“Now, now, don’t all get excited,” admonished Frank, who, all the same, was immensely delighted with the sensation he had stirred up by his announcement.
“Don’t keep us waiting, Frank,” pleaded Fred, who would rather play baseball at any time than eat.
“Out with it, like a good fellow,” chimed in Bobby, whose pitching had won a game from Belden the previous term.
Frank, with the instinct of the true story teller, waited until he had got his audience worked up to the proper pitch. Then when they were on edge, he proceeded:
“It’s this way,” he explained. “Up to now we’ve been going on in a kind of rut. Belden is about the only team we’ve ever played any real games with, and that hasn’t given us enough practice. We’ve had our own scrub nine to practice with, but as a rule they’ve been so easy that we haven’t had to work hard enough to win. The only way we can learn to hit different kinds of pitching is to come up against nines that give us a stiff fight to win.”
“But we have played with village nines sometimes,” interrupted Fred.
“We played the Benton team last year and beat them six to five,” reminded Bobby.
“Yes, I know,” admitted Frank; “but those were only single games, and there wasn’t enough at stake. It didn’t make much difference whether we won from them or not as long as we put it all over Belden.
“Now, don’t you see how much more exciting it would be to have several different teams, all members of one league, each one playing the other a certain number of games, each one fighting hard for every game and each team working its head off to get the pennant, which would be given to the nine that had won the most games at the end of the season?”
The boys broke into a chorus of delighted exclamations.