Fred Merkle is one of the few ball-players who still prefers the head-first slide, and he sticks to it only on certain occasions. He is the best man to steal third base playing ball to-day. He declares that, when he is going into the bag, he can see better by shooting his head first and that he can swing his body away from the base and just hook it with one finger nail, leaving just that to touch. And he keeps his nails clipped short in the season, so that there is very little exposed to which the ball can be applied. If he sees that the third baseman is playing inside the bag, he goes behind it and hooks it with his finger, and if the man is playing back, he cuts through in front, pulling his body away from the play. But the common or garden variety of player will take the hook slide, feet first, because he can catch the bag with one leg, and the feet aren't as tender a portion of the anatomy to be roughly touched as the head and shoulders. A club of base runners will do more to help a pitcher win than a batting order of hard hitters, I believe. Speed is the great thing in the baseball of to-day. By speed I do not mean that good men must be sprinters alone. They must be fast starters, fast runners and fast thinkers. Remember that last one--fast thinkers. Harry McCormick, formerly the left-fielder on the Giants, when he joined the club before his legs began to go bad, was a sprinter, one of the fastest men who ever broke into the League. Before he took up baseball as a profession, he had been a runner in college. But McCormick was never a brilliant base stealer because he could not get the start. When a man is pitching for a club of base runners he knows that every time a player with a stealing reputation gets on and there is an outside chance of his scoring, the run is going to be hung up. The tallies give a pitcher confidence to proceed. Then, when the club has the reputation of possessing a great bunch of base runners, the other pitcher is worried all the time and has to devote about half his energies to watching the bases. This makes him easier to hit. But put a hard hitter who is a slow base runner on the club, and he does little good. There used to be a man on the Giants, named "Charley" Hickman, who played third base and then the outfield. He was one of the best natural hitters who ever wormed his way into baseball, but when he got on, the bases were blocked. He could not run, and it took a hit to advance him a base. Get a fast man on behind him and, because the rules of the game do not permit one runner to pass another, it was like having a freight train preceding the Twentieth Century Limited on a single track road. Hickman was not so slow when he first started, but after a while his legs went bad and his weight increased, so that he was built like a box car, to carry out the railroad figure.