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Sport: Baseball: New Season

10 minute read
TIME

Baseball: New Season(see front cover)

¶Going through McComb, Miss. (pop. 10,000), Manager Bill Terry of the New York Giants last year saw a crowd of 1,000 on the station platform. Delighted, he ordered an exhibition game for McComb this spring. Last week nearly half the population jammed their little baseball park to watch the Giants thrash the Cleveland Indians, 4-to-2. Next day, the Giants played the Indians in another exhibition game in Hattiesburg, Miss, where they were greeted by a brass band, a half holiday. After five balls had been pitched in the first inning, a downpour ended the game.

¶ In Orlando, Fla., the Brooklyn Dodgers offered a last trial to their onetime star pitcher, Arthur C. (“Dazzy”) Vance who, now 42, had just been released by the St. Louis Cardinals. Wearing a pair of trousers much too short for him, Vance showed enough of his oldtime speed in practice to impress Manager Casey Stengel, became sure of a job when, two days later, the Dodgers’ current pitching ace, Van Lingle Mungo, strained a muscle in his shoulder.

¶ In St. Petersburg, Fla., a record crowd for a Florida exhibition game (6,500) last fortnight went to see the two most famed baseball players of their era play against each other. With Jerome Herman Dean pitching for the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Braves’ new rightfielder, George Herman Ruth, failed to get a hit.

To a large cross-section of the U. S. such titbits of news meant one thing: a new baseball season was at hand. Instigated by famed “Cap” Anson, who took Billy Sunday and the rest of his Chicago Colts to Hot Springs, Ark. in 1886, baseball training trips have long since been recognized as valuable less for reconditioning baseball players than for rekindling the excitement of their public. Last week, as the soth training season ended, 16 major-league teams were on their way North for the opening of the 1935 season this week.

Changes, For most major-league teams, 1934 was an unprofitable year. Whether 1935 will be the same will depend on the outcome of changes made since the World Series ended last October.

The National League, under its new president, Ford Frick. last December decided to try an experiment it had been anxiously considering for three years. This summer, in Cincinnati and possibly Chicago and St. Louis, major-league teams will play night games by floodlight for the first time. Harried by financial difficulties, the Boston Braves threatened to turn their park into a dog racetrack. The plan was abandoned. Instead President Emil Fuchs persuaded the New York Yankees to give him Babe Ruth.

In the American League, most notable development of the winter was the deal arranged by the Boston Red Sox, who paid a record price of $225,000 to the Washington Senators for Shortstop and Manager Joe Cronin. These doings, on top of revived interest caused by the exciting end of the 1934 season and the appearance of a new star to take Babe Ruth’s place, will either make 1935 a banner year or indicate that baseball as a U. S. industry is incorrigibly profitless.

Chances. By last week, after a month of studying all 16 teams, baseball experts were prepared to make their predictions as to how the season will end. Probable winners in the American League, according to a consensus compiled by the Associated Press, will be neither the 1934 pennant-winning Detroit Tigers nor the New York Yankees, who finished second, but the Cleveland Indians. A team of young players, managed by oldtime Pitcher Walter Johnson, the Indians showed surprising strength last year. This year they will start the season without their star shortstop, Bill Knickerbocker, but they have two promising new infielders, a capable pitching staff headed by Mel Harder and the best outfield in the league. The Boston Red Sox, still in the process of rebuilding, are likely to get into the first division. The prospects of the Philadelphia Athletics will depend largely on the success of 72-year-old Manager Connie Mack’s experiment of turning his star first-baseman. Jimmy Foxx, into a catcher. Probable tail-enders: the aging Senators, the dispirited St. Louis Browns, the consistently feeble Chicago White Sox.

The National League’s weakest team last week appeared to be the Cincinnati Reds. Their owner, Powel Crosley, spent the winter pouring $200,000 into minor-league treasuries for new players, of whom the most promising, First-Baseman John Mize, cost $50,000. But the team will start the season with an infield of four rookies, a weak pitching staff. Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Boston are likely to finish in the second division. Among the serious contenders, most experts think the Pittsburgh Pirates, with capable but unreliable pitchers, the Chicago Cubs, with dubious pitching and an experimental infield, are too weak to cause serious trouble for either the New York Giants or the St. Louis Cardinals. The Giants, a brilliant defensive team, were seven games ahead of their nearest rivals a month before the season ended last year. Starting with the same line-up this year, they are less likely to be caught napping. The St. Louis Cardinals are eight competent big-league baseball players and Jerome Herman (“Dizzy”) Dean who, after doing more than anyone else to win the pennant and the World Series last year, was last week busily engaged in announcing to the U. S. how he plans to accomplish the same feat again in 1935.

