Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1914-07-15
WADDELL AND SHRECK
PASS; PLANK STAYS
The Moving Finger Has Ceased to
Write About the Athletics
Great Battery

Every young ballplayer and every
deeply over the history of three men
who were stars of the early American
League days, says the Baltimore News.
From the record of their lives, and
their manner of living, and their pres
ent condition, a lesson can be deducted
which ought to help every young dia-
mond start in deciding how he will
spend his time off the ball field.
OF these three men the moving fin
ger has stopped writing about two of
them, for they have ceased to be, at
last in mortal habiliments. These
two, Rube Waddell and Ossie Schreck-
engost, composed a battery the like of
which for mechanical skill has seldom
been equaled. The third man, who is
still with us, to the great benefit of
the Athletics 1914 pennant prospects,
is Edward Plank, the left-handed
pitcher
Rube and Ossie were sports. They
looked at the lights when they were
white and at the wine when it was
red. Plank stayed at home or at the
hotel If the team was on the road
Plank was, and is, a man of simple
tastes, a man who in his life as a
farmer had come to know nature too
we'll and too intimately to try to per-
vert or drug his faculties. And last
Wednesday he held Detroit, one of the
i teams the Athletics will have to beat
to win this years pennant, with three
hits.
Also on last Wednesday about noon,
| three hours and a half before Plank
started pitching the above-men Cioned
game, Shreck, his equal in age col
IlsN sol AT,,-, Il mi =
him, among them uraemia. He was
beyond medical aid, "all in," as he
himself put it, when he regained con-
seriousness for a short space late We'd
nesday night. Next morning he died
and went to join Waddell, who had
died one month before at San Antonio,
Texas, where he had gone, not on a
training trip, which is what usually
takes ballplayers there. but to get
ready to die of consumption.
The Rube was so picturesque in his
grotesque escapades that Schrecken-
COST was relegated to a secondary no.
sition in the folklore that gathered
about the names of the famous bat
terry. 1t was the Rube who went fish
ing, it was the Rube who called the
outfielders in the ninth, and it was also
the Rube who died first one month
ahead of his satellite.
Schreck was wonderful player in
the departments of catching and
throwing. He also knew baseball. The
amount of thinking he and the Rube
did in pinch in the deciding game of
crucial series was only surpassed by
the lack of thinking they did in all
other places except Columbia ball
park. And they have reaped the har-
vest they sowed in the springtime of
their lives.
Because Plank is still alive, and will
probably be alive for a great many
years to come. barring accidents, it is
not customary to pay tribute to the
sort of life he led. But if example
counts for anything, then the example
of how to live cleanly, healthily and
at the same time athletically, which
Plank has given, will. be something
that every young ballplayer should
observe. There may seem to be a lot
of fun to be had where the flowing
bowl flows and that part of the welkin,
enclosed by the walls of the saloon.
rings, but when the days and months
mount into years, the account will all
be squared up.