Under similar conditions Joe would have pulled any other of his pitchers out of the box. So he did not hesitate a moment about yanking himself out.
He slowly pulled off his glove and walked in to the bench, his face flushed but his head erect. As he did so the crowd rose like one man and burst into a volley of cheering that brought a lump into his throat.
It was a spontaneous and overwhelming proof of the sympathy and affection in which they held him.
McRae, his face full of anxiety and solicitude, came from the dugout to meet him.
“How about it, Joe?” he asked. “Under the weather?”
“Arm just went dead,” was the reply. “Feels as though it weighed a ton. Can hardly get them up to the plate. Better let Jim finish the game.”
It was such an unheard of thing for Joe to be replaced on the mound in the course of a game that nobody had been warming up in the “bull-pen” and Jim was forced to go in “cold” to take up the pitcher’s burden.
But the responsibility thus suddenly put upon him stiffened him, and the inning ended without further scoring. And in the succeeding innings, aided once or twice by Joe’s advice about the kind of balls to pitch to certain batters, Jim held the Bostons down while his comrades gave him a run in the eighth that just enabled the Giants to win the game by the close score of 5 to 4.
This to a certain extent lessened Joe’s chagrin at his sudden collapse. It had hurt him personally, but it had not been fraught with disaster to the team, and he was so bound up in their success that this, after all, was all that counted.
“Don’t think of it twice, Joe,” counseled McRae, at the conclusion of the game. “The best pitcher on earth has to take his medicine now and then. The clock can’t strike twelve all the time. You’ll be feeling as fine as a fiddle to-morrow.”