down another man if he had the
opportunity. If one man does spike another accidentally, he is heartily
sorry, and often such an event affects his own playing and his base
running ability.

The feet-first slide is now more in vogue in the Big Leagues than the old
head-first coast, and I attribute this to two causes. One is that the show
of the spikes is a sort of assurance the base runner is going to have room
to come into the bag, and the second is that the great amount of armor
which a catcher wears in these latter days makes some such formidable
slide necessary when coming into the plate.

If a base runner hits a catcher squarely with his shin guards on, he is
likely to be badly injured, and he must be sure that the catcher is going
to give him a clear path. Some catchers block off the plate so that a man
has got to shoot his spikes at them to get through, and I'm not saying
that it's bad catching, because that is the way to keep a man from
scoring. Make him go around if possible.

But the game has changed in the last few years as far as intentional
spiking goes. Many a time, when I first started with the Giants, I heard a
base runner shout at a fielder:

"Get out of the way there or I'll cut you in two!"

And he would not have hesitated to do it, either. That was part of the
game. But nowadays, if a player got the reputation of cutting men down and
putting star players out of the game intentionally, he would soon be
driven out of the League, probably on a stretcher.

When John Hummel of the Brooklyn club spiked Doyle in 1908, and greatly
lessened the Giants' chances of winning the pennant, which the club
ultimately lost, he came around to our clubhouse after the game and
inquired for Larry. When he found how badly Doyle was cut, he was as
broken up as any member of our team.

"If I'd known I was goin' to cut you, Larry, I wouldn't have slid," he
said.

"That's all right," answered Doyle. "I guess I was blockin' you."

Ball-players don't say much in a situation of that kind. But each one who
witnessed the incident knew that when Doyle doubled down, spiked, most of
our chances of the pennant went down with him, for it broke up the infield
of the team at a most important moment. It takes some time for a new part
to work into a clock so that it keeps perfect time again, no matter how
delicate is the workmanship of the new part. So the best infielder takes
time to fit into the infield of a Big League club and h