Page:America's National Game (1911).djvu/573

 "How do I know, yet?" he asked. But then he added: "Give me the Base Ball votes of California and my opponents may have the rest."

Across the room from me sat Homer Davenport, most famous of the world's cartoonists, and himself a Base Ball crank of advanced mania.

"Any man," said Davenport, not looking up from his sketch pad (which Mrs. Spalding, also, was intent upon), "who can pitch every game, every season, for the Boston team, for five long years, and win the pennant every time, and then go to Chicago and take the pennant with him in his trunk, as Mr. Spalding did, can capture a seat in the United States Senate on wet grounds, with a glass arm in the box and the rooters all against him. The political game is easy when you stack it up against Base Ball. You're talking to a Senator-to-be, all right."

He went back to absorption in his work and Mrs. Spalding flushed with pleasure.

"Has your Base Ball training helped you in your business?" I inquired.

"I never struck anything in business that did not seem a simple matter when compared to complications I have faced on the Base Ball field," said Mr. Spalding. "A young man playing Base Ball gets into the habit of quick thinking in most adverse circumstances and under the most merciless criticism in the world—the criticism from the bleachers. If that doesn't train him, nothing can. Base Ball in youth has the effect, in later years, of making him think and act a little quicker than the other fellow.

"They have now, in colleges, a course in which they call experimental psychology. The relation between thought and action is recorded by delicate instruments. These instruments, in the psychological laboratories of the colleges, show that the mental reactions of the athletes are quicker than those of any other students. And that of the Base Ball player is quicker than that of any other of the athletes. The sprinter, don't you see, has but to go from place to place. His thought is intent on the one thing—on getting there. The thought of the Base Ball player must take many other things—a thousand things—into consideration. He must think while he is going.

"Folks marvel at the great throngs which attend important Base Ball matches. They really need not be wondered at. The public likes the game, and, more than that, it knows that this one game, of all sports, is certain to be absolutely on the square. The spectators have been players, most of them, and understand not only the first principles but the fine points of the sport.

"Here, again, is the effect of the evolution of the game up