“Me’n Paul.” When he arrived at the Cardinals’ training camp in Bradenton. Fla. last year, Pitcher Dean astounded reporters by promising that he and his Brother Paul would win 45 games. They won 49. This season, Pitcher Dean was a shade more circumspect. Said he: “I hope they let me pitch the ones they really want to win but you see I’m a regular star today. Frankie Frisch won’t rely on me as much this summer as he did last year. I can’t do the managing and pitching all at once. . . . Frankie thinks he can win this pennant by putting the halter on me’n Paul. He’s got the wrong idea. I told him so and he told me to shut my mouth. . . . Looking at things as they are today, I’d say that me’n Paul would win 45 games this season, and the Cardinals will win the pennant by an eyelash. . . .”

Last week, frisky as usual, Dizzy Dean pitched in an exhibition game against the University of Georgia, then went to a dance where he enjoyed himself so much that he missed the team’s train. For that Manager Frank Frisch fined him $100. Later in the week Dizzy Dean announced he would retire in 1936.

Up to the end of last summer, Dizzy Dean was known to U. S. baseball addicts as the most picturesque, possibly the ablest pitcher in the game. The World Series and the ballyhoo that surrounded his performance in it began to make him something else, a national hero. He and Brother Paul appeared in cinema and vaudeville. He got $15,000 as hero of a Grape-Nuts comic strip. He endorsed sweatshirts, baseball suits and liniment. When, two months ago, before going to Bradenton (whose Chamber of Commerce recently voted to change its name to Deanville), he won an argument to have his salary raised to almost $20,000, the fact made front page headlines. His biography in the Saturday Evening Post followed that of the Blue Eagle. On the dials of cheap Waterbury watches his portrait followed that of Mickey Mouse. By last week, it was clear that with Shirley Temple, Father Coughlin, the Dionne Quintuplets and Mrs. Roosevelt, Jerome Herman Dean was definitely one of that small company of super-celebrities whose names, faces and occupations are familiar to every literate U. S. citizen and whose antics, gracious or absurd, become the legend of their time.

Stones; Shoes; Strikes. Jerome Herman Dean was born in Holdenville, Okla. in 1911. His father was an impoverished junkman and cotton picker. His mother died when he was 4. Jerome Dean began pitching to his brother, two years his junior, with a ball made out of yarn wrapped around a stone. He threw stones at squirrels until his aim was deadly. By the time he was 12, he was invited to pitch for the baseball team of a nearby high school which, because he had left grammar school after the fourth grade, he was too ignorant to attend. At 16, he enlisted in the Army, got his first pair of shoes, pitched for his post team. At 18, he was hired to read gas meters for San Antonio Public Service Co., pitch for their baseball team. In an exhibition game against the Chicago White Sox he annoyed his opponents into giving him, as an insult, his nickname. The next year, he was discovered by scouts for the St. Louis Cardinals. After pitching one game for the Cardinals, he was sent to Houston for a year of seasoning, rejoined the team in 1932. For the last three years he has led the National League in strikeouts. In 1933, he broke a record held jointly by Frank Hahn, Christy Mathewson, Rube Waddell and Nap Rucker by striking out 17 batters in one game. His 30 victories last season made him the National League’s first 30-game winner since 1917.

Lunatic? As famed as his pitching prowess are the eccentricities which are the result of Dizzy Dean’s semi-illiteracy and shrewd self-aggrandizement. When he first joined the Cardinal’s he squandered his money so foolishly that he was put on an allowance of $1 per day. He registered at three hotels, slept in whichever one he was nearest when he felt tired. In Houston he met Patricia Nash, asked her to marry him at the home plate under floodlights. (The ceremony was held elsewhere.) Grown less capable of unconscious buffoonery, Dean has lately been smart enough to live up to his most famed characteristics. On a blistering day in St. Louis last year, he lit a bonfire in front of his team’s dugout, wrapped himself in a blanket, pretended to be an Indian. Most famed Dean trait is an arrogance characteristic of all superior athletes. His boast a year ago that he and Paul would win 45 games was one of many which he later justified. Equally amazing, though he just missed fulfilling it, was his prediction to the Press last September that he and his brother would pitch one-hit and no-hit games against Brooklyn on the same afternoon. Brooklyn got three hits against Dizzy, none against Paul.

Almost as able a pitcher as Dizzy, Brother Paul Dean is equally ignorant but more subdued. He was bought by the St. Louis Cardinals two years ago when Dizzy Dean assured President Sam Breadon that young Paul was a better pitcher than himself. He acquired his nickname of “Daffy” not on the field but from reporters who, terrified by their good fortune in having two such characters to write about, feel obliged to treat both Deans, with tedious regularity, as lunatics. Both Dizzy and Daffy are sane. Their older brother, Elmer, is a lack-wit.

Five years ago, when all four Deans were on the move, a long freight train separated the car in which Dizzy, Daffy and Albert (“Pa”) Dean were riding from the farm truck which Elmer was driving. When the train had passed, Elmer did not catch up. He remained lost to his family until last summer, when, after seeing his brothers’ exploits mentioned in a headline, he turned up in the St. Louis grandstand selling peanuts.

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