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Show V J CMvrLAwlf . HPHE hot spot of baseball In 1947 will be the Yankees the Yankees Yank-ees and Larry MacPhail. For both are hot spots. Even with a team that finished third last season, the Yankees smashed all past attendance at-tendance records by 'r" ""i an incredible mar- N gin. They were th? first major league " team in history to s- f -pass the two mil- lion mark with a few hundred thou- sand to spare. But what about s '. -j 1947? The new man- ' - f iff) f ager of the Yank- "Ui Liui, ees, Bucky Harris, Rucky Harris is one of the best in baseball. His assistant is Charlie Dressen of the Dodgers, who, among the insiders, is given almost equal credit with Leo Durocher for the remarkable showing of the Dodgers last season. Dressen is one of the most underrated under-rated men in baseball. He has proved in the past to be an able manager and he has proved with Brooklyn's nimble Dodgers that he could slip into the second slot and still be a star. The combination of Harris and Dressen should give the Yankees ranking class at the top. Their next problem will be a ball club that can handle the Red Sox-Tiger threat in 1947. MacPhail is not the type to accept ac-cept a third-place brand with what you might call equanimity. MacPhail Mac-Phail is too fiery and keen a personage per-sonage to accept the general verdict that it will take two or three years to bring the Yankees from the barren bar-ren lands into- the uplands, which they held and defended for so long a time. A team that has Robinson as catcher, catch-er, plus an able infield Heinrich at first, Stirnweiss at secoii. Rizzuto at short and Brown at tisnrd plus DiMaggio, Keller and others in the outfield, can't go baii fcsro years in a ro What about the pitching? One answer an-swer is that Yankee pitching allowed fewer earned runs last season than any other club except the Cardinals. New men will be added and the present guess is that the Yankees of 1947 will be a long leap beyond the Yankees of 1946. Their hitless postwar dip should be over by now, especially with such normally good hitters as DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Stirnweiss Stirn-weiss and Heinrich. The Army-Navy Game Pomp and pageant still mean a lot to this country. Army and Navy at Philadelphia will be a sellout for 104,000 spectators, even if Army figures fig-ures to win by 40 to 0. Which Army won't do. While it appears as though there has never been an Army-Navy game that looked as one-sided, it must be remembered that Navy still has good football players. Navy has had a rough road this season, but so has Army. It will be different after 1946. Navy next fall probably will return better material than Army will have. Navy is taking her postwar shellacking shel-lacking now. Navy already is passing pass-ing through her major depression. Army still has one to face, as far as anyone can see. Any team that loses Blanchard, Davis, Foldberg, Poole, Tucker, Fuson and Enos, with only two replacements left from the 1946 starting team, must stare into the shadows for some time to come. Army-Navy games are always closer than they figure to be. A year ago, Army ran up 21 points against Navy m the early going. Everyone looked for a 40 to 0 count. But after that first crash, Navy had the better of the argument in the last two periods. So there not only will be an Army-Navy Army-Navy game, but also 104,000 spectators specta-tors will be on hand to see it. And it can be a much closer meeting than one might predict. Football vs. Baseball No matter how peaceful the skyline sky-line seems to be, there is always someone taking the joy out of life. Now an inquisitive correspondent wants to know which game draws the greater number of people football foot-ball or baseball. He also asks for an exact check on this count. For one thing, baseball has a far longer season five and a half months against two and a half months. For another thing there are close to 200 football teams with varying degrees of real drawing power as compared to a considerable consider-able less number of baseball teams that can match ttu collection at the gate. Big league baseball last season drew close to 18 million customers through the turnstiles. The Yankees Yank-ees drew well over two million admissions ad-missions in 154 games. No college or pro football team can match this count in nine or 10 games. Army, Notre Dame, Michigan, Navy, Pennsylvania and Ohio State are among the leaders this fall. They should average around 400,000 spectators spec-tators each. For example, Army drew 80,000 at Michigan, 80,000 against Notre Dame, 75,000 against Pennsylvania, and will play before 100,000 against Navy. I 4 |