Crandall warmed up, and he didn't have much of anything besides a sweeping outcurve and a good deal of speed. He looked less like a pitcher than any of the spring crop, but McGraw saw something in him and kept him. The result is he has turned out to be one of the most valuable men on the club, because he is there in a pinch. He couldn't be disturbed if the McNamaras tied a bomb to him, with a time fuse on it set for "at once." He is the sort of pitcher who is best when things look darkest. I've heard the crowd yelling, when he has been pitching on the enemy's ground, so that a sixteen-inch gun couldn't have been heard if it had gone off in the lot. "That crowd was making some noise," I've said to Crandall after the inning. "Was it?" asked Otie. "I didn't notice it." One day in 1911, he started a game in Philadelphia and three men got on the bases with no one out, along about the fourth or fifth inning. He shut them out without a run. It was the first game he had started for a long while, his specialty having been to enter a contest, after some other pitcher had gotten into trouble, with two or three men on the bases and scarcely any one out. After he came to the bench with the threatening inning behind him, he said to me: "Matty, I didn't feel at home out there to-day until a lot of people got on the bases. I'll be all right now." And he was. I believe that Crandall is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most valuable men to a team, for he can play any position and bats hard. Besides being a great pinch pitcher, he can also hit in a crush, and won many games for the Giants in 1911 that way. Very often spectators think that a pitcher has lost his grip in a pinch, when really he is playing inside baseball. A game with Chicago in Chicago back in 1908 (not the famous contest that cost the Giants a championship; I did not have any grip at all that day; but one earlier in the season) best illustrates the point I want to bring out. Mordecai Brown and I were having a pitchers' duel, and the Giants were in the lead by the score of 1 to 0 when the team took the field for the ninth inning. It was one of those fragile games in which one run makes a lot of difference, the sort that has a fringe of nervous prostration for the spectators. Chance was up first in the ninth and he pushed a base hit to right field. Steinfeldt followed with a triple that brought Chance home and left the run which would win the game for the Cubs on third base. The crowd was shouting like mad, thinking I was done. I looked at the hitters, waiting to come up, and saw Hofman and Tinker swinging their bats in anticipation. Both are dangerous men, but the silver lining was my second look, which revealed to me Kling and Brown following Hofman and Tinker.