The Baseball MEGAPACK ®. Zane Grey
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till both of ’em got sore. And then, sometimes Jackie would—an’ sometimes he wouldn’t—wade right into the diamond and take after that pitcher with his bat. After which, of course, Jackie spent the rest of that perfect day on the bench.
Jack was sure some pitcher-baiter and umpire-baiter. On the average, I should say he was throwed out of about every third game, sometimes sooner and sometimes later. But we should worry. By—it must’ve been along, about the last of August, that bird had batted up the Destroyers into the lead by a good nine games. Us for the Big Series, and the winner’s end at that!
And then—
I guess I must’ve noticed it as soon as anybody: Jack wasn’t crowdin’ the plate no more. And his hittin’ fell off a little.
Well, with a lead like that, we didn’t think nothin’ much about it till it seemed like the symptoms—whatever they was symptoms of—begin to get a little more pronounced. Jack was standin’ just a little too far back from the plate for the best results in bustin’ the well-known pesky pill. And his hittin’ fell off quite a little.
The Old Man didn’t say nothin’ for a game or two—sometimes these natural-born hitters and things is best left alone to work out their own troubles but finally it gets so the Old Man see where they was somethin’ had to be did, or said, and trust the Old Man to say it!
The next time Jack is due at the plate—“Listen here!” says the Old Man, “I been noticin’ where you’re standin’ too far back from the plate. From where you’re standin’ a man couldn’t hit the ball with two bats on end. Whazza matter with you? You gettin’ ball-shy, or yeller, or lazy or what? Now, see here! You go out there and deliver! Stand right up to that old plate like you used and gimme that hit! Get me? Gimme that hit!”
Well, Jack didn’t say nothin’—which was an awful bad sign—an’ on the level as he walked out to the plate, I could’ swear his knees was shakin’! It didn’t seem as if no such could be possible, but—
Well, Pete Horton was pitchin’ for the Pawnee that day, and where Pete got the hunch you can search me, but the first ball Pete sends up to Jack is one of them regular old bush-league roundhouse outcurves. That ball was so slow that the reporters was wirin’ bulletins to their papers statin’ the exact location of the sphere at the present moment of time— “The ball is now six foot from the pitcher and is expected to cross the plate about 6:30”—somethin’ like that.
It woulddn’t’ve fooled a schoolboy.
Sometimes—generally—them slow outs starts in your direction, but you can see ’em bendin’ away from you all the way up to the plate. And I guess this one must’ve looked to Jack like as if it was comin’ at him.
Because, anyways, Jack had edged up to the plate like the Old Man told him, but when that ball leaves Pete’s hand, about half and hour before it got to the catcher Jack drops flat and rolls away from the play a good forty foot—no tumble-weed had nothin’ on him! Right now he holds the rollin’ record in both leagues, both for speed and distance.
Well, of course, the stands went crazy and everybody else—but none of them had anythin’ on the Old Man! Rave? I wouldn’t repeat it.
The Old Man had took three guesses when he sent Jack up to the plate that time, and he win with the first one: somehow or other Jack Adams had developed the worst case of ball-shyness ever known to science!
Of course, gettin’ into the World’s Series don’t mean nothin’ to a ball club or a ballplayer—not a thing! A fat part in a Broadway success don’t mean nothin’ to an actor, and the championship don’t mean nothin’ to a fighter, certainly not! And so it didn’t mean nothin’ to us Destroyers when that nine game lead of ours fade away till you wouldn’t notice it, and it’s up to us to win our last game with the Pawnees if we’re gonna grab the old flag and get into the big seriousness.
Anyways, that’s what happened.
The Old Man started Jack in a couple of games, after the time Jack fell—an’ rolled—for that sand-lot outcurve of Pete Horton’s; but nothin’ doin’. Jack pulls away from the plate at every pitch and he can’t hit a lick. No mistake, Jackie is plumb scared to death of that ball, and he ain’t takin’ no chances. The pitchers made a monkey of him; all the sport pages carries half a column advertisin’ the fact that Jack Adams, the Destroyers’ celebrated natural-born hitter, has blew up with a report that made the Black Tom disaster sound like somebody crackin’ one of Harry Stevens’s peanuts, an’—the Old Man yanks Jack for keeps.
That is, y’ understand, till we can find out what’s his trouble and maybe get him goin’ again.
Well, the Old Man has Jack up on the mat and throws the third degree into him like if he had said just one half of the same things to me I would’ve killed him where he stood and went to the chair with a song; but the Old Man didn’t get no satisfaction. Jack didn’t do nothin’ but stall and beat ’round the bush, and so finally the Old Man knowed just as much about what was Jack’s trouble as he did in the first place.
Of course, they was somethin’; a man doesn’t go into one of them slumps without they’s a cause for it.
But anyways, so then the Old Man gives up tryin’ to find out what was the cause, and starts in tryin’ to cure the result, as you might say.
Believe me, the Old Man’s methods was what you might call radical!
Nobody—not even Mister J. J. McGraw—has anythin’ on the Old Man when it comes to the sort of English, plain and fancy, straight and reverse, which peels the hide right often you; and he feeds this to Jack in liberal doses before, after, and durin’ each meal and just before retirin’. The rest of the time he has Jack backed up against a fence—so he can’t pull away-bein’ pitched to by every pitcher in the string and anybody that’ll volunteer.
But it didn’t do no good. No, sir; Jack is afraid that every ball pitched to him is gonna bean him; and when the Old Man tries him out away from that fence—well, if anythin’, he backs away more than ever.
Well, I dunno; it didn’t look to me like Jack was fitted by nature to stop no bean balls, like I was tellin’ you, and so— At that, maybe if we could find out just what it was that brung on this attack of ball shyness—just what started Jack worryin’—
But, as I was sayin’, it comes down to where that last game with the Pawnees would make or break us, and Jack still out of the game.
The night before that game, early in the evenin’—I guess the Old Man had been ridin’ him again—Jack comes to my room lookin’ for sympathy. Somebody must’ve gave him the wrong address. After he went out I seen a little bundle of letters layin’ on the bed. It was hot and Jack had throwed down his coat there. So-Well, on the quiet, I had been pullin’ a little Phineas Jenks stuff on the strange case of Jack Adams ever since the Old Man tells me to pick up any little tiling I can an’—it looks like I’m justified.
Ten minutes later I enters the Old Man’s room like a half-back goin’ through a hole in the line. It seems like the Old Man is harnessin’ himself all up to go to a show or somethin’—tryin’, I guess, to forget how to-morrow, as sure as shootin’, we’re gonna drop that last game to the Pawnees and kiss our chance at the Big Series good-by.
“Can the frivolities, boss,” I says, “here’s business!”
“What’s broke?” asts the Old Man.
“I got the goods on the natural-born flivver,” I says.
“Exhibit A,” I says, “one letter from ‘Your Lovin’ Ameliar’ to ‘My Own Dearest Jack’—ouch!—containin’ amongst other things which I blush to repeat a solemn warnin’ to dearest Jack not to let none of them brutal baseball pitchers get him in the head with no baseball, because just think what would happen, and she encloses two clippin’s from the papers showin’ where only this last week two fatal accidents went to the hospital on account of bein’ hit on the head with