Third Base to Home

Baseball superstition says that the team which is leading each major league on July 4 will win the pennant. Last July 4, the New York Giants were nine games ahead in the National League, the New York Yankees one game ahead in the American League. More logical is the belief that the teams which lead the leagues on Labor Day will finish first. On Labor Day last week, the Detroit Tigers were nine full games ahead of the Yankees and seemed destined to win the American League pennant more easily this year than last. In the National League, the Champion St. Louis Cardinals were clinging to first place by two games, with the Giants and Chicago Cubs bunched close behind and the Pittsburgh Pirates within striking distance.

Major characteristic of the Cardinals' performance this year as last has been rowdy behavior, on & off the field. This has caused baseball writers to refer to them as ''the Gas House Gang," to compare them to the oldtime Baltimore Orioles, who could fight almost as ably as they could play. The famed Dean Brothers, after a bad start, last week seemed reasonably sure of winning the astonishing quota of 45 games which they set for themselves last spring. Jerome Herman ("Dizzy") Dean had won 23. Paul Dean, 16.

More mysterious has been the abrupt decline of the Giants, who did exactly the same thing last year. Betting Commissioner Jack Doyle supplied a shrewd diagnosis: the Giants with brilliant pitchers, good fielding but no remarkable batting power, rarely win or lose by a large margin and four months of close games wear them out before the season is over. The Cubs, almost ignored in pre-season pennant predictions, were last week still scorned by the Cardinals and the Giants. Meanwhile a Cub pitcher named Bill Lee took first place in the League pitching averages with 15 victories, 5 defeats.

Eight games behind the Cardinals, the Pirates still have a fighting chance. They have lately won ten games in a row and their crack shortstop, "Arky" (from Arkansas) Vaughan, last week made his 19th homerun and was leading the National League in batting with an average of .400. September's schedule does not favor the Giants, but they will end their season with five games against the tail-end Boston Braves, while the Cubs and Cardinals play each other. Nonetheless, in St. Louis last week, Cardinals' executives announced that they were ready to sell seats for the World Series.

Detroit, long a mediocre baseball city, has this summer showed more excitement about its team than ever before. Detroit newssheets send four or more reporters to cover each game. Fortnight ago, when a game was postponed, a Detroit daily published a four-column picture of Pitcher Lynwood ("Schoolboy") Rowe, staring disconsolately out of a window at the rain. Said the Tigers' Manager Mickey Cochrane last week: "It doesn't make much difference whether we play the Cardinals, Giants or Cubs. . . . Our players are the same, but they have improved since last year."

Had he wished, Manager Cochrane could have supported his second contention with his first baseman, Henry Benjamin Greenberg, who is probably the outstanding player on the Tigers this year, certainly the leading homerun hitter in both leagues and the ablest Jew in baseball. A New Yorker who learned to bat with a broomstick in side-street one-o'-cat games, he was offered a job with the Yankees in 1930, shrewdly refused it because he foresaw small chance of replacing First Baseman Lou Gehrig. He quit New York University at the end of his first semester to join the Tigers at their training camp, played on Detroit's minor league "farms" for three seasons, rejoined the Tigers two years ago. So far this year he has made 34 homeruns, surpassed Gehrig's batting average .342 to .340. The idol of Detroit schoolchildren, he is approved by baseball-minded Jewish matrons because he is handsome, frisky and religiously orthodox. He has invented his own glove, which is larger than standard, with webbing between thumb and index finger. He makes $7,000 a year, prefers not to play on Yom Kippur. Next week, his well-to-do father, president of the Acme & Textile Shrinking Works, plans to order $500 worth of World Series tickets.

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