The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-22
cAsTUs, DUKE oFIsWAT

His Grace the Duke of Swat. Cliff
 ford Cactus CravatE, Marquis of the l Ash and Lord WaIlop, of the Phila- deipllia peerage. will be thtrty-fpi I Diego, Ga1ifss March 28, 1Bg3 and be- ligan playing ball in the theosophical city Tn 1903 he became an Angel
 and for five seasons he played in a Los Angeles uniform. his batting laverages during that period ranging Ethe Boston Red Sox in 1908, and after a disappointing season in the John son circuit he was turned over to the
 White Sox- Comiskey swapped the sCalifcrnian to Joe CantilIon, then the pilot Of the Washington Joe Miners
 He wasn't good enough even for that imitation ball club, and was released l to Minneapolis early in the 1909 sea- 4son.
 It is at this point in CravatI's ea-
 reer that the plot begins to thicken. With the brand of failure set upon
 his noble brow by three major league managers, Cactus was inspired with the ambition to show thfm up and prove them liars. With a. Vertebrata
 failure is often the beginning of suc-
 cesss and it was so in the case of our heavy footed hero. Tn 1910, his secr
 ond season with the Afinneap polls
 Mi1lers. Gravath batted .326 and poll
 ed out fourteen home runs The next ySdE .A6 DdIleQ.ss Ob5t ana hung LID a record of tWenty-nine home runs.
 These exploits naturally aroused in- teFest in big league circles. Cravath looked ripe for a come back to the big top, and he landed with Red Dpqin's PhiIlies, the Quaker manage- ment paying something like $4,00O for the slugger. The hard-hitfing outfielder, who batted for a total of 387 bases with the A1iIlers in 1911, l showed a considerable drop in the National League. but his performance | was very satisfactory His batting l average in 1912 was .s4. and he anv nexed eleven honers. The next sea- | son he fattened his average to .341, | with nineteen complete circuit hits | to his credit. In 1914 he batted only | -298, but he had nineteen home runs, and last season, while his -sWatting | average was only 285, he got twenty four circuit clouts. This was the | best mapor league home run record | since 1929. when Buck Freeman of | the Washington Nationals. got twenty five The nearest approach to Cra- Vath's 1915 home run record since the beginning of the present century was made by Sehu1te of the Cubs, who got twenty=pne homars in 1s11-
 Cravath's rather sdisap appointing work in the worlds series took some of the shine off his home run crown. Gabby wasn't up to form in the ar gurnent with the Red Sox, but at that it is to be remembered that he hit several balls in Nthe Braves Field which would have been homers on any other field in the country.
 Gravath was lucky in landing with the Phillies. because a large proper tion of his home runs have been over the short wall on his home grounds. It is improbable that very many of his long lifted flies would have been caught on any field, but not a few of them would under Jess favorable doubtless be only dou- b1es or triples Gabby has never learned to propeI his feet with any degree of rapidity, and those short fences on the home grounds have certainly helped him a lot
 The fact remains, however, that during his career with the PhilIies Cravath has been the home run king He has averaged 90.1 extra bases per annuna,s as compared with s4.e made by Sam Crawford in his last ten years with the Tigers In four years Cra- vath has made seyenty-three home runs. or an average of little more than eighteen per year.