Talking Trouble

Life in Brooklyn was tough enough for the Dodgers' fireballing pitcher, Don Newcombe. His good right arm ached all summer long and the doctors could find little wrong; opposition batters were beginning to tag him, and he wound up the 1957 season with a dismal record of eleven victories and twelve defeats. He was almost ready to believe the unkind critics who maintained that he lost his stuff in the clutch. Then things got worse. The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and Big Newk (6 ft. 4 in.) began to worry himself witless over the prospect of being forced to fly from game to game.

Frightened of planes ever since he saw a crash in 1951, Pitcher Newcombe could not face up to the idea of flapping about the circuit in a flying machine. So he took his troubles to a hypnotist.

Newk found a practitioner in Manhattan--one Joseph Edelman of the Hypnotism Center, Inc. He spent four $25-a-half-hour sessions listening to a suave, persuasive voice tell him that he was not really afraid, that the plane would not really crash. Newk liked that kind of pitch; early last spring a chiropractor pal tried a little amateur hypnotism and temporarily relieved his arm. Perhaps, the pitcher decided, Edelman could trance him out of all the tensions that sweat up his palms and take the hop off his high hard one in the big innings of a big game.

Last week Edelman put his therapy to the test. He cajoled his patient out to New York's La Guardia Field, picked up a pair of round-trip tickets to Detroit, and led Don onto a plane. By the time they landed in Detroit, both travelers were convinced that Edelman had something on the ball. Don enjoyed the trip so thoroughly that he even entertained the notion of continuing the joy ride all the way to Los Angeles. Hypnotist Edelman took a squint at the future and had no doubts at all about what he saw. Said he: "The autoconditioning I taught Don will be conducive to better pitching and improved reactions to the various circumstances that arise on the ball field."

While Don was indulging himself with expensive chatter, Dodger President Walter O'Malley was doing some fast talking of his own. But he was not half so successful as Hypnotist Edelman. Wary citizens of Los Angeles were not the easy marks he thought them, and they insisted on a time-consuming referendum before they would sell him the land in Chavez Ravine that he wants for a ballpark. Wrigley Field, the only L.A. playground O'Malley now owns, is too small for big-league crowds, and Walter has been buttering up the city fathers of Pasadena, trying to rent their Rose Bowl. If his gift of gab fails him, he will have to fall back on Los Angeles' Memorial Coliseum. Either stadium could pack in some of the biggest crowds on record (some 100,000 fans). With their brief foul lines (as short as 300 ft.) and distant stands, they can easily produce some of the most disappointing baseball.

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