Word: batted
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...game's worst gloveman (unlike Yogi Berra, he has never let a descending fly ball conk him on the head), but the tag of "Butcher" has stuck with him through three ball clubs and five big-league seasons. What Wagner does best is swing a bat lefthanded, and last week he was swinging well enough to tie for second in home runs (15), rank third in RBIs (46), and third in batting...
...Stars. "I haven't been recalled yet," Wagner says, but he did reform. "I spent hours shagging flies, practicing throws, working on low liners," he says. "I could get to the majors with my bat, but I knew I couldn't stay unless I got a glove." Picked up by the newborn Angels in 1961, Wagner finally got a chance to play regularly and made the most of it: .280 batting average, 28 homers, 79 RBIs. Last year he supplied the punch (37 homers, 107 RBIs) that kept the upstart Angels in first division. But his big moment...
Wagner credits his early-season batting surge to a "secret weapon." His bat is a 33-oz. bludgeon with a thin, whippy handle and the biggest business end (8.6 inches around) that baseball rules will allow. Wagner wears a golf glove on his left hand,* grips the bat in unorthodox fashion-with his hands split two inches apart, à la Ty Cobb. "When my bat meets the ball," he says, "that old pill really takes off." Except in Chavez Ravine. For some mysterious reason, Slugger Wagner has yet to hit a homer in his own home park...
...booted scuffed old footballs around the sooty playgrounds of Uniontown, Pa. He was the product of poverty and a broken home, a shy, sensitive boy who dreamed of playing halfback for Notre Dame. His heroes were men like Stan Musial and Johnny Lujack, whose special skills at swinging a bat or throwing a ball had rescued them from the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania...
Died. Tex O'Rourke, 77, magnificently mustachioed wit and bon viveur, a onetime Texas Ranger, boxer (his manager: Bat Masterson), fight manager (his tiger: Jess Willard, who kayoed Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson in 1915), and since 1937, "chief executioner of fall guys" for the ego-busting Circus Saints and Sinners; following prostatic surgery; in Manhattan. Of Ike he once said: "The greatest warrior from Kansas since Carry Nation." Of Kennedy: "I thought the new President wasn't likely to make any mistakes-that they were all made. But I underestimated...