Up Detroit

Last April, in their opening game of the season, the mighty New York Yankees were humiliated by Chubby Dean of the Athletics, a pitcher as obscure as Dizzy and Daffy (no kin) are famed. ''Oh, those things happen," droned U. S. baseball fans, almost to a man agreeing that the World Champion Yankees were a cinch to win the American League pennant for the fifth consecutive year.

Not until last week was the baseball world ready to face facts. After wheezing along for three months--first because of a batting slump, then a pitching slump and finally a fatal fielding slump--the fourth-place Yankees played a three-game series with the pace-setting Tigers, seven-and-a-half games ahead of them in the pennant race. It was a crucial series: their last chance to wear down the leaders before rounding into the homestretch.

When the Tigers had finished with them, the Yankees had lost two games, had dropped to fifth place--with the Chicago White Sox as well as the Red Sox, Indians and Tigers in front of them. For the first time in ten years a Yankee team had sunk to the second division with only two months to go (last year they led the league by nine games on Aug. 1).

No less surprising than the Yankees' collapse was the Tigers' spurt. Last spring few experts gave Detroit an outside chance to finish in the first division. They had plenty of punch at bat, but their infield was creaky, their pitching questionable.

As the season got under way, Del Baker's Tigers began to click--partly because of fiery Shortstop Dick Bartell, but mostly because of the pitching staff. Schoolboy Rowe, Detroit's No. 1 pitcher in 1934-35, recovered his old form after a year in the minors nursing a lame arm.

Tommy Bridges, another veteran of the Tigers' 1935 world-championship team, proved that his curves were as dependable as ever. Rookie Harold Newhouser, a homebred 18-year-old southpaw, made the Yankees look like bush leaguers. And Louis ('"Buck") Newsom, a cocky. 31-year-old righthander, marked his first full year with Detroit by winning 13 games in a row before breaking his thumb three weeks ago.

To Tiger fans. Buck Newsom--also known as Bo-Bo and the Old Showboat--is the big cat's whiskers. At training camp last spring, he noisily announced: "The Yanks are a bunch of softies who have scared everybody except Old Bo-Bo half to death. All we need to win the pennant is some extra good pitching and I'll supply that."

True to his word. Old Bo-Bo (who previously played with the Dodgers, Cubs, Browns, Senators, Red Sox) proceeded to give the Yankees a dose of his pitching poison: a fast ball with plenty of hop, a baffling curve, a lazy looper. In 16 games this season, he and his teammates drubbed the World Champions twelve times. Last week, in their three-game series, they pounded them for 24 runs, 41 hits.

Before the season closes, Old Bo-Bo expects to win 30 games. Last week, only eleven days after he broke his thumb, he defied his doctor's orders, pitched a game against the Athletics. Starting out with his thumb wrapped in adhesive, he pompously ripped the bandage off after walking one batter, proceeded to strike out ten men before being sent to the showers in the eleventh inning with his first defeat since the opening game of the season. Undismayed at breaking his winning streak, Newsom shrugged his massive shoulders, proclaimed: "I'm startin' a new streak right now."

If he can win 20 games this year, the Tigers stand a good chance of facing the Cincinnati Reds--if the Reds keep in front of the unpredictable Brooklyn Dodgers--in the World Series in October.

While the Reds were splitting a double-header with the Boston Bees last week, 29-year-old Willard Hershberger, the Reds' second-string catcher, remained in his hotel room. When friends went to look for him they found that he had slit his throat with a razor. Alleged reason: despair over i) the Reds' loss of a double-header day before; 2 ) his own batting slump.

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