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Show f"-'v "How do they know what Johnson's grct Whether he uses a curve or not Whether his break is set? How can they tell how his outshoota fall? Whether his lncurve's big or small? How can they tell what he's got on the ball? . . Npbody's Been it yet" T I.TJ. S&W O sang a minor poet of the mjjiv major leagues. The hero of this baseball VVVSr epic was Walter Johnson, NtiO) the marvelous pitcher of 1 the Washington club, who 7 has just beaten all records by hurling the ball for 56 consecutive innings with such skill and ounning that not a batsman of an opposing club has been able to score a run. Speed was the great factor in the achievement dazzling, sizzling speed! The big Idahoan's delivery is like the flight of a shell. The mightiest hitters hit-ters of the American- league are as helpless as town lot players when Johnson turns loose his' fastest ball; "Ty" Cobb, "Home Run" Baker and Jackson alike are babes in his hands. Johnson's amazing swiftness in pitching is no mere fancy. It has been scientifically measured. In the testing room of the Remington Arms company at Bridgeport, Conn., Johnson John-son showed that his right arm could hurl the baseball at the rate of 122 feet a second! It was acknowledged that he could do even better, because in athletic parlance he wa3 not warmed up. It is well known that a hurler gathers speed as a game progresses. Johnson flung the sphere through, an aperture in a frame of wood about two feet square. Running from top to bottom were ten very delicate and filmy copper wires. These ; were broken by the ball, and by an electrical elec-trical device the moment of passage was accurately timed. Five yards away was a steel plate and the impact im-pact of the ball on this barrier again caused the electric clock to registr. Thus the exact time of the ball's flight was mathematically determined. The velocity obtained by Johnsou Is all the more extraordinary when it is known that a bullet from the new government .45 automatic pistol travels 800 feet per second. A high power hunting rifle, .35 caliber, cali-ber, auto-loading, travels 2,000 feet per second. The Twentieth Century limited, the fastest long-distance train in the world, makes the 97S.7 miles from New York to Chicago in just 20 hours, or an average speed of 4S.9 miles every hour. This means a velocity of nearly 72 feet a second. Suppose Johnson'B speedball kept on traveling at 122 feet a second right on toward the Windy City at its own hurricane speed. It would eat up the 5.163,840 feet to Chicago in just 11 hours and 48 minutes. The ball would beat the train to Chicago by eight hours and 12 minutes. In other words, the catcher who received the ball could go to bed, have a full night's rest, get up and Into his uniform uni-form again, and be on hand in the morning to meet the Twentieth Century Cen-tury as she rolled into Chicago. Putting It another way the train leaves New York at 2:45 p. m. daily. Time is Bet back at Buffalo by just an hour, so that the onrushing train gains 60 minutes on her westward journey. Eleven hours and 48 minutes min-utes after the start Johnson's bender has reached Chicago, or at 1:33 a. m. Chicago time, the roar,ing locomotive has just plunged through Cleveland without stopping, more than 350 miles away. The striking energy of Johnson's missile was shown to be 160 foot pounds. That means that it possessed approximately half the force in impact im-pact of a bullet fired from a .45 automatic auto-matic pistol! According to these figures, it takes lese than half a second for a ball thrown by Johnson at his high speed to travel from his fingers to catcher's glove! That is why he bewilders even the quickest witted batsman. He isn't able to guess whether it is a straight ball, an In or an out curve, a drop, or whether the sphere is going to jump up into the air in defiance of the law of gravity. "Any time you get a hit off Johnson," John-son," declared Napoleon Lajoie, himself him-self one of the most formidable wield-ers wield-ers of the bat that the game ever knew, "you must not think that you're smart. Just figure that you're lucky lucky that you were able to make that blind swing at just the right spot. There never was, and I doubt if there ever will be, a pitcher as great as Johnson. If he turned loose his very hardest throw with his best curve on it no