"Say, how much did you slip that reporter to pull off that dope about you?" inquired Willard with a sneer.
"What do you mean?" asked Joe indignantly.
"I mean how much coin did you pay him?"
"You know I didn't have anything to do with it!" our hero fired back. "He asked me for my record, and I gave it to him. I didn't know he was going to write that."
"A likely story," grumbled Willard.
The other pitchers did not say so much, but it was clear they did not like the "roasting" they got. But it was not Joe's doing.
There were shifts and re-shifts, there were hard feelings manifested, and gotten over. But nothing could disguise the fact that the Cardinals were in a "slump."
Loyal as the St. Louis "fans" were to their teams, when they were on the winning side, it was not in human nature to love a losing nine.
So that it got to be the fashion to refer to the Cardinals as "losing again." And this did not make for good ball playing, either. There were sore hearts among the players when they assembled in the clubhouse after successive defeats.
Not that the Cardinals lost all the time. No team could do that, and stay in the big league. But they never got to the top of the second division, and even that was not much of an honor to strive for. Still, it was better than nothing.