So I beat it over there and seen a doubleheader between the home club and Evansville. The guy I was sent after worked one game and had about as much action as a soft drink. I voted No! before he’d went two innin’s. Evansville had a left-hander who knowed how to pitch, but they told me he’d been in the league six years; and, besides, he was a little feller.
Well, I spotted old Jack Barnett on the Evansville bench, so I waited to shake hands with him when the game was over. You know him and me broke in together at Utica. I found out while we rode downtown that he’d been with the Fort Wayne Club the last year and was traded to Evansville durin’ the winter. I’d sort o’ lost track of old Jack ’cause he hadn’t been playin’ enough in recent years to get his name in the book.
“I see your club’s still lucky,” he says. “We all thought you had a grand chancet till them two fellers got hurt.”
“Yes,” I says, “but we’re gone now. The young guys we got ought to of been dressmakers instead o’ pitchers.” Then I happened to think o’ Smitty. “Maybe you can tell me somethin’,” says I. “How did this here Smitty ever win all them games for you?”
Barnett started to laugh.
“What’s the matter?” he ast. “Ain’t the big wop worth five thousand?”
“He ain’t worth a cigar coupon,” I says. “He’s a big, lazy tramp.”
Barnett kept on laughin’.
“I knowed what’d come off,” he says. “I told the fellers what’d happen. I bet Punch Knoll fifty bucks that Smitty wouldn’t last the season. You guys can talk about McGraw and Mack, and them other big-league managers, all you want to, but it’s us fellers down here in the sticks that knows how to get the work out of a man.”
I ast him what he meant.
“Well,” he says, “we had Smitty two years ago and he was a bum. He was sloppin’ along with us like he’s doin’ with you now. At that time the Grand Rapids Club had Fogarty, the guy the Cubs got now. Fogarty’s a big right-hander, with a spitter and a good hook and just as good a fast ball as Smitty. He’s a big, handsome brute, too, and maybe he don’t know it! Up to Grand Rapids he was doin’ nothin’ but look pretty and draw his pay. He was just as valuable to them as Smitty was to us; but we used to have all kinds o’ fun with ’em both, kiddin’ ’em about their looks. We’d say to Smitty: ‘You’d be the handsomest guy in this league if it wasn’t for Fogarty.’ And we’d pull the same stuff on Fogarty when we was playin’ Grand Rapids. And the both o’ them would get as sore as a boil. I never seen nothin’ like it.
“At the schedule meetin’ a year ago last winter, our club and Grand Rapids pulled off a trade, Bill Peck comin’ to us for Joe Hammond and Bull Harper, a couple of infielders. Jack Burke, our manager, told the owner o’ the Grand Rapids Club that it didn’t look fair, givin’ up two men for one. So he says: ‘All right; I’ll throw in Fogarty and then you’ll have the two handsomest ball players in the business.’ Jack thought he was jokin’; but, sure enough, he turned Fogarty over to us.
“We started in on the pair o’ them right off the reel, tryin’ to make their life miserable. When Smitty was round we’d talk about Fogarty’s pretty red hair; and when Fogarty was with us we’d be wishin’ we had big black eyes like Smitty’s. I done the most of it, but I didn’t have no idea what’d happen.
“Well, to make it short, Smitty come up to Jack a week before the season opened and ast if he could pitch the first game. Jack pretty near dropped dead, ’cause it’d been all he could do the year before to get him to put on his uniform. Mind you, we all knowed then that Smitty had the stuff if he’d only use it. Burke told him he’d think it over and was wonderin’ whether to turn him down or not, when up come Fogarty and ast the same thing. Burke decided to take a chancet, so he had the two o’ them toss a coin, and Smitty won the toss. He opened up for us and shut Terre Haute out with two hits. And the next day Fogarty worked and shut ’em out again, but give ’em one more hit than Smitty. They was nothin’ to it after that. We kept up the good work, gettin’ ’em madder and madder at each other. And the madder they got the harder they worked. Either one o’ them would of pitched every day if Burke had of let ’em. While Fogarty was workin’ Smitty’d slide up and down the bench cussin’ to himself and pullin’ his head off for the other club. And Fogarty’d do the same thing when Smitty was in there.
“Both o’ them was strong for the skirts; and, o’ course, a pair o’ fine-lookin’ slobs like them could cop one out in every town. We took up that end of it, too, tellin’ Smitty that Fogarty’s Marie was prettier than his Julia, and that kind o’ stuff.
“You know what they done for us. We’d of finished about sixth without ’em. I never seen such pitchin’ in my life, and I
