Word: rubes
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Unlike modern games, where dozens of new balls are used in nine innings, the games of the memorable days of Cy Young and Rube Waddell, Rube Marquard and Jeff Tesreau and Ed Cicotte used the same ball inning after inning. Batters pounded it until it was brown and hard to see, pitchers doctored its horsehide; everything was stacked against the hitter (everything, that is, except for the occasional inspirations of such oldtimers as the pre-World War I Phillies' Otto Knabe and Mike Doolan, who once broke up a game with the Giants by swabbing the ball with capsicum...
...American League pennant contender in the Philadelphia Athletics. Then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court barred all the league jumpers from playing for him. Connie was probably the only man who did not believe the A's were through. He remembered a hard-drinking, eccentric southpaw pitcher named Rube Waddell, then dividing his time between baseball and bottle-belting in California. With Rube's help, Connie whipped the league...
...Comet disasters cost Britain upwards of $30 million. Another plane-the Bristol Brabazon-was designed to carry 100 passengers nonstop across the Atlantic, but it turned into a Rube Goldberg nightmare. Four other big airliners-the Armstrong Whitworth Apollo turboprop, the Handley Page Hermes, the Avro Tudor and the $6.4 million Vickers 1000-also had little success and were scrapped...
...Boys Are Bunting. No matter how often he pitched, Cy Young could always hold his own with the best of his day. Rube Waddell of the old Athletics, Cleveland's Addie Joss, Ed Walsh of the White Sox, Amos Rusie of the Giants, Washington's Walter Johnson-sooner or later, Cy Young matched them all. In 1911 when he played for Boston, Cy's rubber right arm was still strong, but his legs were slowing down. "The boys are bunting on me," he said. "When the third baseman has to start doing my work...
...personal and psychological. For example, presidents worry about using their time effectively. Beset by the feeling that they are wasting precious minutes, some of them affect a "crispness of action" that verges on rudeness. Others go in for an "almost adolescent experimenting with time-saving devices," set up a "Rube Goldberg assortment of mechanical memory joggers, electronic communication systems, push-button desks." They are deeply concerned with self-improvement, e.g., 66% want to better themselves in public speaking, 57% want to improve their memories and 46% want to do more reading...