The Pennington players came in, slightly puzzled to understand just how it all happened. They were still quite certain that it had all been an accident and they decided to alter the score right there in the last of the second and take a lead that would just about discourage the visiting team.
But accidents seemed to continue to happen. Jed Stafford, always a reliable hitter, was the first man up, and the good-natured face full of freckles in the pitcher’s box proceeded to bend some mystifying curves over the plate that Jed could only marvel at but could not possibly find with the end of his bat. It took four pitched balls to send Jed back to the bench, as puzzled as ever.
“Jiminy, that boy has something on the ball, believe me,” he assured Coach Rice.
“Hum, I noticed you didn’t have anything on the end of your bat,” said the coach sarcastically; “you fanned like a novice. I guess when you kids get through you’ll know you’ve been up against a pitcher. He’s just about the best man to step in that pitcher box this season or I miss my guess.”
The coach was right. He of the long arms and the freckles made the heavy hitting Dutch Hecht, the next man up, look like an amateur. He gave him three balls, at which Hecht refused to strike, and then he proceeded to bend three more over the plate in such fashion that Dutch simply grunted as he swung at the last.
About that time the opposing catcher began to liven up, too, and talk a little. And the line of baseball “guff” he handed out completely took the wind out of the next batter’s sails, and he fanned, too. Pennington had gone down one, two, three,—three successive strike outs, an “accident” that had not happened to the team all season.
To be sure, the fellows took a brace right there. Their conceit had been nicely taken down and they decided that the only way they could beat the combination they were facing was to take them seriously and play their hardest. They did. But somehow their hardest did not seem to amount to much. The visiting players, with all the confidence in the world, waded right into George Dixon and spattered hits around the diamond and outfield something scandalous, and while the Pennington players did their best to keep these hits from developing into runs, their best was none too good and five runs did slip through.
As for the opposing pitcher, he of the freckles, long arms and a smile, there seemed to be nothing in the way of curves that he could not deliver to perfection when he had to. He had slow balls and swift balls, too, floaters and a mystifying assortment of almost everything in the pitching line, and the result was he made the Pennington players look like a lot of sand-lot kids. Indeed when the dust finally settled and the game was neatly folded away in the official score book, the Pennington players discovered that the Washington pitcher had left a humiliating record behind him. He struck out ten men, and allowed six hits from which they managed to get one run, and that in the first inning. That was all. They had been defeated to the tune of 5 to 1. The worst beating they had received during the entire season so far.
“Crackey,” said Wade Grenville to Jeff, in the locker room after the game, “I never faced anything like that for pitching. He’s going to be one of the best pitchers in the country when he gets three years more on his shoulders. There didn’t seem to be a thing he couldn’t make the ball do.”
“It surely was air-tight pitching. I begin to think we don’t know a thing about the game the way they trimmed us. Some pitching, I’ll say.”