Damon Runyon
Washington Herald/October 6, 1916
Believes Brooklyn Club Will Trim Carrigan’s Red Sox in the Coming Classic
New York, Oct. 5—We cannot desert the old rubber plant.
Brooklyn, forever!
If your uncle Wilbert Robinson’s noble flatbush fusillers fail to wallop the Boston Red Sox in the impending world series, the present speaker is going to be vastly astonished, not to say humiliated and chagrined.
We expect the Dodgers to win by that main strength and awkwardness which carried them through to a flag in the National League race.
The Brooklyn Dodgers are a good deal like another very notable product of the transtubeine district, Mr. Al Mccoy, the middle-weight champion of the world. They are often a most distressing spectacle in their battles, but who knocks ’em out?
They meet handsomer, and cleverer, and more graceful opponents, and everybody prepares to weep over their sad finish, but at the close of the contest these Al McCoys of baseball are still in there, upright and whanging away.
Folks say they are joke champions; that they do not constitute the best club in the National League. Folks say the same thing, in a general way, about Al McCoy. None the less Al McCoy is the middle-weight title bearer, and he won the title by a knockout. None the less, the Dodgers are the champions of their class, and they gathered their victory by slapping all their opponents unconscious.
At the Monday afternoon, in Brooklyn, with the championship at stake, the Dodgers stepped out and licked the most sensational baseball club of all time, including a lad who was then being called the greatest left-hander in America.
They beat the New York Giants, fresh from their run of twenty-six consecutive victories—or sale from it, as you please—and they beat Ferdinand Schupp, with six straight wins behind him, and one of the greatest curve balls that ever the left the paw of a side wheeler.
The Dodgers just naturally had to win, and they won. Throw out the succeeding game if you wish, but don’t overlook that opener. That was a test. True, Schupp gave them only a brace of hits, and they won on errors—but they won.
All along the line they won when they had to win.
A singular outfit, often playing half-dead-and-half-alive baseball, always giving the impression that it was fearful of losing rather than carrying the spirit of confidence that is characteristic of championship clubs—but always winning.
Lacking in what baseball people call aggressiveness, but carrying a dangerous knock-out punch that came crashing out at the most unexpected moments, the Dodgers plodded stolidly along to a championship while everybody was saying that they wouldn’t do; that they had no class or baseball courage.
We have some shivers of trepidation when we think of those two ball murderers, Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis, of the Sox outfield section, but the Brooklyn club also has its pill pounders.
Also it has the crafty old Jack Coombs, and the not-so-craft Rube Marquard to oppose Ruth, Shore, Leonard and the other star hurlers of the Carrigan corps. Marquard holds two world series decisions over a more powerful Red Sox club than the one the Dodgers face Saturday, and the memory is bound to hearten the wry-necked Reuben.
As a whole, the Red Sox pitching staff may be better than Your Uncle Wilber’s band of moundsmen; individually there is not a lot to choose. The Red Sox have the best outfield—as a whole—but no individual outfield as good as Zack Wheat.
The infields are about a stand-off. If Jack Barry plays second for the Red Sox, that may give them the individual star of the inner works, but Robinson has Jack Daubert, one of the great first basemen of his time.
(Source: Chronicling America: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045433/1916-10-06/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1789&sort=relevance&rows=20&words=DAMON+RUNYON&searchType=basic&sequence=0&index=0&state=&date2=1922&proxtext=Damon+Runyon&y=9&x=12&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=29)
The works of Damon Runyon and other American journalists are now freely available at The Archive of American Journalism. Visit our bookstore for single-volume collections–-ideal for research, reference use or casual reading.
The Archive 