A Job for the Flash

Frankie Frisch, 51, baseball's old "Fordham Flash," is an ingenious man and a highly vocal competitor. Once, while managing Pittsburgh, he tried to get himself thrown out of a hopelessly lost ball game in Brooklyn so that he could hustle up to New Rochelle, N.Y. and tend his flower garden. "No you don't, Frisch," said the umpire he was sassing. "Get back on the bench and go home with the rest of us." When Frisch was running the celebrated Gashouse Gang in St. Louis, Dizzy Dean used to needle him "just to hear that Dutchman roar." Last week, the Dutchman got a new job that would tax his ingenuity and vocal cords.

Frisch resigned as coach for the New York Giants (where he had won fame in the '20s as a hard-hitting, base-stealing second baseman) to become manager of the tottering Chicago Cubs. He replaced another Dutchman, Charlie Grimm, who was nudged upstairs into a vice president's chair. Since winning a wartime pennant under Grimm, the Cubs had become tame as kittens. They finished in the National League cellar last year for the first time in 23 years and were still struggling to stay out of last place last week. That Frisch could lift them out of the doldrums this season was something fans on Chicago's North Side hoped for but hardly expected. But at least there would be more noise around Wrigley Field.

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