OCR Text |
Show SPORTSl By ROBERT McSHANE Rtl.owd by Wait.m N.wipap.r Union Fifth Pennant? Yanks Think So! TpHE Yankees, whose courage and optimism are much higher than the team's batting average, still expect ex-pect to win the American league pennant. The strategy they expect to employ em-ploy is comparatively simple. They're going to make a powerhouse drive In late August and September. At least that's the present hope. The Yanks have it all figured out and not without considerable logic They point to the fact that they're not so far behind even with so many ! of their better hitters below .250. It wasn't so very long ago that "Murderer's "Mur-derer's Row" dwindled to a puny .248 average and a bit lower. Even the I St. Louis Browns were above the I Yanks with a .257. Still Good Defensively You can guess what will happen to the present race if the Yanks particularly the sluggers really wake up and climb back to their 1939 hitting form. It wouldn't take a very Dig increase in hitting to put them at the top of the league once more. The McCarthymen figure Cleveland Cleve-land as the team to beat due largely to the Indians' pitching staff. Then, too, they feel that Cleveland has a better infield than either Boston or Detroit. The Red Sox are a gang of hitters, but their own pitchers don't help win enough ball games. The Yanks, it may be remembered, remem-bered, lost their first six extra in-ning in-ning games. Some of the previous I year's punch was lacking. It isn't inconceivable that four pennants and four World series in a row had quite a bit to do with the lack of snap. Why the Slump? Hitting slumps are hard to pin down too many things enter in to make definition or solution easy. A slump might start out from purely natural causes such as bad body motion. Then it turns into worry. The hitter tries too hard, becoming tighter with each trip to the plate. Then the lack of confidence disappears disap-pears after a few hits. The hittei has his eye once more. But don't count the Yanks out yet. They've done all right with a mis-erably mis-erably poor batting average, and when they find themselves even a nine or ten game lead won't look too secure. Trick Shot Artist Wizard of Fairways TACK REDMOND, one of the most successful golfers currently pounding America's fairways, didn't get that way because he won a lot of tournaments. Redmond is a trickster. Possibly and very probably he couldn't take the measure of Slammin' Sammy Sam-my Snead or Jimmy Thompson in a 36-hole match, but neither could Trick golfer Jack Redmond pre- pares to drive one off a human tee. i Sam or Jimmy equal Redmond in sheer entertainment for the gallery. Redmond got his start during the World war when so the story goes -an officer took a liking to him and asked the young recruit to play a round of golf. Our hero didn't know a tee from a trap, but that day he shot an 81 to defeat his amazed host. Eight months later he became a professional. But tournament competition was just a bit too rugged, Redmond now recalls, and he wasn't very happy teaching rookie golfers the finer points of the game. Gradually he developed a bag of trick shots, such as driving a ball off somebody's nose and blasting four balls out of a sandtrap with one swing of his mammoth niblick. The spectators lapped it up, and soon Redmond found himself giving demonstrations. To make a long story short, he's been following this unique profession for 16 years. If his caddy is sufficiently cooperative, co-operative, Redmond claims he can i drive a ball into his golf bag 200 yards away it's the caddy's job to move the bag a little. Or, if you don't think that's hard enough, he'll knock a ball off the top of a bottle j without breaking the bottle or even , jarring it. Redmond's most extensive stunt, incidentally, was to play his way r around the world in 36 holes of r golf, completing one hole at each A stop on a tour which carried him t through India, Hawaii, South Amer- tl ica, Australia and Europe. |