Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the InsideMathewson, Christy
History
Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside
Mathewson, Christy
Baseball -- United States -- History; Mathewson, Christy, 1880-1925; Pitching (Baseball)
Tinker, with his long bat, swung on a ball intended to be a low curve over
the outside corner of the plate, but it failed to break well. He pushed
out a high fly to centre field, and I turned with the ball to see Seymour
take a couple of steps toward the diamond, evidently thinking it would
drop somewhere behind second base. He appeared to be uncertain in his
judgment of the hit until he suddenly turned and started to run back. That
must have been when the ball cleared the roof of the stand and was visible
above the sky line. He ran wildly. Once he turned, and then ran on again,
at last sticking up his hands and having the ball fall just beyond them.
He chased it and picked it up, but Tinker had reached third base by that
time. If he had let the ball roll into the crowd in centre field, the Cub
could have made only two bases on the hit, according to the ground rules.
That was a mistake, but it made little difference in the end.
All the players, both the Cubs and the Giants, were under a terrific
strain that day, and Seymour, in his anxiety to be sure to catch the ball,
misjudged it. Did you ever stand out in the field at a ball park with
thirty thousand crazy, shouting fans looking at you and watch a ball climb
and climb into the air and have to make up your mind exactly where it is
going to land and then have to be there, when it arrived, to greet it,
realizing all the time that if you are not there you are going to be
everlastingly roasted? It is no cure for nervous diseases, that
situation. Probably forty-nine times out of fifty Seymour would have
caught the fly.
"I misjudged that ball," said "Cy" to me in the clubhouse after the game.
"I'll take the blame for it."
He accepted all the abuse the newspapers handed him without a murmur and I
don't think myself that it was more than an incident in the game. I'll try
to show later in this story where the real "break" came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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