Devlin had his first chance to make good in a pinch. There
was no weariness in his manner. Poole, the Brooklyn pitcher, showing less
respect than he should have for the newcomer in baseball society, spilled
one over too near the middle, and Arthur drove out a home run, winning
the game. Those who had refused to place any confidence in him only a
moment before, were on their feet cheering wildly now. And Devlin played
third base for almost eight years after that, and none thought of
Bresnahan and his rheumatism until he began catching again. Devlin, after
that home run, was oozing confidence from every pore and burned up the
League with his batting for three years. He got the old confidence from
his start. The fans had expected nothing from him, and he had delivered.
He had gained everything. He had made the most dramatic play in baseball
on his first day, a home run with the bases full.

When Fred Snodgrass first started playing as a regular with the Giants
about the middle of the season of 1910, he hit any ball pitched him hard
and had all the fans marvelling at his stick work. He believed that he
could hit anything and, as long as he retained that belief, he could.

But the Chalmers Automobile Company had offered a prize of one nice,
mild-mannered motor car to the batter in either league who finished the
season with the biggest average.

Snodgrass was batting over four hundred at one time and was ahead of them
all when suddenly the New York evening papers began to publish the daily
averages of the leaders for the automobile, boosting Snodgrass. It
suddenly struck Fred that he was a great batter and that to keep his place
in that daily standing he would have to make a hit every time he went to
the plate. These printed figures worried him. His batting fell off
miserably until, in the post season series with the Yankees, he gave one
of the worst exhibitions of any man on the team. The newspapers did it.

"They got me worrying about myself," he told me once. "I began to think
how close I was to the car and had a moving picture of myself driving it.
That settled it."

Many promising young players are broken in their first game in the Big
League by the ragging which they are forced to undergo at the hands of
veteran catchers. John Kling is a very bad man with youngsters, and
sometimes he can get on the nerves of older players in close games when
the nerves are strung tight. The purpose of a catcher in talking to a man