“Say,” snorted the veteran twirler, “when anybody gets me to try anything like that again he’ll know it. Why, that dub would slap his grandmother’s face if she peeped to him. I overtook him by chance on the street and tried to talk decent. What did I get? He seemed to think I was trying to rub something into him, and I couldn’t argue it out of his dumb noddle. The more I said the dirtier he got. I just had to give it up and quit sudden before I forgot myself and handed him a bunch of fives. Anybody that wants to talk to him hereafter can do so. _Excuse me!_” “He wouldn’t listen?” asked Dalton in deep disappointment. “Did you make him understand that your motives were friendly?” “Dunno. I tried hard enough. ’Twan’t no good. If anybody else’d met me that way, I’d soaked him. Now I’m done with Lefty Locke.” CHAPTER XVIII UNDER A CLOUD Sometimes it takes very little to upset the poise of a Big League team. Even when a winning organization is running smoothly, an injury to a single player may throw the whole machinery out of mesh. To an outsider――a mere spectator who has not studied the peculiarities of baseball at close range――this often seems unaccountable. To him, in a club with first-class substitutes waiting to fill the position of any man, there seems to be no reason why the loss of a regular player should make such a remarkable difference in the work of the entire outfit. Few outsiders realize how evenly matched the clubs often are in the first division. Many times the action of an astute manager in replacing a player who seems to be doing splendid work in his position with another player, apparently no better, has turned a losing club into a winner, the secret of this being that the man substituted fitted in more nicely with the fine adjustment of the great machine, like a perfectly made pinion in the works of a watch. It is not drawing it too fine to compare a first-class Big League team to a high-grade watch. Time after time the spectators wonder at the clockwork precision of the living machine upon the field. Now and then, at rare intervals, of course, this piece of machinery temporarily goes wrong; but a little oiling or adjusting puts it right again, and it once more resumes its accurate, methodical, mechanical course. The pitching staff may be likened to the mainspring of the watch. Without pitchers of the highest grade any club, no matter how strong it may be in other departments, is badly handicapped; with such a staff it often happens that a team of otherwise inferior caliber makes no end of trouble and worriment for the leaders. And, despite his ill-advised handling of Lefty Locke, no one knew this better than Al Carson.