Free Kid Comes Back by John R. Tunis Page A

glad they were to have him back once more. They made this plain, all of them, by the way their faces lighted with pleasure at his approach, by their firm handshakes and those heartening slaps on his back. It was good to be out there on the field, to hear again the sounds of the game he loved; the slap-slap, slap-slap of ball and glove, the shouts and cries from the stands, the familiar voices of the players in the field. He could scarcely believe he was in that accustomed spot, in the spike-scarred dugout, looking once more over the green turf.
    “Boy, it’s hard to believe. No fooling, I can’t really believe I’m back!”
    “Hello there, Spike! Glad to see you, Mr. Mac. Yessir, I’m sure anxious to get into that monkey suit again. Hello there, Al. Hi, Razzle! Say, this is great, Raz. Hello, Charlie, old boy.”
    It was grand to see the old gang, what was left. For many had gone. Bob Russell was on Guam with the Navy; Jocko Klein was in Germany; Alan Whitehouse was playing baseball for the Army on the coast; Harry Street was back in the States after receiving injuries with the 4th Marines at Tarawa; and Bones Hathaway was still in England.
    It was good to see the men he knew; Swanny and Fat Stuff and Razzle. But it wasn’t the Dodgers he remembered, this sixth-place ballclub. It seemed like a different outfit.
    No wonder there was a new furrow in the forehead of Spike Russell, the manager. Swanny had been moved in from right field and stationed at third. Many of the pitchers, all the catchers, and the whole outfield were newcomers. Kids they were, kids who hadn’t even begun to shave. He said as much to Charlie Draper, the coach, who sat as usual with one spiked shoe on the bench, his hand on his knee.
    “They’ll go,” remarked Charlie. “You watch; they’ll vanish fast enough when you and Bob Russell and the varsity come back. Then we got us this guy Young.”
    “Young? Who is he?”
    “Who is he? Haven’t you heard about Lester Young? The rookie Mac paid almost twenty-five thousand dollars for, practically sight unseen, too?”
    “Must be good.”
    “Good!” The coach ejected tobacco juice onto the grass twelve feet from the dugout’s rim. “Roy, he ain’t good. He’s Superman.”
    Roy was interested. It was the first time he had ever heard Draper talk like this. Usually the coach was noncommittal about young ballplayers, for he had been around far too long to go out on a limb for a rookie, even the best of them. A great many things could happen in their development, he always said. So Roy sat up. “What position does he play, Charlie?”
    “Dunno. Nobody knows. Why, that bird can play anywhere on a ballclub, and do anything. Roy, it looks as if we got ourselves another Babe Ruth. He hits the ball a country mile, he’s a better than average fielder, fast as Man O’War, and they say he can pitch, too.”
    Roy sat back, thinking: Hope they don’t put him in the outfield, what with me, and Swanny back from third again, and one or two boys like Alan Whitehouse and Paul Roth coming from the service. Then there’s those two boys from Montreal. He sat there half-listening to the voices about him, to the shoptalk and chatter which was once so familiar that he really never heard it. Now it was almost foreign; it rang in his ears.
    “Look at Steve up there,” said someone along the bench. Roy didn’t know the speaker. “He’s got power, sure; and he’s loose as ashes at the plate, but he won’t lay off that low curve. See there... see that!”
    “I know. It’ll run him right out of this-here league.”
    “Know what? I told him that last night. I says to him: ‘Kid, unless you lay off that low ball, you ain’t gonna get anywhere but Birmingham.’ I told him.”
    “Yeah. He thinks the only kind of a hit that goes in the batting average is a homer. Well, he won’t be round next year when the boys come back.”
    Then a familiar figure sauntered across from the batting cage around the plate.