Word: catcher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...whose plight uncovers compassion in Bang the Drum Slowly is Catcher Bruce Pearson. He is a baseball and football tramp. His near illiteracy was no handicap at a Southern university, but with the Mammoths, one of the New York big league teams, he is strictly a marginal player: a positive handicap to the pitcher, endowed only with a real passion for pasting the ball. Next to visiting prostitutes, Bruce's favorite off-diamond pastime is sitting at hotel windows and spitting into the street. What fascinates Bruce is the fact that, when spitting from on high...
...disease, and any moment may be his last. That is why Ace Pitcher Wiggen makes it part of his contract that Bruce must be kept on with the Mammoths as long as he is. That is why the players who had got their kicks out of riding the dumb catcher suddenly expose hidden reserves of tenderness and simple decency. There is one bad apple, and that is Katie, the beautiful prostitute with whom Catcher Bruce is in love. Unlike the cliche harlot of fiction, she is as short of compassion as Bruce is of IQ. Only when she learns that...
Down in Bradenton, Fla., the Boston Red Sox and the Milwaukee Braves battled eleven innings before settling for a 7 to 7 tie in a Grapefruit League game. Red Sox rookie catcher Haywood Sullivan was the batting hero of the day, belting a three-run homer in the seventh inning...
...great victory at Fredericksburg when Cornelius McGillicuddy was born at East Brookfield, Mass, on Dec. 23, 1862. Soon after President Garfield was assassinated on July 2, 1881, Cornelius was beginning to be called Connie Mack, a name that fit handily into a baseball box score. Young Connie was a catcher-one of the young game's best. He was in Pittsburgh as manager of the Pirates when Coxey's Army marched on Washington in 1894; he was manager of Milwaukee in the Western League when Dewey took Manila in 1898. And when MacArthur landed at Inchon...
Then Connie moved up right behind the batter. That close, he could not resist the temptation to tip bats and trip batters. A good catcher but not a great one, he was tricky and tough enough to move up through the bush leagues into the big time. In that era of fierce competition and low salaries (he got $200 a month in 1886), Connie jumped from the solidly entrenched National League to the short-lived Brotherhood, then to the Pittsburgh Nationals, where he played until 1893, when a broken ankle sent him on to an unparalleled career as manager...