Rookie of the Year Read Online Free Page B

I just meant...” Hanson was the sort of person who agreed with anybody who put up an argument. But Spike wished to squelch that defeatist talk. It could hurt the club badly.
    “If you’re trying to hint to me the outlook is dark, I say nuts to all that, Bill. I know baseball history. I haven’t been round as long as you have but I’ve seen enough to know this team won’t stop until they flash the mathematics on us. I never said we’d win the pennant. I don’t go in for predictions. I only said we gotta chance. I said that back in June, when we were hanging on to seventh place; I said it in July when we were fifth; and I say it today when we’re third. Yes, even if we did drop an important one yesterday.”
    “Yeah... yeah... oh, yeah, that’s right. You’re dead right, Spike....”
    Charlie Draper felt the atmosphere tighten. He spoke up. “We needn’t have lost that game yesterday at all if young Baldwin hadn’t gone into third standing up in the sixth. Too darned lazy to hit the dirt, he was. Went in standing up, so he was out; then Klein hits that double which would have won us the game. Spike, it’s what you were saying the other day, the effect of nine men giving their best over a hundred and fifty-four days; that means ten or fifteen games, that extra effort.”
    How to get this extra effort, how to make each player come through with his best all the time, which man to drive, which to coax along, which to holler at, that’s the job of the manager. That’s my job, thought Spike, looking out the taxi window. “Charlie, I like to kill that kid right there on the spot before the crowd. I was so mad I couldn’t speak to him last night. I did this morning, though. I had breakfast with him and told him a few things. ‘That cost us a mighty important game, boy, and it’s gonna cost you fifty bucks,’ I told him.”
    “How’d he take it?”
    “How could he take it?”
    “Just the same, Spike, the team’s rolling better since you traded Case and stuck in this boy there in left field. Y’know, Case was a trouble-maker.”
    “Sure,” Hanson spoke up. “Karl Case was the one who started all that name-calling with Jocko Klein. Look at Jocko now. What a ballplayer he turned out to be.”
    “Always was,” said Spike sharply. “He always was a ballplayer. And the way he backs up with men on base is just something. I bet he saved us three different times in tight spots yesterday.”
    “Doggone, then that dopey kid Baldwin has to go and lose it for us. Shoot, we would have picked up a whole game on the Cards. The Pirates, too.”
    “Raz Nugent says we lost yesterday because he hasn’t got locker 13.” Hanson grinned. “Says we always lose in this town when he hasn’t got locker 13. He’s trying the worst way to get Harry Street to change, and Harry won’t, ’cause he went three for five the other day and wants to hang onto that number.”
    “These birds are sure funny,” said Draper. “D’ja ever notice Roy Tucker at bat? When he first comes up he always taps the four corners of the plate.”
    “Yeah, an’ Jocko Klein always puts his left shoe on first.”
    “An’ Fat Stuff, if he wins a game he wears the same inner socks until he loses; why, he’ll wear ’em until they fall off him.”
    “Remember that trick of Razzle’s, the way after every inning he chucks his glove across the foul line ahead of him, then when he reaches it, leans over and moves it so the fingers point toward third base? Well, I was asking him about that the other day. He says there’s folks stop him on the street and question him; says they come out to the ball park just to see him do it.”
    “That big guy’ll slay me,” remarked Hanson. “Over in Cinci he got hold of a pair of rabbits and kept them four days in his room in the Netherlands Plaza. They ate up four square yards of rug. The hotel people like to throw us all out of the place. I made Raz pay for it though, every red cent.”
    The taxi drew up at