“Pitch hard, now. Only three left.”
Ames says that he lost a game in St. Louis once because McGraw forgot himself and urged him to pitch hard because only three remained to be put out. Those three batters raised the mischief with Ames’s prospects; he was knocked out of the box in that last inning, and we lost the game. That was before the days of the wonder necktie.
Ames won the third game played in Chicago on the last trip West. Coming into the ninth inning, he had the Cubs beaten, when McGraw began:
“Come on, ‘Red,’ only——”
“Nix, Mac,” cut in Ames, “for the love of Mike, be reasonable.”
And then he won the game. But the chances are that if McGraw had got that “only three more” out, he would have lost, because it would have been working on his strained nerves.