty Cobb?” he asked me next.
“Listen!” I answered. “Did you come down here to learn to play ball or with the idea that you are attending some sort of a conversational soiree?”
Many recruits think that, if they can get friendly with the veterans, they will be retained on account of their social standing, and I cannot “go” young ball-players who attempt to become the bootblacks for the old ones.
I have seen many a youngster ruin himself, even for playing in the minors, through his too vigorous efforts to make good under the large tent. He will come into camp, and the first day out put everything he has on the ball to show the manager “he’s got something.” The Giants had a young pitcher with them in 1911, named Nagle, who tried to pick up the pace, on the first day in camp, at which he had left off on the closing day of the previous year. He started to shoot the ball over to the batters with big, sharp breaking curves on it. He had not been South three days before he developed a sore arm that required a sling to help him carry it around, and he never was able to twirl again before he was shunted back into the lesser leagues.
But hope springs eternal in the breast of the bush leaguer in the spring, and many a young fellow, when he gets his send-off from the little, old home town, with the local band playing at the station, knows that the next time the populace of that place hears of him, it will be through seeing his name in the headlines of the New York papers. And then along about the middle of April, he comes sneaking back into the old burg, crestfallen and disappointed. There are a lot of humor and some pathos in a spring training trip. Many a busher I have seen go back who has tried hard to make good and just could not, and I have felt sorry for him. It is just like a man in any other business getting a chance at a better job than the one he is holding and not being big enough to fit it. It is the one time that opportunity has knocked, and most of the bush leaguers do not know the combination to open the door, and, as has been pointed out, opportunity was never charged with picking locks. Many are called in the spring, but few get past. Most of them are sincere young fellows, too, trying to make good, and I have seen them work until their tongues were hanging out and the perspiration was starting all over them, only to hear McGraw say:
“I’m sorry, but you will have to go back again. I’ve let you out to Kankakee.”
“Steve Evans”, who now plays right field on the St. Louis club, was South with the Giants one season and worked hard to stick. But McGraw had a lot of young out-fielders, and some minor league magnate from Montreal came into camp one day who liked “Steve’s” action. McGraw started for the outfield where Evans was chasing flies and tried to get to “Steve,” but every time the manager approached him with the minor league man, Evans would rush for a ball on another corner of the field, and he became suddenly hard of hearing. Finally McGraw abandoned the chase and let another out-fielder go to Montreal, retaining Evans.
“Say, ‘Steve,’” said “Mac,” that night, “why didn’t you come, when I called you out on the field there this afternoon?”