Little Pitchers

Baseball is the chief interest of Japanese sporting bloods. Eighty thousand Nipponese gather to watch schoolboy baseball games. Each summer day on the Eastern Island crowds stand in the streets of town and city to hear the latest baseball scores. During the late World Series, to which Japanese newspaper correspondents travelled 8,000 miles. Japanese excitement eclipsed that shown in Manhattan or St. Louis. Were the World Series played in Japan, it would be necessary to hollow out the crater of Fujiyama to provide a stadium of suitable dimensions.

Aware of this condition, the smartest of ballplayers, Tyrus Raymond Cobb* in company with George A. Putnam, Pacific coast baseball magnate, and Ernest C. Quigley, National League umpire, three months ago sailed from San Francisco to Japan. Last week having toured the country lecturing on baseball subjects at Keio, Waseda, Meiji and Osaka (four leading universities which, with a Japanese newspaper, paid for his trip) and having played nine baseball games in the capacity of first baseman, Ty Cobb returned with his party to San Francisco.

Ty Cobb played baseball in Japan as a member of the teams of above named colleges, against their rivals. Usually, the team of which he was a member won the game and this was not due to the fact that Umpire Quigley was officiating. The reason was a more significant one:

The Japanese are not very good baseball players. However hard they try, there is some gymnastic constraint in little yellow Japanese frames which makes it impossible for them to throw and catch without an awkwardness. They are at their best in running and sliding between bases; their feet are quick and they give little birdlike cries on arriving safely, or shrill furious ones when they are tagged. The terminology of baseball in Japan is identical with that in the U. S.; it is strange to hear the hordes of rooters, their eyes swimming with suspense, abusing pitchers in their own tongue but calling on the batter to ''swat a homer."

The Japanese are ardent sports; they play hard and they idolize those who play any game better than they. Thus Gehrig, Tilden, Tunney, Ruth are far greater names to them than that of Tsunenohana, their champion wrestler. Japanese baseball addicts possess a faculty which U.S. fans in some measure lack: they like to play as well as watch. Japanese players, unlike U.S. ones who speak largely of golf, poker and guzzling, like to hear about their U.S. counterparts. The little pitchers have big ears and the catchers wait anxiously every day to hear what is doing with big league catchers in Chicago. To them, the Yankees have always been as splendid as ancestors and the Giants have been a team of nine enormous men, as swift as birds, galloping upon a desert of turf and walloping a moonlike ball with tree-trunks.

Although 20,000 persons were usually on hand to watch him play, and though the curious cries of the Japanese enthusiasts, who greeted him as Babe Ruth's cousin, must have helped convince him that he had not passed his prime, Ty Cobb, as soon as he returned to the U. S., reiterated his intention of retiring from professional baseball. He said that he was not considering becoming the manager of any big league team; he will go for a hunting trip soon and after that he will spend a year in touring Europe.

-Famed Detroit and Philadelphia outfielder, for 24 years a leading batsman, holder of many records, especially for stolen bases.