Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 208, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1911 — NEW BASEBALL PLAYS [ARTICLE]

NEW BASEBALL PLAYS

Old-Timers Had AU of the Pres-ent-Day Triclcs. Dan Brouthers, Player of Old School and One of Greatest Batsmen In Annals of Baseball, Sees Nothing New. Dan Brouthers, a player of the old school and one of the greatest batsmen in the annals of baseball, being asked recently as to how many new plays had been discovered in the game in the last twenty years, made this reply: “I don’t know of any real new ones. They don’t do much that they didn’t do when I played ball. There is a little difference. Some moves are made with more frequency, and team work is more common among clubs. There is nothing new about the bunt. There’s a man coaching for the New York baseball club who, twenty years ago, could bunt more skillfully than most of the players on the field today,* and as skillfully as the experts, for all that I can see. I mean Arlle Latham. This squeeze play whlbh they talk so much about I saw happen on the ball field, although the batter used to chop at the ball, rather than bunt it. “The delayed steal is not a modern invention. Old players used to do it, and they used to say that they were blamed Idiots for taking such chances on the bases. They weren’t so critical then about picking plays and putting fancy names on them. If anything happened out of the ordinary—that is, the ordinary run of luck—they’d say after the game was over, ‘That was a streak of luck, and the club was fortunate to get away with a victory.’ That’s what we used to get. None of your delayed steals and sacrifice killers and such things. “The sacrifice hit was not known thdfi? That is, exactly in the manner that it is made today, although when managers saw the trend of the times that baseball was getting more and more to be a game in which one run would be a great factor in winning, they trained their clubs to go after the sacrifice as much as any other play. Yet I have known times when we used to play out in the lake cities when we sacrificed. Did it deliberately, too. No picaynae luck about it Simply jumped in and took a chance on getting, out to get another fellow around. They’re all old —every one of them —and It's- only the frequency of some of these so-called plays, against their scarcity in years gone by, which Induces something that we didn’t know. ; “Some folks today claim that there are better base runners now than years ago. I would like those people to produce them. Where is there one better than Ned Williamson? How abotft Harry Stovey? What of Buck Ewing and Mike Kelley and Fogarty and about forty others that I could name if it were worth while? Better base stealers? Let me tell you something—when people say anything like that, you tell them to stop reading those romances about baseball and go somewhere and borrow —for you can’t buy them —a few copies of the older editions of the baseball guides, and then come around and tell us what they found in them in regard to base runners.”