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Show I IT WOULD have been a big lift to I big league baseball If Lou Novikoff, Novi-koff, the Mad Russian of the Cubs, could only have approached his minor mi-nor league average under the Big Tent. There has always been a need In baseball for another Rube WaddelL another Bugs Raymond or another Dizzy Dean. They had more than their share of .color. But they had something more than color they were also great ballplayers. Lou Novikoff has carried around a gob of color but he has to prove ne was a great ballplayer. His average In Los Angeles and Milwaukee, Mil-waukee, both in strong leagues, has been over .370 at bat With Los Angeles in 1941 he batted .363 and hammered ham-mered out 41 bvX vU .M-s- home runs. He Lou Novikoff was known on the West coast at the time as the batter bat-ter who could hit anything any pitch- AT f-mi1i4 Vitni Tint Y.a fyrfA taittrV the Cubs has been entirely different.' If Novikoff had kept up his minor league hitting, he might have picked up where Dizzy Dean left off in the headline class. But color doesn't carry far when it is minus real ability abil-ity or high class skill. Novikoff on the West coast looked to be as good a hitter as Ted Williams Wil-liams who came along to bat over .400 with the Red Sox. But he was no Ted Williams in the major show. Novikoff's average with Los Angeles was over 90 points above the Williams Wil-liams average with San Diego. These figures were reversed when the two headed east for Chicago and Boston. These are conditions that are hard to explain. Novikoff won't be 29 until December and it may be that Charlie Grimm can wipe away the dust from his big league batting eye. The Colorful Types Baseball can use more color than it has known since Dizzy Dean retired re-tired to tell St. Louis radio listeners that someone "slod into third base." It could use another Rube Waddell, Wad-dell, who split his spring and summer sum-mer days three ways pitching, tending bar and going fishing. But it should be remembered that Dizzy Dean and Rube Waddell were among the great pitchers of all time. It wasn't color alone that made them famous. No one could have given out more color than Babe Ruth. Ping Bodie tvfls npvpr m. rrpfti hftll nlavr. hut he was good enough. He was another an-other remembered character. There was the time he bought a parrot and taught the bird to keep repeating "Ping made good." Bugs Raymond was a star pitcher, pitch-er, but Bugs also gave you something some-thing to write about and talk about on the side. There was the time when Bugs was pitching for Shreve-port. Shreve-port. He made a bet that he could eat a whole turkey, drink two quarts of scotch and win a double-header. He won his bet, tradition says. I first ran into Bugs the day he landed in Atlanta. He was to pitch against the world champion Boston Red Sox that afternoon, back in 1904. Bugs took three big hookers of scotch and walked to the park, throwing rocks at telephone poles en route. All he did was to shut out the world's champions, 2 to 0. I would like to see a team that was composed of Babe Ruth, Rube Waddell, Dizzy Dean, Bugs Raymond, Ray-mond, Larry McLean, Tacks Par-rott, Par-rott, Arlie Latham, Germany Schae-fer, Schae-fer, Al Schacht, Crazy Schmidt, Rabbit Maranville and one or two more. I wouldn't, however, want to be the manager. Strictly Business On tne otner nana, two or me greatest ball clubs I ever saw were never noted for color. One was the Connie Mack's Athletic line-up from 1910 through 1914, winners of four pennants in five years. The other was the Yankees after Babe Ruth left, a crushing outfit, season after season. These two squads were composed of fine ball players who were rarely on the prankish or the lighter side of life Eddie Collins, Eddie Plank, Stuffy Mclnnis, Jack Barry, Home-run Home-run Baker, Jack Coombs, Chief Bender, Ben-der, to whom baseball was strictly a business matter. The same went for Bill Dickey, Joe Gordon, Lou Gehrig, Charlie Keller, Spud Chandler. Chan-dler. Joe DiMaggio and others who might have made up a session of bank vice presidents. BasebaWs Bigger Shots Who is the best trap-and-field shot among big league ballplayers? My vote has always been for Bill Dickey in the field end of this sport Ernest Hemingway, the writer, casts his vote for Curt Davis, the Dodger pitcher. "Curt Davis," Hemingway says, "is one of the best trap-and-field shots, I ever saw. Hugh Casey is another fine shot So are Arky Vaughan and Bill Dickey." Quick eye and muscle response are needed both in ballplayine and shootine. |