After that game comes the inevitable run around the park which has been a headliner in spring training ever since the institution was discovered. A story is told of "Cap" Anson and his famous old White Stockings. According to the reports I have heard, training with the "Cap" when he was right was no bed of roses. After hours of practice, he would lead the men in long runs, and the better he felt, the longer the runs. One hot day, so the story goes, Anson was toiling around the park, with his usual determination, at the head of a string of steaming, sweating players, when "Bill" Dahlen, a clever man at finding an opening, discovered a loose board in the fence on the back stretch, pulled it off, and dived through the hole. On the next lap two more tired athletes followed him, and at last the whole squad was on the other side of the fence, watching their leader run on tirelessly. But "Cap" must have missed the "plunk, plunk" of the footsteps behind him, for he looked around and saw that his players were gone. He kept grimly on, alone, until he had finished, and then he pushed his red face through the hole in the fence and saw his men. "Your turn now, boys," he said, and while he sat in the grand-stand as the sole spectator, he made that crowd of unfortunate athletes run around the track twice as many times as he himself had done. "Guess I won't have to nail up that hole in the fence, boys," "Cap" remarked when it was all over. Speaking of the influence of catchers on pitchers during the training trip, there is the well-known case of Wilbert Robinson, the old catcher, and "Rube" Marquard, the great left-handed pitcher of the Giants. "Robbie" devoted himself almost entirely in the spring of 1911 to the training of the then erratic "Rube," and he handed back to McGraw at the end of the rehearsal the man who turned out to be the premier pitcher of his League, according to the official figures, and figures are not in the habit of lying. "Robbie" used to take Marquard off into some corner every day and talk to him for hours. Draw up close, for I am going to tell you the secret of how Marquard became a great pitcher and that, too, at just about the time the papers were mentioning him as the "$11,000 lemon," and imploring McGraw to let him go to some club in exchange for a good capable bat boy. "Now 'Rube,'" would be "Robbie's" first line in the daily lecture, "you've got to start on the first ball to get the batter. Always have something on him and never let him have anything on you. This is the prescription for a great pitcher." One of the worst habits of Marquard's early days was to get a couple of strikes on a batter and then let up until he got himself "into a hole" and could not put the ball over. Robinson by his coaching gave him the confidence he lacked.