Word: scratch
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DeGraaf has won three and lost one game so far this year, his one defeat being a 3 to 2 decision at the hands of a strong Yale team which he lost in the ninth inning on a scratch infield single. Cornell's chief problem at the moment is the same as the varsity's: anemic hitting. Their only consistent batter is a Hawaiian first baseman by the name of Jim Shigikane who is the leading hitter on the team...
...Beebe, and I would be indebted to you if, in the private car dossier in your library devoted to such matters or to me and Mr. Clegg against our ultimate obituaries, you made a note to this effect. It is rather mean to have him put up half the scratch or wampum for this property and then have it altogether attributed to his partner...
...aged pastor's post as rabidly as if it were a cardinal's red hat. Only after he trips over all his political guide wires does the curate acquire a saving measure of humility. The two tales are notable not only for Powers' quiplash irony ("Scratch a prelate and you'll find a second baseman") but for being told in the first person by the parish house cat, an unlikely but effective observation post from which the humans frequently appear the more feline...
Catcher Pearson dies, but by that time Narrator Wiggen and Author Harris have made their point: scratch a ballplayer and you find a human being, a taxpayer, a batter in the game of life whose exhilaration at pitching a shutout or swatting a homer with the bases full is apt to be balanced at any time by an ignominious strikeout or a sad walk to the showers. As the theme of a novel, this carries its own banality if only because no decent reader would want to quarrel with it. What makes Bang the Drum Slowly unique in current fiction...
Expressions like "A continuing sort of oneupmanship" LJan. 9] make the average TIME reader backtrack, ponder, and shake or scratch his head. "Oneupmanship" is not even to be found in a golfer's vocabulary...