“No more publicity this evening, Jeff. That’s a good job for one day. You’ll talk me onto the first team yet.”
“Well, believe me, if Wade Grenville wasn’t rooming with me he wouldn’t have made it to-day. See what I did for him. Why, Rabbit, you wouldn’t believe it, but I make Wade stand on the bed every night and catch glasses filled with water. If he spills any he has to sleep in a wet bed. That’s why he’s such a good fielder. How about it, Wade?”
“Yes, you old sleeper, you. All the practice I ever get from you is practice in how to snore in three languages. Fine lot of help you are to me. I’m thinking of changing my room now that I have advanced to real company. That Penguin outfit is some bunch of birds. They know about as much about baseball as—”
Wade did not get any further before several members of the scrub team began to bombard him with everything from catcher’s mitts to baseball shoes and he had to beat a hasty retreat into the shower room.
CHAPTER XVII
A STIFF SCHEDULE
That Saturday afternoon game was the first of a series of five inning games between the Penningtons and the Penguins that extended over a period of just one week; the first week preceding the opening of the season for the Pennington team with the game with Erasmus Hall which was dated for April 21st. And it was during these games that the Penguin players, Jeff Thatcher included, hoped to make sufficient impression on Coach Rice to be allowed to play at least a part of the first game.
The result was a veritable whirlwind series in which the Penningtons and the Penguins fought it out from the first ball pitched to the last batter up. And to give the scrub team credit, it was composed of such high caliber material that in the seven games played they won and tied three games, only permitting the first team a clean cut victory in the first game of the series and in the fourth; that played on Wednesday afternoon when the first team closed the fifth inning with a rally that all but completely rattled Cy Gordon, the youngest of the three pitchers, and caused him to let them pile up four runs in the one inning drubbing the scrubs to the tune of 6 to 1, which was the worst beating that either of the teams had suffered.
The Pennington schedule was a stiff one; according to Coach Rice the hardest they had had in years, for it provided for two games a week and in some weeks three games were scheduled. It began with the Erasmus Hall game, which was not a big game but usually an interesting one for the school from Flatbush brought down to Montvale an aggregation of scrappy ball players who fought for every run and every out, and it was generally considered an excellent game on which to test the mettle of the team from the bigger institution. Following the Erasmus game came a number of games of more or less importance ranging from the East Winton and New City Y. M. C. A. teams to the game with the Princeton Freshmen which occurred about the middle of May. That was the first of the really big games and from then on the Pennington team was supposed to keep going in full stride through the rest of May and on to the middle of June when the climax of the baseball year was reached in the game with Lawrencetown, an institution of about the same scholastic standing as Pennington and jealous of annexing the State Championship each year. It was generally a fight between the schools for this championship and the game was rated of such great importance that although the ’varsity P was awarded for baseball to a player who had played in seven games of the season one of the seven must needs be the Lawrencetown contest. So, of course, the objective of all the members of the Pennington baseball squad was to become of so much importance to the team that the coach would feel it quite necessary to include them in the batting order of the team when it faced Lawrencetown.
And Jeff Thatcher was not the only one who realized that it was never too early to begin fighting for that objective and that is the reason why he and several others of the scrub team put everything they had into the first five games of the practice season. Indeed, he and Rabbit Warren played such heady baseball and handled their bats so well that in the last game of the series on Friday afternoon, they were both shifted to the first team as a temporary expedient by Coach Rice, just by way of determining whether the Penningtons could be made any stronger with them in the batting order.