“I had the same stuff,” he said, “but I never showed it, except once.”
I asked him why he hadn’t showed it. He said:
“Because I was always scared they would be a big league scout in the stand and I didn’t want to go ‘up.’ ”
Then I said why not, and he told me he was stuck on a gal in Waco and wanted to be near her.
“Yes,” I said, “but your hometown, Yuma, is a long ways from Waco and you couldn’t see much of her winters even if you stayed in the Texas League.”
“I got a gal in Yuma for winters,” he says. “This other gal was just for during the season.”
“How about that one time you showed your stuff?” I asked him. “How did you happen to do it?”
“Well,” he said, “the Dallas club was playing a series in Waco and I went to a picture show and seen the gal with Fred Kruger. He’s Dallas’s manager. So the next day I made a monkey out of his ball club. I struck out fifteen of them and give them one hit—a fly ball that Smitty could have caught in a hollow tooth if he hadn’t drunk his lunch.”
Of course that was the game Dave’s friend seen him pitch and we were lucky he happened to be in Waco just then. And it was Kane’s last game in that league. Him and his “during the season” gal had a brawl and he played sick and got himself sent home.
Well, everybody knows now what a whale of a pitcher he turned out to be. He had a good, fast-breaking curve and Carney learned him how to throw a slow ball. Old Kid Farrell worked like a horse with him and got him so he could move around and field his position. At first he seemed to think he was moored out there. And another cute habit that had to be cured was his full windup with men on bases. The Kid starved him out of this.
Maybe I didn’t tell you what an eater he was. Before Dave caught on to it, he was ordering one breakfast in his room and having another downstairs, and besides pretty near choking himself to death at lunch and supper, he’d sneak out to some lunchroom before bedtime, put away a Hamburger steak and eggs and bring back three or four sandwiches to snap at during the night.
He was rooming at the start with Joe Bonham and Joe finally told on him, thinking it was funny. But it wasn’t funny to Dave and he named the Kid and Johnny Abbott a committee of two to see that Kane didn’t explode. The Kid watched over him at table and Johnny succeeded Bonham as his roommate. And the way the Kid got him to cut out his windup was by telling him, “Now if you forget yourself and use it with a man on, your supper’s going to be two olives and a finger-bowl, but if you hold up those runners, you can eat the chef.”
As I say, the whole world knows what he is now. But they don’t know how hard we worked with him, they don’t know how close we came to losing him altogether, and they don’t know the real story of that final game last year, which I’ll tell you in a little while.
First, about pretty near losing him: As soon as Dave seen his possibilities and his value to us, he warned the boys not to ride him or play too many jokes on him because he was simple enough to take everything in dead earnest, and if he ever found out we were laughing at him, he might either lay down and quit trying or blow us entirely. Dave’s dope was good, but you can’t no more prevent a bunch of ball players from kidding a goofer like Kane than you can stop the Century at Herkimer by hollering “Whoa!” He was always saying things and doing things that left him wide open and the gang took full advantage, especially Bull Wade.
I remember one night everybody was sitting on the porch and Bull was on the railing, right in front of Kane’s chair.
“What’s your first name, Steve?” Bull asked him.
“Well,” says Kane, “it ain’t Steve at all. It’s Elmer.”
“It would be!” says Bull. “It fits you like your suit. And that reminds me, I was going to inquire where you got that suit.”
“In Yuma,” said Kane. “In a store.”
“A store!” says Bull.
“A clothing store,” says Kane. “They sell all kinds of clothes.”
“I see they do,” said Bull.
“If you want a suit like it, I’ll write and find out if they’ve got another one,” says Kane.
“They couldn’t be two of them,” says Bull, “and if they was, I’ll bet Ed Wynn’s bought the other. But anyway, I’ve already got a suit, and what I wanted to ask you was what the boys out West call you. I mean, what’s your nickname?”
“ ‘Hurry,’ ” says the sap. “ ‘Hurry’ Kane. Lefty Condon named me that.”
“He seen you on your way to the dining-room,” said Bull.
Kane didn’t get it.
“No,” he said. “It ain’t nothing to do with a dining-room. A hurricane is a kind of a storm. My last name is Kane, so Lefty called me ‘Hurry’ Kane. It’s a kind of a storm.”
“A brainstorm,” says Bull.
“No,” said Kane. “A hurricane is a big windstorm.”
“Does it blow up all of a sudden?” asked Bull.
“Yeah, that’s it,” says Kane.
“We had three or four of them on this club last year,” said Bull. “All pitchers, too. Dave got rid of them and he must be figuring on you to take their place.”
“Do you mean you had four pitchers
