Who's on First?

"A lot of ball games," mused Candidate Averell Harriman hopefully one day last week, "are being won in the ninth inning this year."

With the vernacular thus established, he sent around to each of the other 24 Democratic chiefs of state at the 48th U.S. Governors' Conference at Atlantic City, N.J. a set of baseballs autographed by members of all three of New York's major-league teams.* It was a nice pitch, but, like most of Harriman's Atlantic City efforts, it missed the strike zone. The upshot: at the end of the seventh inning of the big Democratic delegate contest, Harriman still trailed Front Runner Adlai Stevenson, 3-1. Nothing Harriman tried at the conference quite seemed to work. When he tried to switch-hit on the civil-rights issue ("I know and understand the South"), North Carolina's Stevenson-supporting Governor Luther Hodges threw him a fast-breaking curve. Harriman, said Hodges, had no chance to carry the South because of his "Tammany Hall and A.D.A. connections." The situation called for a sacrifice, and as they had done before, Ave's aides (he was accompanied to the conference by a staff of seven, including a speechwriter and a photographer) passed the word that Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio was no longer a key man in his lineup, pointing to De Sapio's absence to prove it. Besides, said Ave, "It [Tammany] is only a nickname for the New York County Committee, and it does not dominate the Democratic Party of New York." Only when two old gubernatorial friends, A. B. ("Happy") Chandler and Oklahoma's Raymond Gary, indicated their esteem did Harriman get on base -and then the rally quickly died.

While Harriman was having trouble getting the wood on the ball at Atlantic City, Stevenson rattled solid base hits off political fences from Minnesota to Tennessee. In Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor convention instructed its 30-vote national convention delegation to switch to Stevenson as soon as released by Kefauver, who won their votes by upsetting Stevenson in Minnesota's March primary. And in Kefauver's home state of Tennessee, the state Democratic convention all but ran the Keef out of the ball park by refusing him even a favorite-son endorsement. Most likely to pick up the Tennessee votes: Stevenson.

At week's end Stevenson's coaches-making the most of every maybe -expansively predicted between 528 and 600 first-ballot votes for their man (with 686 1/2 needed to win) while Harriman's most optimistic teammates could conjure up no more than 190.

As the pennant chase continued, an old clutch-hitter with a reputation for breaking up tight ball games and a well-known affection for Harriman was asked what he thought of the current crop. Said Harry Truman in Southampton just before heading home from his European tour: he didn't care to comment just now. But then, with Casey Stengel shrewdness, he added: "I'll have plenty to say later on."

* In addition to Ave's baseballs, each governor received more than $1,000 worth of other merchandise, most of it gifts from manufacturers in the host state of New Jersey. Some of the items on each gift list: a recording of Thomas Edison's earliest phonograph records, assorted sporting goods, a set of Lennox china, two books on New Jersey history, and a box of patent medicines, including aspirin.

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