Word: campanella
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...active player in American baseball fills that formidable job better than a burly, bulging (5 ft. 9 in., 205 Ibs.), cocoa-colored catcher named Roy Campanella, currently enjoying one of the best seasons of his long career on the best team in baseball...
Heart of the Team. On the bench, ruminating over a cud of tobacco, the Brooklyn Dodgers' Catcher Campanella is the picture of tranquillity. He never makes an unnecessary move. Take away the uniform, and he would look for all the world like a displaced Buddha in calm contemplation. But the fans sit up when he waddles to his place behind the plate. A remarkable transformation takes place: the somnolent bulk becomes a quick and agile athlete. After he has strapped on the "tools of ignorance,"* hunkered down in the close confines of the modern catcher...
...darting like a great cat after well-dropped bunts, settling under pop fouls or wheeling and firing to pick a man off base-Campy keeps the good catcher's track of every aspect of the game. It takes a hog-wild pitcher to whip a ball out of Campanella's reach, or stick a pitch in the dirt that he cannot dig out. "I line up my body for the way it's coming in," he says, "and jump if it's too much outside. I do it all pre-advance. It might be easier just...
...seemed like old times. On the mound, large, loose-jointed Don Newcombe leaned forward to take his signal; behind the plate was his best friend, Catcher Roy Campanella, back in action after a two-week layoff with a bad knee. The best battery in baseball was back in business again, and though the visiting Cardinals tried to make a game of it. they didn't have a chance...
...throw hard. By 1946 he was throwing hard enough to make his way to a Dodger farm club in Nashua. N.H. There, a mild-mannered manager named Walter Alston learned his first lessons in handling the moody pitcher. And an up-and-coming catcher named Roy Campanella learned how to needle him into game-winning pitch...