Certain friends of the Giants gave us some “inside” information on the Athletics’ hitters. Among others, the Cubs supplied us with good tips, but no one spread the Baker alarm. I was told to watch out for Collins as a dangerous man, one who was likely to break up a game any time with a long drive.

I consider Baker one of the hardest, cleanest hitters I have ever faced, and he drives the ball on a line to any field. The fielders cannot play for him. He did not show up well in the first game of the world’s series because the Athletics thought they were getting our signs, and we crossed Baker with two men on the bases in the third inning. He lost a chance to be a hero right there.

The roughest deal that I got from Baker in the 1911 series was in the third game, which was the second in New York. We had made one run and the ninth inning rolled around with the Giants still leading, 1 to 0. The first man at the bat grounded out and then Baker came up. I realized by this time that he was a hard proposition, but figured that he could not hit a low curve over the outside corner, as he is naturally a right-field hitter. I got one ball and one strike on him and then delivered a ball that was aimed to be a low curve over the outside corner. Baker refused to swing at it, and Brennan, the umpire, called it a ball.

I thought that it caught the outside corner of the plate, and that Brennan missed the strike. It put me in the hole with the count two balls and one strike, and I had to lay the next one over very near the middle to keep the count from being three and one. I pitched a curve ball that was meant for the outside corner, but cut the plate better than I intended. Baker stepped up into it and smashed it into the grand-stand in right field for a home run, and there is the history of that famous wallop. This tied the score.

A pitcher has two types of batters to face. One is the man who is always thinking and guessing and waiting, trying to get the pitcher in the hole. Evers, of the Cubs, is that sort. They tell me that “Ty” Cobb of Detroit is the most highly developed of this type of hitter. I have never seen him play. Then the other kind is the natural slugger, who does not wait for anything, and who could not outguess a pitcher if he did. The brainy man is the harder for a pitcher to face because he is a constant source of worry.

There are two ways of fooling a batter. One is literally to “mix ’em up,” and the other is to keep feeding him the same sort of a ball, but to induce him to think that something else is coming. When a brainy man is at the bat, he is always trying to figure out what to expect. If he knows, then his chances of getting a hit are greatly increased. For instance, if a batter has two balls and two strikes on him, he naturally concludes that the pitcher will throw him a curve ball, and prepares for it. Big League ball-players recognize only two kinds of pitched balls—the curve and the straight one.

When a catcher in the Big League signals for a curved ball, he means a drop, and, after handling a certain pitcher for a time, he gets to know just how much the ball is going to curve. That is why the one catcher receives for the same pitcher so regularly, because they get to work together harmoniously. “Chief” Meyers, the big Indian catcher on the Giants, understands my style so well that in some games he hardly has to give a sign. But, oddly enough, he could never catch Raymond because he did not like to handle the spit ball, a hard delivery to receive, and Raymond and he could not get along together as a battery. They would cross each other. But Arthur Wilson caught Raymond almost perfectly. This explains the loss of effectiveness of many pitchers when a certain catcher is laid up or out of the game.

“Cy” Seymour, formerly the outfielder of the Giants, was one of the hardest batters I ever had to pitch against when he was with the Cincinnati club and going at the top of his stride. He liked a curved ball, and could hit it hard and far, and was always waiting for it. He was very clever at out-guessing a pitcher and being able to conclude what was coming. For a long time whenever I pitched against him I had “mixed ’em up” literally, handing him first a fast ball and then a slow curve and so on, trying to fool him in this way. But one day we were playing in Cincinnati, and I decided to keep delivering the same kind of a ball, that old fast one around his neck, and to try to induce him to believe that a curve was coming. I pitched him nothing but fast ones that day, and he was always waiting for a curve. The result was that I had him in the hole all the time, and I struck him out three times. He has never gotten over it. Only recently I saw Seymour, and he said:

“Matty, you are the only man that ever struck me out three times in the same game.”

He soon guessed, however, that I was not really mixing them up, and then I had to switch my style again for him.

Some pitchers talk to batters a great deal, hoping to get their minds off the game in this way, and thus be able to sneak strikes over. But I find that talking to a batter disconcerts me almost as much as it does him, and I seldom do it. Repartee is not my line anyway.

Bender talked to the Giant players all through that first game in the 1911 world’s series, the one in which he wore the smile, probably because he was a pitcher old in the game and several of the younger men on the New York team acted as if they were nervous. Snodgrass and the Indian kept up a running fire of small talk every time that the Giants’ centre-fielder came to the plate.

Snodgrass got hit by pitched balls twice, and this seemed to worry Bender. When the New York centre-fielder came to the bat in the eighth inning, the Indian showed his even teeth in the chronic grin and greeted Snodgrass in this way:

“Look out, Freddie, you don’t get hit this time.”

Then Bender wound up and with all his speed drove the ball straight at Snodgrass’s head, and Bender had more speed in that first game than I ever saw him use before. Snodgrass dodged, and the ball drove into Thomas’s glove. This pitching the first ball at the head of a batter is an old trick of pitchers when they think a player intends to get hit purposely or that he is crowding the plate.

“If you can’t push ’em over better than that,” retorted Snodgrass, “I won’t need to get hit. Let’s see your fast one now.”

“Try this one,” suggested Bender, as he pitched another fast one that cut the heart of the plate. Snodgrass swung and hit nothing but the air. The old atmosphere was very much mauled by bats in that game anyway.

“You missed that one a mile, Freddie,” chuckled the Indian, with his grin.

Snodgrass eventually struck out and then Bender broke into a laugh.

“You ain’t a batter, Freddie,” exclaimed the Indian, as he walked to the bench. “You’re a backstop. You can never get anywhere without being hit.”

If a pitcher is going to talk to a batter, he must size up his man. An irritable, nervous young player often will fall for the conversation, but most seasoned hitters will not answer back. The Athletics, other than Bender, will not talk in a game. We tried to get after them in the first contest in 1911, and we could not get a rise out of one of them, except when Snodgrass spiked Baker, and I want to say right here that this much discussed incident was accidental. Baker was blocking Snodgrass out, and the New York player had a perfect right to the base line.

Sherwood Magee of the Philadelphia National League team is