Word: mounds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Behind him, vague and impersonal, rises the roar of the crowd. His chest is covered with a corrugated protective pad, and his big mitt is thrust out as if to fend off destruction. Exactly 60 ft. 6 in. straight ahead of him, the pitcher looms preternaturally large on his mound of earth. As he crouches close to the ground, his field of vision gives him his own special view of the vast ballpark. The white foul lines stretch to the distant fences; the outfielders seem to be men without legs. Between him and the flycatchers, from the far outfield grass...
...team. The pitcher waits for his signals. (Earlier, team and manager have talked over opposing batters, come to some tentative conclusions about strategy.) Campy calls for the curve or the fast ball, the change-up or the slider. It is a rare event when the man on the mound shakes him off, i.e., refuses his signal. By now most Dodger pitchers, reveling this week in an unbeatable 13½-game lead in the National League, know that their catcher knows best...
...roommate, Don Newcombe. "Hum that pea." Neither Newk nor anyone else is permitted a moment's carelessness. Once, when Don Newcombe crossed up his catcher with a slow curve after taking the signal for a fast ball, Roy promptly flipped off his mask and padded out to the mound. "How come you give me the local when I call for the express?" he demanded in singsong irritation. Campy believes that his chatter helps. Says he: "You shouldn't be a dead pants out there...
...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...
...diggers extended their trenches across the mound, they found an enormous mass of burned limestone and brickwork. It turned out to be a palace, whose plan suggested in some ways the sophisticated civilization of Knossos on the island of Crete. The diggers speculated that when Knossos was destroyed by the Mycenians (Homeric Greeks) about 1400 B.C., a Cretan architect may have escaped and plied his trade among the Arzawans...