Equinoctial Climax

(See front cover)

Crack! Thrown by the Boston centerfielder, the ball hit the catcher's mitt in the same split-second that Travis Jackson of the New York Giants slid for the plate. An instant later, a cloud of dust, settling slowly in the bright September sun, revealed the emphatic figure of Umpire George Magerkurth leaning toward the plate with his hand pointed toward the ground, palm down.

Loudly questioned by the Boston crowd, the Boston press and the Boston team, which swarmed angrily out onto the field, that gesture last week was highly significant. It meant a run for the Giants in the tenth inning. The run--on a hit by Pitcher Hal Schumacher who a few minutes later retired the next three Boston batters--meant that the Giants won a close ball game, 2-to-1. Winning the ball game meant that the Giants had won the National League Pennant, set the stage for a World Series that will be not merely the equinoctial climax of a great baseball year but a sporting freak of the first order.

All this year's games for baseball's "world championship" will be played on two fields not much more than a good outfielder's throw apart: the Polo Grounds, home field of young Horace Stoneham's New York Giants, and the Yankee Stadium, home field of old Jacob Ruppert's New York Yankees.

In New York last week, 37-year-old Manager-First Baseman Bill Terry of the Giants, whose left knee is now so stiff that playing baseball is acutely painful, announced that he would retire after the Series, direct the team from the bench next year. Non-playing Manager Joe McCarthy of the Yankees was photographed with his happy beer-brewing employer who pays him $35,000 a year and will get some of it back in sales of his brew at the World Series games. Owner Stoneham, who inherited the Giants from his father last January and has followed them on road trips this summer, hurried arrangements for improving his grandstand as a result of the Pennant he had just won in his first season as a big-league owner. Delighted with the prospect of another "subway series," New York's Interborough Rapid Transit Co. promised to double the length of its trains to take care of the 100,000 extra passengers who will use them every afternoon of play.

The first World Series which exhibited dramatic unity of place was played between the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox in 1906. There have been only three since, in 1921-22-23, all in New York. This year, in a race as remarkably one-sided as the National League's was close, the Yankees clinched the American League Pennant on Sept. 9, a record. Last week, while the Giants were nosing out the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, the Yankees were topping off their season by piling up some of the most impressive figures ever made by a Pennant winner.

Before complete figures had been added up, it looked last week as though both major leagues had had the most profitable summer on record. Last fortnight, a crowd of 67,000 was the biggest that ever jammed the 40-year-old Polo Grounds for a National League game. Louisville's famed Hillerich & Bradsby factory, which makes 95% of organized baseball's bats, has this summer been turning out 1,600 more a month than usual. Upshot of the exhibition baseball game at the Olympic Games in Berlin (TIME, Aug. 24) has been increased demand for baseball paraphernalia from India, China, England and South Africa.

In the unprecedented demand for seats that made it seem probable that all games in this year's World Series would be sellouts, the one that got most attention last week came from the White House. First Presidential junket to the World Series since Herbert Hoover was roundly booed at Philadelphia in 1931 was scheduled for the third game, the first in the Yankee Stadium.

When the Yankees became mathematically certain of the American League Pennant a month ago, they had won 91 games. By last week, with no particular incentive, they had raised the total to 102, 19 1/2 games ahead of second-place Detroit. Altogether, the team had made 182 home runs, an average of more than one for each game, nine more than the record set by the Philadelphia Athletics in 1932. It set a new major-league record of 992 runs batted in for the season. Five players drove in more than 100 runs each. A grand total of 1,065 runs just missed an-other all-time high. With Gehrig, Dickey, Di Maggio, Selkirk, Crosetti and Lazzeri in the lineup, the Yankees appear to be the hardest-hitting team in the history of modern baseball. Last week they were 2-to-1 favorites to beat an adversary which had a fair claim to equal distinction of another sort.

Last July 15, the Giants were in fifth place, nearer sixth than fourth. They won 33 of their next 38 games to take the league lead, grimly held onto it through the late summer stretch while the Cubs and Cardinals helped put each other out of the race. All told, the Giants made only 742 runs all season. The team has the league's leading home run hitter in Melvin Ott and Manager Terry is a dependable batter but most of its games have been won by tight fielding and smart pitching. If one run was often enough to beat the Giants, one run was even more often enough to win for them. Trying to pick the World Series winner last week, baseball experts quickly boiled it down to a question of whether Giant pitching--by Hubbell, Schumacher and Fitzsimmons-- could beat Yankee hitting. For nonexperts, the question was even simpler. For them, as it is likely to be for baseball historians, the 1936 World Series was a personal struggle between Hubbell and Gehrig. Lean, morose Carl Owen Hubbell is currently baseball's No. 1 Pitcher and among the half dozen ablest in the game's annals. Jolly, thick-legged Henry Louis Gehrig is the game's No. 1 batsman. Even more remarkable than the freak that made this year's World Series antagonists so geographically close and so temperamentally remote was the freak that made it include also the two greatest figures in the game, each symbolizing perfectly his team's specialty.

Baseball's greatest batter is also baseball's iron man. Lou Gehrig is the son of a German janitor who once worked in a Columbia University fraternity house. Lou got a scholarship at Columbia when the fraternity house manager, who had become Columbia's Athletic Director, recognized Mr. Gehrig in the crowd at a high school football game in which little Louie was performing. Yankee scouts spotted him when he was still in college. On June 1, 1925, he replaced Walter Pipp at first base. From then through last week's games, Gehrig has not been out of the Yankee lineup for a single day. When he started a string of consecutive games played which is now almost 500 more than any other ever compiled by a major-league baseballer, crossword puzzles were beginning to catch on, Jack Dempsey was world's heavyweight champion, Calvin Coolidge was President and Manhattan's Jimmy Walker was still a State Senator. Last week, New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia presented Lou Gehrig with a scroll for having played in his 1,800th consecutive game.

