e
papers yesterday that collarless gowns is slightly passay f'r winter."

IV

A BUSH LEAGUE HERO

This is not a baseball story. The grandstand does not rise as one man
and shout itself hoarse with joy. There isn't a three-bagger in the
entire three thousand words, and nobody is carried home on the shoulders
of the crowd. For that sort of thing you need not squander fifteen cents
on your favorite magazine. The modest sum of one cent will make you the
possessor of a Pink 'Un. There you will find the season's games handled
in masterly fashion by a six-best-seller artist, an expert mathematician,
and an original-slang humorist. No mere short story dub may hope to
compete with these.

In the old days, before the gentry of the ring had learned the wisdom of
investing their winnings in solids instead of liquids, this used to be a
favorite conundrum: When is a prize-fighter not a prize-fighter?

Chorus: When he is tending bar.

I rise to ask you Brothah Fan, when is a ball player not a ball player?
Above the storm of facetious replies I shout the answer:

When he's a shoe clerk.

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis.
There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar,
and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink
undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a
man's best points. Then too, a baseball suit requires so much in the
matter of leg. Therefore, when I say that Rudie Schlachweiler was a
dream even in his baseball uniform, with a dirty brown streak right up
the side of his pants where he had slid for base, you may know that the
girls camped on the grounds during the season.

During the summer months our ball park is to us what the Grand Prix is to
Paris, or Ascot is to London. What care we that Evers gets seven
thousand a year (or is it a month?); or that Chicago's new South-side
ball park seats thirty-five thousand (or is it million?). Of what
interest are such meager items compared with the knowledge that "Pug"
Coulan, who plays short, goes with Undine Meyers, the girl up there in
the eighth row, with the pink dress and the red roses on her hat? When
"Pug" snatches a high one out of the firmament we yell with delight, and
even as we yell we turn sideways to look up and see how Undine is taking
it. Undine's shining eyes are fixed on "Pug," and he knows it, stoops to
brush the dust off his d