“My old soup bone,” says Kilroy, “was so weak that I couldn’t break a pane of glass at fifty feet. So one winter I spent some time every day out in the back yard getting that balk motion down. I had a pretty fair balk motion when my arm was good, but I saw that it had to be better, so I put one stone in the yard for a home plate and another up against the fence for first base. Then I practised looking at the home plate stone and throwing at first base with a snap of the wrist and without moving my feet. It was stare steady at the batter, then the arm up to about my ear, and zip, with a twist of the wrist at first base, and you’ve got him!
“I got so I could throw ’em harder to the bag with that wrist wriggle than I could to the batter, and I had them stickin’ closer to the base for two years than a sixteen-year-old fellow does to his gal when they’ve just decided they would do for each other.”
As a rule McGraw takes charge of the batters and general team work at spring practice, and he is one of the busiest little persons in seven counties, for he says a lot depends on the start a club gets in a league race. He always wants the first jump because it is lots easier falling back than catching up.
After a week or so of practice, the team is divided up into two squads, and one goes to San Antonio and the other to Houston each Saturday and Sunday to play games. One of the older men takes charge of the younger players, and there is a lot of rivalry between the two teams to see which one will make the better record, I remember one year I was handling the youngsters, and we went to Houston to play the team there and just managed to nose out a victory. McGraw thought that for the next Saturday he had better strengthen the Yannigans up a bit, so he sent Roger Bresnahan along to play third base instead of Henderson, the young fellow we had the week before. Playing third base could not exactly have been called a habit with “Rog” at that time. He was still pretty fat, and bending over quick after grounders was not his regular line. He booted two or three and finally managed to lose the game for us. We sent McGraw the following telegram that night:
“John McGraw, manager of the Giants, San Antonio, Texas:
“Will trade Bresnahan for Henderson. Rush answer.”
McGraw does not like to have any of his clubs beaten by the minor leaguers, because the bushers are inclined to imitate pouter pigeons right away after beating the Big Leaguers.
The social side of a training trip consists of kicking about the grub, singing songs at night, and listening to the same old stories that creep out of the bushes on crutches year after year. Last spring the food got so bad that some of the newspaper men fixed up a fake story they said they were going to send to New York, displayed it to the proprietor, and he came through with beefsteak for three nights in succession, thus establishing a record and proving the power of the press. The trouble with the diet schedule on a spring trip is that almost invariably those hotels on the bush-league circuits serve dinner in the middle of the day, just when a ball-player does not feel like eating anything much. Then at night they have a pick-up supper when one’s stomach feels as if it thought a fellow’s throat had been cut.
The Giants had an umpire with them in the spring of 1911, named Hansell, who enlivened the long, weary, training season some. Like a lot of the recruits who thought that they were great ball-players, this Hansell firmly believed he was a great umpire. He used to try to put players who did not agree with his decisions out of the game and, of course, they would not go.
“Why don’t you have them arrested if they won’t leave?” McGraw asked him one day. “I would.”