And so they talked baseball until long after midnight, and their enthusiasm for the great American game made them friends at once, and Harold went to bed feeling that the world was bright and warm and that spring would be coming pretty soon, and he made up his mind right there not to get homesick any more, but to dig more into his studies so that his marks wouldn’t interfere with the amount of time he wanted to give to baseball when practice started.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE JERRY HARRIMAN SCHOLARSHIP PRIZES
When Lowell University won the college baseball Championship in 1876 the victory was to a large extent due to the wonderful all-round work of Jerry Harriman. As a pitcher he had never up to that time had an equal, and he could play almost any other position on the team well. In those days a club would have only one pitcher and he was expected to pitch almost every game of the season, which often meant pitching every day in the week but Sunday. When not pitching he played an outfield position.
This is a whole lot different than the way the game is conducted in the colleges to-day. In these days a nine will sometimes have half a dozen pitchers and they don’t do anything but pitch and then only in their regular turns. Besides being a great pitcher Jerry was also a great batter. This was also unusual because very seldom do you find a good pitcher who can bat, but Jerry could both pitch and bat and he made a great name for himself as a college athlete.
After he had been graduated he went into business in a city in the Middle West, and became very wealthy.
As a young lad he had been weak physically and his heart was said to be affected. In fact, he was not expected to live to grow up. When he was thirteen years old the doctors said he couldn’t live a year. There came to his home town, however, about this time, a young man who opened a school of Physical Culture. He had a wonderfully well developed body, was a great enthusiast on athletics, and he made a great effort to get the young boys around town who were weak physically to come to him.
He made his living by forming gymnasium classes among the business men of the town and by his work with them got many a staid old business man, who was constantly confined to his office, into the habit of taking exercise regularly, and he made many a man who had become fat and sick through lack of exercise strong again physically.