Slugger with a Jinx

For baseball's best hitter, Waterloo is spelled Chicago. Tommy Holmes has found it hard to buy a hit at Wrigley Field all season, and last week his jinx park stopped him again--after he had hit safely in 37 straight games to bust Rogers Hornsby's modern National League record of 33. (Anyhow, the Boston Braves's roly-poly, 180-lb. right fielder had modestly figured Wee Willie Keeler's ancient 44-game mark as his goal, and had not seriously hoped that his luck would hang around until he caught Joe DiMaggio's American League record of 56.)

Records notwithstanding, by knocking the cover off the ball everywhere else. Tommy Holmes was far & away the hitter of the year. For 78 games he had a .396 average that nobody in either league could challenge. He had also batted in more runs (69) than anyone else, and was runner-up in homers, with 14. He had gone hitless in just six of his 78 games (three at Wrigley Field).

In the eight years since he started climbing up the Yankee chain, Tommy Holmes had worked hard to reach his present peak. As a pesky wrist-hitter, who specialized in poking the ball to left field (mostly singles), he had a five-year average of .329 with Norfolk, Binghamton and Newark. Then the Yankees sold him to Boston. There he learned to pull the ball, spent hours trying to hit a roll of tarpaulin along the right field foul line. When the right-field fence at Braves Field was shortened, he learned to, swing for distance.

Tommy Holmes is the big reason why the sixth-place Braves have already drawn 15,000 more cash customers than they did all last season. The Yankees, whose present powder-puffing at the plate has put them in the also-ran class, could certainly use him now.

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