Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 165, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1919 — PROMINENT BASEBALL PLAYERS POSSESS LITTLE FADS OF ONE KIND OR ANOTHER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PROMINENT BASEBALL PLAYERS POSSESS LITTLE FADS OF ONE KIND OR ANOTHER

Many ball players have fads of one kind and another. A brief list might be instructive. Lena Blackbtfrne, who has played shortstop on many teams, collects pennants from the various cities he visits. Joe Benz has an account of every game he has ever pitched pasted away in a scrap book. Dutch Leonard has a passion for talking machines, and spends much of his spare cash purchasing records. Strong for Flowers. Eddie Collins is strong for flowers, and picks up a rose bush here and a new kind of plant there for his garden back in a suburb of Philadelphia. A large number of players keep scrap books. Ed Walsh has a pile of them large enough to stock a small library. Few players have had so many features written about them as Walsh has enjoyed, and many a day he filed from one to four pages in his book. Ed also picked up pictures of himself in action, and has fixed up a baseball den at his home in Meriden, Conn., which is said to be one of the finest of its kind in the country. Eddie Cicotte is another who keeps a scrap book. His fondest hope is some day to place an account of his no-hit game in this volume. He has nearly everything else. While on the coast this spring we visited Jack Fournier, former Sox and

Yankee, at his home in a Los Angeles hotel, writes Malcolm Mac Lean in Detroit Free Press. Jack is one of the coast’s star players and seems certain to be back in the majors again before the year is out. His room was bare of ornaments —unless a Y ar( J r °U e trunk could be considered such —and the only objects in sight were "two scrap books on a table beside the water pitcher. Many of the clippings in his books refer to him as the Frenchman, which he collects with great delight. “You know,” he confided, “I was born In Michigan.” Had Great Time. ‘T had a great time when I played with Montreal,” he continued. “The French afns took me to their hearts I actually heard one of them tell another that I couldn’t understand any English except a few words like ‘ball,’ ‘strike,’ and others used In playing the pastim< “And I didn’t have to buy many dinners in Montreal, either. I had one or more invitations every night at one of the French homes, and I had one swell year of It. Many of them called me Jacques Flonyea, and I could often hear them yelling that at me when I was at bat.” Before closing we might state that the Angels have a hitting trio that compares favorably with many of those in the majors—Fournier bats third, Sam Crawford, former Tiger, fourth, and then comes Rube Ellis, ex-CardinaL