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Show COMMENTS j By Guy Stevens It's turning out to be a tough year on major league managers because about 12 of the 16 clubs want to win a pennant. As a rule, club bigwigs would rather have a strong contender than a pennant winning team. A World Series, is a costly affair. So if some team goes ahead and wins four straight in the series, it means that club officials of-ficials are left holding the bag. They receive no dough from the first four games. But this, year, as we mentioned, 12 of the 16 clubs are doing their best to cop a pennant. That's why so many managers find themselves in a tough spot. Only recently, there were three managerial changes, Durocher, Ott and Chapman within a 24-hour period. Now it seems that Eddie Dyer of the St. Louis Cards and Steve O'Neill of the Detroit Tigers will be the next to go unless of course the Cards and the Tigers win the pennant in their respective leagues, which would make them great managers. Johnny Neun of the Reds may also be on the skids. This being an open season on managers there's only one way a skipper can be sure of his job, and that's to be like Connie Mack have your own ball club. Bobby Feller, the Cleveland fire-baller, fire-baller, is not having a good year as everyone knows.- Perhaps he should have a few words with Hal Newhauser, Detroit hurler. New-houser New-houser did very good in 1944, '45 and '46. But in 1947, he had rather rath-er a rough time, winning 17 and losing 17. The Tigers dropped his salary to $45,000, a $15,000 cut. Newhouser did plenty qf thinking after that and over the winter months studied motion pictures of himself in action. He discovered that he was not pitching the same in 1947 as he was in his better better if he had tried to make his league into a Class , AA or Class AAA circuit. Tony Zale and Marcel Cerdan will meet in a middleweight title fight on Sept. 23 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. On that f,ame card, unless a change is made, Freddie Mills and Gus Lesnevich will meet in a return championship go. With these two fights on the same card, a million dollar gate is expected. But the point is this: here's a terrific card being offered, and it's not being offered by Mike Jacobs and his Madison Square Garden associates. Up to now Jacobs and Co. have had pretty much control of the big bouts in the boxing game. They had control because they hogtied every contender who fought for them in a title fight. Somehow they misr.ed out on the Zale-Cerdan, Mills-Lesnevich deal. And that could only mean that Jacobs Ja-cobs is losing his grip on the boxing box-ing game. His, heavyweight tournament tour-nament coming up can't be taken too seriously. Any major city in the country could stage one of those affairs with the' winner claiming the heavyweight title. There's only one thing left for Jacobs, if he wishes to regain a firm grip again, and that's to get Joe Loujs back into the ring for one more title fight. He's doing everything under the sun right now to persuade the Brown Bomber Bom-ber because if Louis fought once more and lost, Jacobs, having hogtied hog-tied the contender, would again be boss of the big boys. And when you're boss of the big boys, you're practically boss of the boxing game. Speaking of Lesnevich, he's been taking plenty of kidding the last few days. In this month's issue of Argosy he tells how he could take the title away from Joe Louis. Lesnevich lost his own title to Freddie Mills a few weeks ago. JUST GAB Only 17 spectators were in London's 10,000-seat Har-ringway Har-ringway Arena to see America's basketball team defeat Switzerland Switzer-land 86 to 21 in the opening Olympic Olym-pic test . . . over here they would have played before a packed house. Joe Tinker was the last of the Chicago Cubs' famed Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play trio to go. Paul Erickson must be wondering won-dering how long he's going to stay with the Pittsburgh Pirates .... since the last of May, he's been with the Phillies, Cubs, Giants and now the Pirates. Detroit seems to be a stumbling block for win streaks . . . several days ago the Tigers ended the Red Sox's consecutive con-secutive wins at 13 . . . last year they stopped the Yankees' sensational sensa-tional win streak at 19. years. He corrected the fault and his record this season was 14 wins and 7 defeats proves that he's in great form again. Feller should study films of himself. As in. the case of Newhouser, he may be doing do-ing something on the mound that's affecting his pitching. Rocky Graziano is scheduled to meet Fred Apostoli in Oakland, Calif., next month. Seeing as how the "old" boys seem to be doing all right these days, Apostoli may give Graziano plenty of trouble. But it's more likely to be the other way ar6und. Graziano is still a tough hombre with a wallop in both fists. Apostoli of course saw his best days years and years ago. He was campaigning in 1934 and 1935. In 1937, he defeated Marcel Thil of France who was recognized recog-nized by some as world's champion. cham-pion. That was 11 years ago. Apostoli has staged a fair comeback come-back but he hasn't any business, being in the same ring with Graziano. Gra-ziano. Just the same, the fight should draw a good crowd in Oakland. Oak-land. Branch Rickey, boss of the Dodgers, Dod-gers, may be all hot and bothered over his baseball team but he's also quite excited over his football team, the Dodgers of the All-American All-American Conference. The reason is Bob Chappuis, the great back who passed Michigan to a national championship in 1947. Rickey is reported to have said recently that his team must win or finish last. The Dodger football foot-ball team won only 3 out of 14 games last year. With Chappuis in the lineup, Rickey may have a winner this fall. Jorge Pasquel, who tried so hard to bring big time ball to Mexico, is just about fed up on baseball. His Mexican League is losing money and two teams, San Luis Potosi and Tampico, have been is having the remaining four clubs dropped from the circuit. Pasquel play all their games in Mexico City in order to salvage the league. lea-gue. ' Two years ago, Pasquel was out to make his, circuit into a major league outfit. He "raided" clubs, giving players enormous salaries. He went south of the border to play ball, many got homesick and returned. When Pasquel realized that American players were too much trouble, he dropped the idea, though now and then he made' a bid for Ted Williams and other top players just for the sake of publicity. pub-licity. At least Pasquel did his best. But he went about it the wrong way. He would have done |