“In time of peace prepare for war,” said Hughie. “Now I am wondering right now whom we are going to get to take the place of old boy Penny on first (Fred Penny had been the sensation of the college world at the first bag), and who will take Johnny King’s place as catcher and will he be able to work that delayed throw trick with Johnny Everson and the shortstop? And by the way, who is going to take Joe Brinker’s place at short, besides the couple of other places that are vacant?
“Boys,” continued Hughie, “this is going to be my last year at school here. You fellows have helped me win the championship before. It’s all right about the football business, but this last year with you, we’ve simply got to have another winning nine. Let’s give a good old cheer for the football boys, and then let’s give another for the grand old game of ball, and then you go and tell all the fellows who can play ball that I want to see them in the cage next week, and tell all of them that think they can play ball to come, too. Sometimes some of these chaps who think they can’t do it turn out the best of all.”
And that evening when the boys got talking by themselves they forgot all about football, and the fellows who had been to school last year had to tell all over again about the wonderful stunts that Lowell boys had pulled off in the past, just as if most of them hadn’t heard them all before.
“Say, Johnny,” said Fred Larke, a Junior from Kansas and Captain of the Baseball Nine, to Johnny Everson, “I was trying to tell Robb here (Robb was from Georgia) how Johnny King and you and Joe Brinker figured out that delayed-throw-to-second trick that won that game from Princeville last year.”
“Well,” said Johnny, “it didn’t really win the game, you know, because we were ahead then, but it kept the other fellows from winning. You see, some one said to us in the visitors’ dressing room of Bailey Oval that Walker of the Princeville team was a slow thinker. ‘I have a new trick for fellows that can’t think quick,’ said King, the catcher, and he explained it to us so we would be on the job if the chance came. Sure enough it did.
“In the last half of the ninth inning of the game with Princeville College, the Lowell boys were one run to the good. Princeville College was at bat, of course.
“Walker, the first man up, had gotten to first on a hit and reached second on a sacrifice and he was the lad they said didn’t think quick. This was just the thing we figured might happen. King had said, ‘If that fellow gets on second, I can pull off this new trick, which I call the delayed throw. Let Joe cover the bag and Johnny stall.’ On the first ball pitched, this Walker took a big lead off second, and Brinker covered the bag, King motioned quick as if to throw, and I stood still. Walker first started back toward second, but when he saw that King didn’t throw he slowed down. Brinker, walking back to his place at short, said to Walker, ‘We’d have got you that time, old boy, if King had thrown the ball.’ For just one fatal moment Walker turned around to answer Brinker’s remark and in that instant King threw the ball to me as I hustled for the bag. Of course, I caught it and jabbed it against the runner and before he knew how it was done, he was out.
“Of course you couldn’t work that on a real live player, but we won the game on that play because the next batter drove out a long single on which Walker could have scored. Looking at it one way, it was won in the dressing room because that’s where we fixed up the scheme.”
“It pays to keep thinking about the game all the time, doesn’t it?” commented Larke.
That brought up the other story of another game with Biltmore University a couple of years before which Lowell lost, and Everson had to tell that, too.