all never forget how he looked the
first spring I saw him in Texas. The club had a large number of recruits
and was short of uniforms. He was among the last of the hopefuls to arrive
and there was no suit for him, so, in a pair of regular trousers with his
coat off, he began chasing flies in the outfield. His head hung down on
his chest, and, when not playing, a cigarette drooped out of the corner of
his mouth. But he turned out to be a very good fly chaser, and McGraw
admired his persistency.

"What are you?" McGraw asked him one day.

"A pitcher," replied Crandall. Two words constitute an oration for him.

"Let's see what you've got," said McGraw.

Crandall warmed up, and he didn't have much of anything besides a sweeping
outcurve and a good deal of speed. He looked less like a pitcher than any
of the spring crop, but McGraw saw something in him and kept him. The
result is he has turned out to be one of the most valuable men on the
club, because he is there in a pinch. He couldn't be disturbed if the
McNamaras tied a bomb to him, with a time fuse on it set for "at once." He
is the sort of pitcher who is best when things look darkest. I've heard
the crowd yelling, when he has been pitching on the enemy's ground, so
that a sixteen-inch gun couldn't have been heard if it had gone off in the
lot.

"That crowd was making some noise," I've said to Crandall after the
inning.

"Was it?" asked Otie. "I didn't notice it."

One day in 1911, he started a game in Philadelphia and three men got on
the bases with no one out, along about the fourth or fifth inning. He shut
them out without a run. It was the first game he had started for a long
while, his specialty having been to enter a contest, after some other
pitcher had gotten into trouble, with two or three men on the bases and
scarcely any one out. After he came to the bench with the threatening
inning behind him, he said to me:

"Matty, I didn't feel at home out there to-day until a lot of people got
on the bases. I'll be all right now." And he was. I believe that Crandall
is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most
valuable men to a team, for he can play any position and bats hard.
Besides being a great pinch pitcher, he can also hit in a crush, and won
many games for the Giants in 1911 that way.

Very often spectators think that a pitcher has lost his grip in a pinch,
when really he is playing inside baseball. A game with Chicago in Ch