The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-03-26
| SPECS TOPORCER
 LEARNED GAME IN
 GOTHAM STREETS
Conditions for Training of Young Athletes at Mini
 mum in New York

NEW YORK, March 25-Among the employees engaged in che some
 what dilettante toll of the training camp with the St. Louis Cardinals Toporcer, called Specs" because he wears a set of formers to neu- tralize the spurious slants of his vision He came along in 1922 as a utility hand, showing talent with the potato washer and proving him. self an agile patrolman where the hot shots come screaming between second base and third.
 "Specs" Toporcer is one of tine very few ball players developed of late from among the children of the 6,Oo0,ooo New Workers. Frankie Waite Hoyt, the Yankee pitcher, who used to play with Brooklyn high school team, is yet another.
 But Frisch is college player and Hoyt comes from one of the more rcomy residential sections of town. player on the macadam one-eyed cat grounds of the tenement streets. His Baseball Education.
 Toporcer learned the principles in those games where a man-hole cover is home plate and fire plug the first and only base, and where time is called every other play to give right-of-way to the motor trucks. Quite few players are killed every year in these games.
 Where the kids grow thickest and toughest in America, the real ball players are fewest, and the develop ment of big leaguer is so rare q thing that Specs Toporcer has been written about under the title of New York Boy Makes Good With Cardinals"
 City kids in Philadelphia. Cleve- land, Chicago or where you will. fave as good a chance to become athletes as country kids.
 But the New York youngster who becomes star does so in spite of conditions. There are here none of the twilight leagues that play reg llar schedules of games in other cities. High school athletes are pam pered in the papers of St. Louis but neglected in New York.
 Jimmy Hussey, high school sprinter here. would have been known to the whole state of Ohio had he been developed in Cleveland. Put he had to equal the 100-yard record in a recent dash to be noticed at all in his own home town offNew York and only slightly noticed, at that.
 New York being a city of strang CTS assembled from everywhere, pays no attention to her young athletes ard gives them fewer facilities for 1. aiming and development in propor- tion to their number than Allen town, Pa, gives her boys. There are 9 few miserable tennis courts without any backstops in the New York parks: there are a few tufty, lilly baseball diamonds held by gangs by the right of preemption; the municipal golf courses are the worst in the world with greens like thickets; and. in fall time, the foot ball fields are just flat parcels of real estate without white lines. Amateurs With Quakers. Il
 The Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies have about dozen young sters with them down south who Test flashed their talent in the anna teur and mi-professional leagues bout Philadelphia last summer. Any New York boys who chance to be training with the Giants or Yankees, on the other hand, were taken along only after they had shown the first of baseball promise out of town.
 These conditions. this neglect of the kid accounts for the preponder- auca of prize fl ghters among native athletes of New York city. It takes cnly two to make fight and you can put up your hands within the cramped compass of a court-hard ground or on the graveled roof or you can't play baseball. football or tennis. In every New York public gym there are Tar too many boys to be accommodated cn athletic teams. So they par OH and learn to fight.