catcher could get down, in time to receive the ball. "Every ball he throws has stuff on it that can't be solved. Some of the hops that his swiftest ones take are bigger curves than a man ever threw before. I've seen him slam bajls up to the plate that didn't look larger than a pinhead." Not surprising, Is it, that Johnson Is such a terror? The quiet, modest young Idaho youth he is only twenty-five, years old also fooled his opponents into giving him another record. Last year he struck out 303 men in 386 innings. None of the other wizards could touch that mark. Before he became a big leaguer striking out batsmen was merely a pastime for him. Out in Weiser, when only nineteen, he was playing In the Idaho State league, and among the performances credited to him was the striking out of the firs'; elght,.men who faced htm In c important game, and he later struck out 11 other men during the nine lnuingi. And these men were all crack players, play-ers, many of whom are now stars in the western leagues. In that Idaho season Johnson was the slab artist in fifty-seven straight games In which not a run was scored off his delivery. So you see he got the habit early! After that feat Johnson applied to various smart managers of the clubs in the big cities. Hut they wouldn't even give him a trial. They were dis-daiuful, dis-daiuful, and easily declared that Johnson John-son would be shattered by the heavy artillery of the major leagues. It remained re-mained for the then tail-euder Washington Wash-ington team to send Catcher Blenkeu-ship Blenkeu-ship in 1907 out to Weiser to investigate investi-gate the picturesque stories that came east of the youth's prowess. The scout lost no time in getting Johnsou to Bign a contract as soon as he had seen him pitch a few innings. That Washington is now one of the leading lead-ing clubs of the American league Is due in large part to the ekill of the western recruit. When Johnson made good from the jump there was woe among all the Napoleonic managers who had turned him down. But his steady and astonishing aston-ishing improvement is shown by the following official table: j Year. G. B.H. R. B.B. S.O. W. L. Ave.' 1907 1-1 99 34 16 72 5 8 .3S4 2S 11)7 66 50 1-19 14 11 .518 KK 37 238 109 85 158 12 24 . 33:1 1910 41 258 86 74 303 24 16 .boo 1911 SS 281 107 63 200 23 15 . 603 1912 40 244 86 72 Ml 30 10 .750 Total for 6 years 198 12S7 137 360 1163 108 84 '.5G3 A big, likable fellow Is Johnson, a raw-boned product 06 the prairie farms. There is nothing very speedy about him except his pitching. Otherwise Other-wise he is slow as law. He moves slow, eats slow and even runs his motor car in an "out-of-gasoline man- ' ner." He Baves all his energy for the diamond. After seeing Johnson shoot the ball at the plate you wouldn't wonder the poet was Inspired to song. You wouldn't wonder at the dazed batsmen. bats-men. If you can't see it you can't hit It. Resuscitated Memory. Charles Reade, the novelist, believed believ-ed in the daily newspaper as a source for incidents that would furnish better material for romance than could possibly pos-sibly be created by any effort of fancy. He kept a scrap book in which he stored away newspaper clippings which were afterward to masquerade as fiction. His story of "A Simpleton," is one In which Dr. Christopher Staines of London is lost overboard In j mid-ocean, picked up all but dead from a raft, taken to Cape Town with all memory of the past utterly obliterated, obliter-ated, but afterward restored in small installments through the agency of a couple of the terrific thunderstorms peculiar to that latitude. . That story of forty years ago has been more than confirmed over and over again In real life by Incidents of memory and personality per-sonality lost and regained. The last of these comes from Warren, Pa., of a man, a common laborer, working at a silica sand plant, who, struck by a fall of ice, has. while lying in a hospital. regained his identity, lost a dozen -: years ago, and says he is John Oliver, the owner of 125 - valuable building I lots In Wheeling, W. Va., and of mln- ' I eral lands In Lancaster, Pa. A tele- I gram from relatives" In Chicago con- I firms the story. It can not be wholly f. unpleasant to wake up after twelve : t years' sleep of this kind and find one's I self not dead broke, but entirely sol- J . vent. I 3k. eQ 'Bp? r t ri (l JrvPL n 320' aSd'SlI |