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Picked for Patsies. This week they are right in the middle of one of the fanciest midseason free-for-alls that the National League has ever known. The first division really consists of six teams, and there is not a soft touch even in the last two clubs (Chicago's Cubs, Pittsburgh's Pirates). The aging Dodgers may not be the world-beaters of other summers, but they are hanging on while some of their best players nurse assorted aches and pains on the sidelines. The St. Louis Cardinals have come upon a pair of pitching brothers named McDaniel, and for the first time in eleven years St. Louis has reason to remember the happy days of the Gashouse Gang and the Dean boys, whose strong right arms used to burn up the league. The once feeble Phillies have fooled everyone and ice-picked their way into contention with a surprisingly potent combination of slap hitters and speedball pitchers. Milwaukee's Braves, despite their unhappy habit of losing the big ones, seem to be training down into fighting trim for the decisive half of the season. Even the sixth-place Giants have come on so fast that their fans are talking of 1951, when a midsummer spurt shot them all the way to the top. And all the while, on the edge of the pack, ready to drag down the first team to falter, the trailing Pirates and Cubs are giving none of their betters an easy inning.
Without Big Klu to flex his muscles and frighten opposing pitchers, every club in the league picked the Redlegs as roundheeled patsies. They had not figured on Birdie Tebbetts. This season's success is not so much a matter of tactics on the field as it is a triumph of Tebbetts' psychology in the clubhouse. Maybe off the diamond the Redlegs will never learn their manager's supreme self-confidence, the positive faith that no man is his superior; maybe some of them sometimes settle for second best—say, in arguments with their wives. But on the ball field, Birdie has converted them all. "The way they're thinking now," says Birdie, "is that any one of them can make up for Klu. Because of Klu's absence, we're getting a complete team effort. Even Frank Robinson is playing well, bad arm and all. McMillan, Temple—everyone is putting out. If the big man was in there but not hitting, it might be different. They'd be waiting for him to pick them up. Now they know they got to pick themselves up. So they do."
Fast Start. There is something about the Redlegs' current cockiness that perks up the whole town.(pop. 525,000). Rooting for them reminds Cincinnati fans that, in a way, they own big-league baseball. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings-were the first professional baseball team ever—the first team, that is, on which every member freely admitted that he was being paid to play. They were also the best; they had a 130-game winning streak before the Brooklyn Atlantics finally beat them in June of 1870.