The Baseball MEGAPACK ®. Zane Grey

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СКАЧАТЬ on that ball! We can’t waste all day monkeyin’ with this here busher! Strike ’im out! Strike ’im out!”

      Well, barrin’ the usual exceptions, they ain’t no tougher bird in the big leagues to bat against than Speed Williams—an’, barrin’ no exceptions at all, Speed has the meanest spitter that ever give a man floatin’ kidney swingin’ at it. And—

      And Jack busted that spitter clean out of commission. He could’ve made three home runs off that hit and come in standin’ up!

      “Hmmm,” says the Old Man, beginnin’ to look kind of serious and—scared. I guess maybe he thought he was seein’ things. Well, I don’t know as I blame him. It would make most anybody rub their eye.

      “That’s enough for you!” says the Old Man to Speed. “Here, Dempsey,” he says to another first-string pitcher, “you give the poet lariat, or the professor, or whatever he is, a whirl! Show up this natural-born hitter and show him up quick—get me? Come on, now—the old jazz! Slip it to him!”

      “That’s right!” sings Jack. “Bring ’em on! Bring ’em all on! The more the merrier, no fear an, no favor!”

      And believe me, if he showed anythin’ to them pitchers—an’ he did!—it wasn’t favor. That bird simply rapped everythin’ to all corners of the lot and out of it! He loops and whizzes ’em all over the place—an’ every one right on the nose! If you hadn’t knowed what was goin’ on, you might’ve thought it was the drumfire on the western front—the sound of them balls explodin’ up against Jack’s bat. On the level. I never before seen no such exhibition of the fine art of pastin’ that old pill! Never!

      And so—well, if I was to try and describe that bird, I guess I’d say—now—that he was what you might call a natural-born hitter!

      No, sir, I wouldn’t say that this guy had oversubscribed himself by a single share: he was all he said he was. And—well, leave it to the Old Man. When we hiked north, Jack Adams, the natural-born hitter, was with us—as a regular.

      The rock, the sledge, and the pop-bottle cases? I’m workin’ back to ’em right now.

      They was better fielders than Jack, and guys which was faster on the bases, Cobb, for instance; but if one man can make a team, and one man can do that little thing, Jack Adams made us Destroyers. The Old Man put Jack in the clean-up position, and I’ll tell the world Jackie cleaned up! Doubles, triples, and four-baggers trickled off that bird’s bat like water offen a duck’s back.

      He was sure a terror to pitchers, for one thing, because he was always crowdin’ the plate. You take a guy which crowds the plate, and about the only way you can get him to stand back is to shoot a good fast one right on a line with the place you seen him last and about head high; if he’s still there—well, you win your point, or that plate-crowder goes clean out of the game and maybe to the hospital.

      That’s the old bean ball!

      But Jack—well, somehow he was so sort of delicate appearin’ ’round about where a bean ball lands if you don’t happen to duck it—an’ sometimes you don’t—that most of them pitchers didn’t dast to take a chance on beanin’ him. Nobody goes to the chair from choice.

      Oh, of course, sometimes a pitcher would go crazy and shoot one at Jack—an’ Jackie always ducked ’em. Then him and the pitcher would chatter at each other 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’ СКАЧАТЬ