ave it hit on all
four cylinders again.

Fred Merkle is one of the few ball-players who still prefers the
head-first slide, and he sticks to it only on certain occasions. He is the
best man to steal third base playing ball to-day. He declares that, when
he is going into the bag, he can see better by shooting his head first and
that he can swing his body away from the base and just hook it with one
finger nail, leaving just that to touch. And he keeps his nails clipped
short in the season, so that there is very little exposed to which the
ball can be applied. If he sees that the third baseman is playing inside
the bag, he goes behind it and hooks it with his finger, and if the man is
playing back, he cuts through in front, pulling his body away from the
play. But the common or garden variety of player will take the hook slide,
feet first, because he can catch the bag with one leg, and the feet aren't
as tender a portion of the anatomy to be roughly touched as the head and
shoulders.

A club of base runners will do more to help a pitcher win than a batting
order of hard hitters, I believe. Speed is the great thing in the baseball
of to-day. By speed I do not mean that good men must be sprinters alone.
They must be fast starters, fast runners and fast thinkers. Remember that
last one--fast thinkers.

Harry McCormick, formerly the left-fielder on the Giants, when he joined
the club before his legs began to go bad, was a sprinter, one of the
fastest men who ever broke into the League. Before he took up baseball as
a profession, he had been a runner in college. But McCormick was never a
brilliant base stealer because he could not get the start.

When a man is pitching for a club of base runners he knows that every
time a player with a stealing reputation gets on and there is an outside
chance of his scoring, the run is going to be hung up. The tallies give a
pitcher confidence to proceed. Then, when the club has the reputation of
possessing a great bunch of base runners, the other pitcher is worried all
the time and has to devote about half his energies to watching the bases.
This makes him easier to hit.

But put a hard hitter who is a slow base runner on the club, and he does
little good. There used to be a man on the Giants, named "Charley"
Hickman, who played third base and then the outfield. He was one of the
best natural hitters who ever wormed his way into baseball, but when he
got on, the bases were blocked. He c