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Show SPORTL1GHT , Cards' Owner Is Chief Optimist By GRANTLAND RICE IN EVERY GAME played in any sport there is usually a leading optimist to match a leading pessimist. pes-simist. For example, practically all football foot-ball coaches are soaked from ankle to forehead in pes-: pes-: simism. In baseball : you get the optim-i optim-i ists up to July. I And probably the : chief optimist of ? the lot is Fred Saigh, the owner of the Cardinals. Fred was that wav back In We have no idea of selling the Cardinals short. They are the only National League team in over 20 years that has been good enough and game enough to crowd the American League into a rough corner cor-ner more than once and apply the old right hand to the chin. What other National League team has won four world series in the last 20 years? -r Vanderbilt Uprising The right things in life don't always come to the right people, but a turn in this direction has been taken by Al Vanderbilt and his racing stable. Outside of Discovery, the Vanderbilt Van-derbilt stable hasn't been able to give racing too many top horses just before and after the war. You had the feeling some years back that Vanderbilt horses seldom won any races. You considered this point in your visits to the mutuel windows. But there has been a sweeping change in the last two years. Bed O'Koses won $199,200 last year as a two-year old. Vanderbilt is a smart horseman. He saw at once, with the war over, that he had to move in a hurry. So he got Winfrey, one of the smartest smart-est trainers in the business, to get his horses ready. He also picked Ralph Kercheval to run his farm. You may have forgotten Ralph Kercheval. Not so long ago he was one of the best backs Kentucky ever had. Ask Shipwreck Kelly, his teammate. Kercheval was also one of the greatest kickers . football has ever seen. I mean up there with Ken Strong, the nonpareil of kickers. Kercheval had taken a keeD liking to the thoroughbred game. Both Winfrey and Kercheval have worked together to give Vanderbilt as strong a combination combina-tion as any racing man needs. Tangled Snarl The so-called fight game has developed de-veloped the weird habit of moving further and further into the deep, tangled wildwood. As a starter it has only two good divisions today and the better one, the middleweight, is practically twisted out of shape The leading people eligible to fight for this crown are Jake LaMotta defending champion; Ray Robin son, welterweight champion; Rob ert Villemain and Laurent Daut-huille Daut-huille and Rocky Graziano. The odds now are that Ray Robinson Rob-inson is the best middleweight in the world today with Villemain and Dauthuille about even for the runner-up spot. Grantland Bice March. Be was still that way in early June. "Don't sell ns short," he writes. "After a rather hectio start, we are now ready to settle down to play some real baseball. We are supposed sup-posed to be a veteran team. We are both young and old. I honestly believe we are going to surprise you and a lot of others." The Cardinals are not going to surprise us. We picked them to finish second last fall and they carried car-ried the fight right up to the last day. We picked them to finish second sec-ond this fall, although rating Eddie Ed-die Sawyer's Phillies right alongside. along-side. This Cardinal line-up is really a remarkable collection. Many of them were supposed to reach their peak in 1940. 1941 or 1942. Here and there some ball club has a survivor from the Neolithic age who lasts eight or ten years. But only one or two are still on the scene. Look at the years these Cardinals reached the big leagues: Max Lanier, Lan-ier, 1939; Enos Slaughter, 1938; Stan Musial, 1941; Marty Marion, 1940; Howie Pollet, 1941; Harry Walker. 1940; Harry Brecheen, 1940; Alph Brazle, 1943. Here we have eight men who average 10 years service with one club. Make it nine and bne-half years if you care to. And yet this one club, built on spirit as well as ability, is still one of the favored teams in the older league, a ball club that might well enough go on to beat the highly favored Dodgers and win another pennant. Thcj are the exact opposite of the youthful Phillies many, many years older. Yet neither the Dodgers nor Phillies so far have been able to shake these veterans loose. They have an exceptionally fine manager in Eddie Dyer, a sportsman, a scholar, a gentleman, an able manager and a swell guy. |