Page:America's National Game (1911).djvu/463

 boys have made too many errors, and the visitors have been on their mettle. Every close decision has seemed to be against you. The game has ended with a score showing your nine to have the small figures. Everything has gone wrong. The attendance has been light. The crowd is glowering in disgust. You turn from the grounds, thinking to escape to your home, where you may forget the Base Ball business and its discouragements for just a little while. But, alas! Every man you meet is loaded with the same question. "What was the score to-day?" You are perfectly aware that your interrogator knows the score as well as you do. You saw him in the grandstand, where he caught your eye half a dozen times just as errors had been scored against your team. But you must feign a cheerfulness you do not feel and make a civil answer. Then you must control the ire arising within you as he asks: " What in the d——l is the matter with your club, anyhow?" "Can't your boys play the game any more?" "Where on earth did you get the lobster you are playing on third?" Remarks similar to these come from every man you meet on the homeward path. And next day, when the game has been brilliantly won by your team, the bombardment of exclamations and interrogatories is hardly more satisfactory, for now the jubilant fan, in the exuberance of his joy, shouts to the ears of all the world, "How was that?" "What's the matter with our boys?" "Say, it looks as if we'd got the flag cinched for sure this year, don't it.'"' And so forth and so on. Your club in defeat, with anathemas on the side for you. Our team in victory, with the bouquets for us.