Westbrook Pegler
Fort Worth Star-Telegram/January 4, 1926
American League Hitters are Anxious to Try Out New Model Pill with Bats
NEW YORK, Jan. 4—After a winter of experiments in their Philadelphia hotbeds, the Burbanks of the baseball business announce that they have taken certain liberties with the official apple tomato, or whatever you prefer to call the official vegetable of the American League, and are ready to furnish a better apple, tomato or whatever you prefer to call it.
There has always been confusion as to the name of the missile The once great, but always enormous Ping Bodie once remarked that he sure did love to spank that apple. The wide-spreading Frank Bruggy, who was so vast that people called him Bruggy and Bruggy, insisted on calling it tomato. The Babe Ruth, when pressed for his favorite definition, replied “‘Yes, we have no bananas.”
Under no circumstances however is the object to be described as a baseball, there being some sort of bylaw of the playing and writing professions which forbids it. Baseball is believed therefore to be a bad word.
Anyway, the staff Burbanks of the firm of A. J. Reach, which manufactures the official onion or whatnot of the American League, are now ready to admit that the thing Babe Ruth distributed so lavishly in his time was quite an inferior product and not really worth the black eyes, stab wounds and stranglings that occurred in the scramble for every one he knocked into the bleachers.
No Faster Insist Makers
The pink and panting Babe himself, who has lately been seeking an estrangement from his Winter’s accumulation of blubber by playing handball in a New York gymnasium, has not decided whether to be alarmed or elated or even interested in the departure. The Reach Company insists the new model is neither a kangaroo or leaping ball nor a possum or dead one. But the manufacturers of the National League’s official radish fungus, or whatever you prefer to call it, announced last year that the bail of that period was the best of all possible spuds and no different from the one that had been used in the seasons when a dozen home runs in one hitter’s record were regarded as quite a number of home runs. And, although the matter is not generally known, the two official vegetables are manufactured in one and the same factory and under common auspices. By this process one arrives at doubts and misgivings as to the reliability of the Reach Company’s declaration that the new artichoke is no more or less sprightly than the old one, but nevertheless much better.
There is no available autopsy report on the now abandoned type by which to check up on the improvements said to be involved in the stuffing of the new one. However, the Reach Company has furnished a lot of ingredients and an anatomical map showing the heart, esophagus and all other internal appointments of the 1926 model and it makes a very pretty picture indeed.
Beginning with the peeling, which is made from the complexions of spirited but recently adjourned horses, the structure next presents a layer of yarn which is obtained by clipping the toupes of a very prominent family of sheep residing in Australia. Now, notwithstanding certain bold intimations that the agile Australian kangaroo has inter-married with the prominent Australian sheep family and communicated its agility to the breed, the Reach Company is prepared to prove there is no bar sinister to the pedigree of the herd, which offers its hair combings to the baseball business twice annually.
Center still Cork
The next item in the tailoring of the new and superior horsehide radish of the American League is a layer of red rubber and the next one is made of black rubber.
And there’s the heart of America, as they say, meaning the core of the baseball, which is made of cork. Cork is not so plentiful since the Scotch began making those non-refillable bottles with the metal tops, but it can still be obtained from rye or port.
And that’s the new and very superior musk melon Babe Ruth will have to do business with next summer, not knowing until he pastes one on the label whether they have taken the home runs out or left them in, or doubled the order. There is just one clue to the answer. The Reach Company admits the Washington games of the last world series were a tryout of the improved turnip, and if that was the one Earl Smith consigned to Sammy Rice over the center field wall of the Washington ballyard, the Babe may approach his season confident that he is still receiving the agile co-operation of the—let’s call it a baseball and defy literary tradition
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