From time to time, the Gehrig string has come close to breaking. He has appeared on innumerable occasions while suffering from colds, headaches, broken fingers and minor ailments, always without noticeable detriment to his play. Practically immune to the normal wear and tear of big-league baseball, Gehrig has only once been dangerously hurt. This was when a pitched ball knocked him unconscious in 1934. But he was in the lineup the next day, hit three triples in five innings. Closest call of all came when Gehrig was laid up with acute lumbago. To save his record, Manager Joe McCarthy had him motored to the park, put him at the head of the batting order instead of his usual position of 4th, made arrangements to have him whisked back to his sick bed as soon as he could contrive to be put out. To his dismay, Gehrig got a hit. Since his string began Gehrig has grown 20 lb. heavier, increased his yearly income from $3,000 to $30,000, married, replaced Babe Ruth, his onetime coach, as baseball's No. 1 home run hitter (49 this year). He now claims to dislike his record, says he wants a holiday.

Merely to have been in 1,800 baseball games in succession is twice as much as any current big leaguer has been able to accomplish but what is far more remarkable in Gehrig's case is what he has done in them. In eleven years he has never had a season's batting average of less than .300. He has led his league in batting once, in home runs three times, in batting in runs five times. He has hit three home runs in one game three times and once he hit four. Last week, for the fourth time, he was voted the most valuable player in his league. In four previous World Series Gehrig has batted at the incredible figures of .348, .308, .545 and .529. An amiable, modest young Teuton with less taste for luxury than for the eels which his mother still fries in large batches for him, Gehrig lives in a small house in New Rochelle, plays bridge, saves money.

Stringy and taciturn, long-faced and lugubrious, Oklahoma's Carl Hubbell is no iron man. In the past summer, far from appearing in every game, he has appeared in a mere 42. To students of pitching, however, the 42 might well be worth all of Gehrig's 1,800. Almost every one has been a pitching masterpiece. In Pitcher Hubbell's proudest record there is less than one game for every 100 of First-Baseman Gehrig's, but the record is not, on that account, the less impressive. In the long history of organized baseball, until last week only seven pitchers (Rowe, Grove, Wood, Johnson, Marquard, Keefe, Radbourne) had ever been able to win 16 or more games in a row. Last week, the game before the one that clinched the Pennant for the Giants made Hubbell the eighth.

Baseball endears itself to the U. S. public because it is a game of figures, but the statistics of Hubbell's record, though they do not lie, tell only part of his story. The co-holders of the record for consecutive pitching victories were aided either by luck, strong batting by teammates, or weak opposition. Hubbell's victories have been, almost without exception, against the best pitchers in the league. In most of them his teammates made less than five runs. All 16 were achieved in the thick of an uphill fight to win the Pennant. The ten victories which preceded Hubbell's string of 16 were of the same class. The half dozen games in which he was defeated, he lost, with two exceptions, by margins of only one run and without allowing his opponents to score more than three.

Like Gehrig, Pitcher Hubbell was last week voted the most valuable player in his league. First time he won this distinction was in 1933, when his earned run average -- best index to a pitcher's ability -- was 1.66 per game, lowest in the league. The pitching equivalent of Gehrig's four-home-run feat is a no-hit, no-run game. Hubbell achieved the only such game played in the major leagues in 1929. Left-handed pitchers, according to all baseball legend, lack control both on and off the diamond. Hubbell's secret is that he possesses control, in alarming quantities, under all circumstances. Growing up on a farm in Carthage, Mo., he practiced for hours at a time a form of ingrown athletic solitaire which consisted of throwing stones at a barn door until he could unfailingly hit knotholes no bigger than a dime. When he joined a minor league team, he decided that he was so much worse than most pitchers that only a special kind of curve would save him. He perfected one, the screwball. In 1925, Detroit bought Pitcher Hubbell. When famed Ty Cobb saw the screwball, he contemptuously told Hubbell to learn something else or give up pitching. Hubbell's control kept him from arguing. Back in the minor leagues, he went on throwing screwballs. In 1928, he was throwing the screwball for the Giants. In the All-Star game of 1934, he used it to strike out Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Simmons and Cronin, the five best batters in the American League, in succession. Mixed with a sidearm curve and a fast ball, it is still his specialty. The Hubbell screwball, according to batters who have missed it, not only dips sharply but also slows down as it arrives at the plate.

Batter Gehrig takes boyish pride in banging a baseball as far, and running around the bases as quickly, as possible. Nothing so unsubtle would suit solemn Pitcher Hubbell. A baseball sadist, he prefers to let a batter tap out a grounder which is almost but not quite good enough to get him to first base if he runs his fastest. When forced to effect a strikeout, Hubbell does so as slowly and as painfully as possible. In the offseason, Pitcher Hubbell's amusement is hunting. When pitching, his cheeks look drawn, his trousers hang down far below his knees. Off the diamond, he wears dark clothes, walks with a slouch, speaks in monosyllables.

Guessing at the outcome of the Gehrig v. Hubbell series last week, baseball experts were divided. Giant rooters pointed out that if National League batters who were accustomed to it could not hit the Hubbell screwball, Yankee batsmen who had never encountered it could scarcely hope to do so. Yankee enthusiasts retaliated with the argument that the Polo Grounds, where the grandstands are nearer to the plate than in the Stadium, would suit home run experts like Gehrig, Joe Di Maggio, Bill Dickey. Hired to sign stories for Hearst sport pages, Pitcher Hubbell and First Baseman Gehrig met in the syndicate's office in Manhattan. Said First Baseman Gehrig: "This fellow Hubbell . . . isn't much on conversation. . . ."

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