Opening Pitch

The major league baseball season opened in California last week--and so did Democrat Edmund ("Pat") Brown's campaign for re-election as Governor. At a breakfast rally in San Francisco's Civic Center Auditorium, Brown wound up and let fly with the political season's longest metaphor. Cried he of Republican Opponent Richard Nixon. "You've seen the scouting reports on the opposition. You know you can look for a lot of low, inside curves and some hot ones down the foul line. And it is a matter of record that their star pitcher is a man who will balk at nothing."

Continuing, Brown taunted Nixon for having White House ambitions. "The top man for the opposition," he said, "is letting quite a few bounce off his glove. His problem is he doesn't know the ballpark. He has his mind and his eye on a grandstand about 3,000 miles east of here. And he's finding out you make a lot of errors when you try to play two games at once. He wants the people of California to turn Sacramento into a private bullpen so that he can start warming up for a second chance in another league."

All warmed up, Brown took off on a daylong, 500-mile swing through the heavily Democratic coast and valley country north of California's Tehachapi Mountains. At San Luis Obispo, he was confronted by 600 angry California State Polytechnic College students, demonstrating in protest against a state-levied, $9-per-quarter parking fee for students with cars. Speaking without a microphone, Brown raised his voice to drown out the hecklers, eased the tension with a quip: "Now I know how Nixon felt in Caracas. This is my first crisis, but I'm not going to write a book about it." He went on to promise that California state colleges would be tuition-free so long as he was Governor, and as for the parking fee: "When I get back to Sacramento, we'll go over it thoroughly."

Buoyed by the Mervin Field poll, which showed him leading Nixon 45% to 42%, Brown seemed confident that he already had two strikes on Nixon. But as they say, the game is never over until the last man is out--and, before November, Brown will have plenty of opportunity to live up to his reputation as a gopher-ball pitcher.

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