Most successful baseball players enter the major leagues by a succession of steps. With Sunday it was quite otherwise. Because he fell under the personal eye of "Pop" Anson he was borne directly from the fields of Marshalltown, Iowa, to the great park of the Chicago team. That was in 1883, when Sunday was not yet twenty-one years of age. His mind was still formative--a quality it retains to this day--and his entrance into the larger field of baseball trained him to think in broad terms. It widened his horizon and made him reasonably indifferent to the comments of the crowds. A better equipment for the work he is doing could not have been found; for above all else Sunday "plays ball." While others discuss methods and bewail conditions he keeps the game going. Such a volume of criticism as no other evangelist, within the memory of living men, has ever received, has fallen harmless from his head, because he has not turned aside to argue with the umpire, but has "played ball." There is no call for tears or heroics over the early experiences of Sunday. His life was normal; no different from that of tens of thousands of other American boys. He himself was in no wise a phenomenon. He was possessed of no special abilities or inclinations. He came to his preaching gift only after years of experience in Christian work. It is clear that a Divine Providence utilized the very ordinariness of his life and training to make him an ambassador to the common people. CHAPTER III A Base-Ball "Star" Don't get chesty over success.--BILLY SUNDAY. Sometimes the preacher tells his people what a great journalist he might have been, or what a successful business man, had he not entered the ministry; but usually his hearers never would have suspected it if he had not told them. Billy Sunday's eminence as a baseball player is not a shadow cast backward from his present pre-eminence. His success as a preacher has gained luster from his distinction as a baseball player, while his fame as a baseball player has been kept alive by his work as an evangelist. All the world of baseball enthusiasts, a generation ago, knew Billy Sunday, the speediest base-runner and the most daring base-stealer in the whole fraternity. Wherever he goes today veteran devotees of the national game recall times they saw him play; and sporting periodicals and sporting pages of newspapers have been filled with reminiscences from baseball "fans," of the triumphs of the evangelist on the diamond. A side light on the reality of his religion while engaged in professional baseball is thrown by the fact that sporting writers always speak of him with pride and loyalty, and his old baseball associates who still survive, go frequently to hear him preach. The baseball world thinks that he reflects distinction on the game.