The abashed rookie subsided, and just then McRae put in his appearance.
“All here, eh?” he remarked, as his keen eye ran over the group. “Come along then and we’ll jog down to the Park.”
The “jog” proved to be a run of two miles or more. It did not inconvenience Joe to any extent because he was already in fine fettle, but many of the others were winded by the time they reached the gates. But pride kept them from falling behind and none of them cared to take a chance with the rasping tongue of McRae. Besides he was only asking them to do what he was willing to do himself and they soon learned that he worked just as hard to get into condition as any “busher” on the team.
Joe tingled clear to the finger tips as he passed through the entrance and his eye fell on the diamond. For months he had been hungry for baseball. The passion for the game was in his blood, as it has to be if one is going to be a star player. He longed for the music of bat meeting ball. He felt like a colt let out to pasture in the spring.
“Go easy now, boys,” warned McRae. “Don’t get up too much steam all at once. You pitchers, especially, cut out all curves for the first few days. Just straight ones and not too fast at that. You don’t want to do anything more now than just limber up.”
There were a number of bats and balls in the little clubhouse and these were brought quickly into service. The majority of the men scattered out into the field, while others, standing near the plate, batted up flies. Others took the infield positions and passed the ball around the bases. The pitchers paired off with the catchers and tossed up a few easy ones, seldom cutting loose a fast one except at times when the temptation became too hard to resist. McRae wandered around the field watching the action of the different players, putting in a word of criticism or advice here and there, but devoting himself especially to the new men from whom he hoped to cull a certain amount of “big league timber.” No one knew better than he how hard this was to get. He had thirty or more prospects on hand to develop, but if he really got two or three first-class men out of that number he would feel amply repaid for all the trouble and expense.
At noon they ran back to the hotel for dinner and returned for a two-hour session in the afternoon. They felt pretty tired when night came and they slept like logs. The next morning all were lame and sore and there were demands for arnica and a massage. But McRae believed that one is cured by “the hair of the dog that bites him,” and he insisted on the two sessions just the same although he limited the time for each. By the end of a week most of the soreness had disappeared and the men were as spry as kittens.
“Now,” McRae announced one morning, “we’re going to have some real practice. I’m going to split the squad into two teams. One will be called the Giants and the other the Yannigans. We’ll only play six inning games at the start, but I want them to be for blood. Most of the regulars will be on the Giant team, but I give you old timers fair warning that if any of the Yannigans play better ball than you do they’ll get your job.”
To equalize matters somewhat, he let the Yannigans have one of the first string pitchers, but for the rest they had to stand or fall on their merits. And the Yannigans soon proved that they were not to be despised. They wanted to show McRae what they could do, and they “worked their heads off” to defeat their rivals. More than once they had that satisfaction, although in the majority of games, as was to be expected, they came off second best.
The pitching staff too was now sent through its paces. Robson, the famous old time catcher of the Orioles and a warm friend of McRae’s, had special charge of this work. For developing young pitchers he had no equal in the country.