Word: rabbiting
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...quarter-century later, the lively ball argument is as lively as ever, and its proponents are multiplying. "Don't tell me it isn't a rabbit ball," says Cincinnati Pitcher Jim Brosnan. "I can hear it squealing every time it goes over the fence." The Chicago White Sox's veteran Early Wynn, 41, agrees: "Cut the ball open and you'll find a carburetor...
...this year's heavy barrage from the batter's box, those who hold the rabbit ball responsible point in triumph to the evidence. With more than a month to go, the major-league sluggers have poled 2,094 balls into home-run territory-a figure that, extended to season's end, will set a record. For the first time, Babe Ruth's durable record of 60 home runs, set in 1927, is threatened by two men: Yankee Sluggers Mickey Mantle (45 home runs to date) and Roger Maris, who brought his total to 48 last week...
...fact is that proponents of the rabbit-ball theory had no argument in 1926, and have none now. Says Edwin L. Parker, president of A. G. Spalding Bros., the major leagues' sole baseball purveyors since 1876: "Today's ball and the one that Ruth hit are identical. Period." Nor has the manufacturing process in Spalding's Chicopee, Mass, factory appreciably changed. Each ball must conform to rigid specifications, set decades ago by the leagues. Its horsehide cover conceals a cork core wrapped in two layers of rubber and 490 machine-wound yards of five kinds of yarn...
...sudden explosion of power? Pitchers moan that the modern ball is more rabbit than horsehide. "They've got it jacked up," insists Los Angeles Angels Reliefer Ryne Duren. Says Cleveland Manager Jimmy Dykes: "When some of these little fellows start popping 'em over the fence, you have to figure they are winding the rubber in the ball tighter. They must even be using elastic glue, too." Baseball manufacturers huffily denied that souped-up balls are the reason. "There has been no change in the construction of the ball in the last quarter-century," says Spalding President Edwin...
...splintered and dangling upside down in the foreground; Maciek setting fire to each glass of vodka on a bar and delivering weird incantations to old, dead loves; his girl drenched in sunlight while Maciek-in the death throes on a dank rubbish heap-whimpers and twitches like a wounded rabbit...