(See front cover)
National League. The batter dug his spikes into the dust beside the plate, pulled down his cap, swung back to wait for the first pitch. It was Woody English, wiry Chicago third-baseman, coming up in the tenth with one out and the score tied. At the crack of his clean single the record crowd, spreading down over the grandstand terraces into roped-off areas along the sidelines, began to stir and shout. Kiki Cuyler lined out to Hendrick but then Hack Wilson hit safely and Taylor smacked the ball into the overflow crowd at the right, bringing in the run that won the game for the Cubs, 4-3. The big crowd went home jubilant. In a crucial series with Brooklyn, who had led the league until their final game with St. Louis early in the week, the Cubs had won three games out of four, had nipped into first place and stayed there.
The contest for league leadership has been fought between the Cubs and the Brooklyn Robins as closely as though the whole season were one game which it would take extra innings to decide. "The team that is ahead on July 4 will win the pennant" is an old baseball adage, a wiser adage being: "The team ahead on Labor Day [when there are only some 20 more games to go] is not likely to lose." This year on July 4 Brooklyn played a double-header and lost the first game, which put them behind Chicago. But Chicago was playing Pittsburgh a doubleheader, and after lunch they lost and the Robins won, so that at sunset Brooklyn was in the lead —by .002 of a point. The decisive factor was clearly what sort of playing would be done thereafter by these Robins, a gambling, reckless team of fine pitchers and erratic hitters, a team famed for last-minute spurts, for easy fellowship, popularity in its own town, and for its manager, Wilbert ("Uncle Robbie") Robinson, son of a butcher, who says: "It's the best ball team I ever managed."
Round, loquacious, genial, with big muscles, a fine anecdotal memory, a hearty appetite and a short deep scar— in his cheek, Manager Robinson, 66, has worked at baseball every summer for 50 years. He caught for the Baltimore "Orioles" when John McGraw played for them. Once a pitched ball broke one of his fingers, left it hanging by a thread of skin.
"What did you do, Robbie?" listeners are expected to ask as he tells the story. "Aw, I bit it off and went on playing."
For a while he and McGraw ran a saloon together in Baltimore. When McGraw went to New York, Robbie followed him and helped coach the Giants. Hired by Charles Ebbets to manage Brooklyn he took with him none of the methods of domineering, arrogant Strategist McGraw, or any other manager.
The original journalese for the Brooklyn club—"Dodgers"—was founded on the popular belief that, Brooklyn being overrun with trolley cars, all its citizens, including the ballplayers, were trolley-dodgers. The team's later name of Robins is pure tribute to the manager's enveloping personality. He is recognized wherever he goes in Brooklyn and willingly discusses managerial tactics with taxi-drivers, countermen, policemen, waiters. His tone in explaining his methods with these interlocutors is sometimes apologetic. He says: "My gosh! You should hear the bawling out I get from the wife when we lose a game. . . . "