“They haven’t been beaten yet,” said Everson, who just came up, “and I don’t think we are going to be licked this year. Did you ever see such a bunch of stars?”
“If Jefferson College has anything like our kind of luck in discovering stars among the freshmen, there will be the hottest series of ball games that ever was played anywhere between two teams,” said Penny.
“It’s hardly possible that Jefferson should have anything like the same kind of luck,” remarked Hughie.
Meantime, however, some very similar talk was going on at Jefferson.
“They licked us at football this year all right and I still think it was mostly luck that they did,” said Captain and Manager Frank Church to his coaches and captains about this same time, “but we’ve got them this year on the ball game. Won’t Lowell be surprised though when we turn ’em inside out on the diamond.”
“Did you ever know of anybody else having the kind of baseball luck we have had this year?” asked Tommy Beach, center fielder on the Jefferson team and good friend of Church’s.
“No,” said Church, “I’ve seen the bad luck come in bunches often before, such as having a half dozen of the team put out of the game on account of injuries in a day, but no one ever had the good luck we have had in picking out fine kids from a bunch of freshmen recruits, and have them develop into stars after the few games we have played.”
“This Lowell crowd has put it over us in the past,” said Big George Mellen, star pitcher of the Western college, “but methinks that when we have finished our games with them this year, with the team we have now, this bunch of fellows will have wiped out not only all the disgrace of the football defeat, but also the long string of baseball beatings they have handed us in the past years.”
About this time, too, various graduates of Lowell who lived in the West and had had a chance to see some of the games which Jefferson had played with other Western colleges, began to think that Church had finally succeeded in putting a team together that would, if they kept up the pace which they had set for themselves, give Lowell a pretty hard tussle.