Now baseball in Marshalltown and baseball in Chicago had not exactly the same standards. The recruit had to be drilled. He struck out the first thirteen times he went to bat. He never became a superior batter, but he could always throw straight and hard. At first he was inclined to take too many chances and his judgment was rather unsafe. One baseball writer has said that "Sunday probably caused more wide throws than any other player the game has ever known, because of his specialty of going down to first like a streak of greased electricity. When he hit the ball infielders yelled 'hurry it up.' The result was that they often threw them away." He was the acknowledged champion sprinter of the National League. This once led to a match race with Arlie Latham, who held like honors in the American League. Sunday won by fifteen feet. [Illustration: HIS SLIDES WERE ADVENTURES BELOVED OF THE "FANS"] Sunday was the sort of figure the bleachers liked. He was always eager--sometimes too eager--to "take a chance." What was a one-base hit for another man was usually good for two bases for him. His slides and stolen bases were adventures beloved of the "fans"--the spice of the game. He also was apt in retort to the comments from the bleachers, but always good-natured. The crowds liked him, even as did his team mates. Sunday was a man's man, and so continues to this day. His tabernacle audiences resemble baseball crowds in the proportion of men present, more nearly than any other meetings of a religious nature that are regularly being held. Sunday spent five years on the old Chicago team, mostly playing right or center field. He was the first man in the history of baseball to circle the bases in fourteen seconds. He could run a hundred yards from a standing start in ten seconds flat. Speed had always been his one distinction. As a lad of thirteen, in the Fourth of July games at Ames, he won a prize of three dollars in a foot-race, a feat which he recalls with pleasure. Speed is a phase of baseball that, being clear to all eyes, appeals to the bleachers. So it came about that Sunday was soon a baseball "hero," analogous to "Ty" Cobb or "Home-Run" Baker, or Christy Mathewson of our own day. He himself tells the story of one famous play, on the day after his conversion: "That afternoon we played the old Detroit club. We were neck and neck for the championship. That club had Thompson, Richardson, Rowe, Dunlap, Hanlon and Bennett, and they could play ball. "I was playing right field. Mike Kelly was catching and John G. Clarkson was pitching. He was as fine a pitcher as ever crawled into a uniform. There are some pitchers today, O'Toole, Bender, Wood, Mathewson, Johnson, Marquard, but I do not believe any one of them stood in the class with Clarkson. "Cigarettes put him on the bum. When he'd taken a bath the water would be stained with nicotine.