, but the trouble with most of them is that they think
they are wonders when they arrive.

"How do you hold a curve?" a young fellow asked me last spring.

I showed him.

"Do you think Hans Wagner is as good as Ty Cobb?" he asked me next.

"Listen!" I answered. "Did you come down here to learn to play ball or
with the idea that you are attending some sort of a conversational
soiree?"

Many recruits think that, if they can get friendly with the veterans, they
will be retained on account of their social standing, and I cannot "go"
young ball-players who attempt to become the bootblacks for the old ones.

I have seen many a youngster ruin himself, even for playing in the minors,
through his too vigorous efforts to make good under the large tent. He
will come into camp, and the first day out put everything he has on the
ball to show the manager "he's got something." The Giants had a young
pitcher with them in 1911, named Nagle, who tried to pick up the pace, on
the first day in camp, at which he had left off on the closing day of the
previous year. He started to shoot the ball over to the batters with big,
sharp breaking curves on it. He had not been South three days before he
developed a sore arm that required a sling to help him carry it around,
and he never was able to twirl again before he was shunted back into the
lesser leagues.

But hope springs eternal in the breast of the bush leaguer in the spring,
and many a young fellow, when he gets his send-off from the little, old
home town, with the local band playing at the station, knows that the next
time the populace of that place hears of him, it will be through seeing
his name in the headlines of the New York papers. And then along about the
middle of April, he comes sneaking back into the old burg, crestfallen and
disappointed. There are a lot of humor and some pathos in a spring
training trip. Many a busher I have seen go back who has tried hard to
make good and just could not, and I have felt sorry for him. It is just
like a man in any other business getting a chance at a better job than the
one he is holding and not being big enough to fit it. It is the one time
that opportunity has knocked, and most of the bush leaguers do not know
the combination to open the door, and, as has been pointed out,
opportunity was never charged with picking locks. Many are called in the
spring, but few get past. Most of them are sincere young fellows, too,
trying to make good,