The Wilmington morning star., 1947-08-20
AS Pegler Sees It
BY WEsTBROOK PEGLEK
Copyright. 1s47, By King Features
Syndicate, Incl

OANAA Aoo y Vic dllSIuOO1 SO
long ago that the Yankees were just nothing
but common old low-down POI trash, just
nothing but sharecroppers playing as tenants
IN the Polo grounds, and without a home to
call their own -
Back in those days you couldn't tell what
might happen from one inning to another. Or
this afternoon that I mention my idea was to
beat the rush and get a seat on the L train
down to Park row and mentally compose
my living human document so that when l
whipped into the office in the old World build
ing could Just play the keys and zip it off.
OF the ninth. l took a chance and left with
the score about Z Or 8 to q in favor of the
Tigers.
l should have known that you couldn't turn
your back on the Yankees any more than you
could on a trick mule. But l was young.
When l got to the office, the boss he said:
what happened, anyway? that must have
been quite an inning
I was bitten by a fox when l was young
so I said: Eyes, that sure was an inning, you
know; one of those innings"
Then l made a tack toward the water cool
er and out the door and down the stairs to
the newsstand and grabbed a green sheet of
the old Evening World, which was just coming
up from the cellar. And what do you know?
Those crazy fools waited until l got out OF
the park-the big baboon, Witt, Meusel. Pipp
and the rest-and then they said, Lets get
Pegler canned' and they made nine and won
the ball game. Anything for a laugh.
AS it happened, though, l hid in a corner
and read Bozeman Buyers lead and his play
byplay on the ninth and then went back up
stairs and had my throes as usual and didn't
get canned.
I haven't been getting around to baseball
as much as l would like, but when l get a
little older and get waived on Town the line
1 want a job doing baseball for the Citizen
down in Tucson or the Republic in Phoenix
or the brewery gulch Gazette over in Bisbee,
in a real country league, the Arizona-Texas,
where they act natural. Where they play the
kind Of ball the Yankees used TO play. Where
they remember that to err is human and
never try to pretend they amt.
The Arizona Texas is largely a farm league
now. The Yankees stake Bisbee, Cleveland
stakes the Tucson club, the Red Sox put up
for the Ell Pasos and the Browns have poor
boyed Globe-Miami. That is a term of the
oil men and the miners. You stake a poor
boy and if he scores you are his partner: If
Globe-Miami would seem to be about the last
place in the world to try to run a regular
professional club in a regular league. This
refers to Miami, Ariz, in the copper noun
tains. Yet, Hi Corbett, of Tucson. who messed
around trying to play a little class z ball just
before the first war, says Globe-Miami is the
red-hottest town, temperamentally, in the
whole United States. Hotter than Brooklyn
WIN udt utue OQ kllCneneIle Ddll-ydrd IN
the biggest borough in the country and not
always filled, at that.
Down in my league they score baseball by
the tit-tat-toe system, in punches of fives.
Everybody hits. Everybody runs around like
crazy.
The Ar~izona-Texas league suspended after
1911 because of the war and, in reviving the
game, the promoters and athletes actually
have had to revive the old town baseball
spirit, too. AS in many other areas where
minor league professional baseball had been
an institution or a habit for years and years,
there had come along a generation used to
doing without. In Phoenix. the state capital,
on a Friday night a soft-ball game drew
5000 while the Phoenix Senators and the Bis
bee Yanks played to 500.
wasn't there then but l doubt that Arizona
baseball is as rough and crude today as it
used to be. Bisbee's old motto was never
defeat except when cheated" and the 1880
playoff between Bisbee and Miami wound up
in a riot in the dark and the championship
never was settled. One season, when the de-
preston was just beginning to hurt, the
Bisbee club got a special tolerance from the
law to run a battery of slot machines to exc
out the turnstile income and keep body and
soul together. In Tucson the same high pur-
pose was served by a blackjack and roulette
layout in a store-front downtown. I didn't say
they Just clipped off enough to make up their
baseball deficits and then barred the doors.
didn't say any such thing. Maybe Happy
Chandler, the high commissioner, would take
a grim view of such now. One year or maybe
several years, the big copper companies,
Phelps-Dodge and Calumet, supported the
Bisbee club. which has always had a rather
petulant following.
In playful defiance Of this feeling a fellow
named Pug Cavet, an old-time Detroit pitcher
who was managing the Tucson club, once got
hold of a break-away bat from a Hollywood
studio and busted it over the head of an
umpire in a close decision at Bisbee. The
umpire went down with ms arms out and his
toes TN and if he hadn't hoped up in the nick
of time there would have been a 1ynching at
the Bisbee ball-yard, which once upon = time
in 1917, was the concentration, camp from
which we Americans conducted our first mass
deportation IN modern times.