when the draft maze was unraveled. He reported at our Texas training camp—short, stocky, silent, and confident; a little too short for a backstop, perhaps, but he assayed one hundred percent when it came to ability.
He was one of the finds of the season.
Nothing got by him and he had a way of pegging down to second that was a revelation: a crouch and a snap, and presto!—the ball was sizzling across the diamond like a bullet. And it always came just a little to the left of second, and low, where the man covering the base merely had to hold it and let the runner slide to his own destruction.
I wasn’t surprised to see the bucko catching honors with Thomson, our first string receiver, right from the start of the season. You see, Nelligan wasn’t absolutely green: he’d had one season in the Kitty and one in the Pacific Coast, and he seemed to know the ins and outs of the game by instinct.
Out on the coast, Davis had accumulated something of a rep as a star base-runner. And, of course, he was drafted by Scrappy Connor, of the Reds. Scrappy was always on the lookout for men who would get into a game and fight for it with all their might—and take chances, and all that—but I think he was a little taken aback with the way Davis buckled down to the job.
He put Davis in center the opening day of the season—they were stacked up against St. Louis—and what did the youngster do but spike two of the Cardinal basemen right off the reel. And before the series ended he had spiked two more.
I kept on thinking it was accidental until we met the Reds in the first series together.
Then I saw he was a deliberate base pirate—one of that class of runners which scares the basemen off the bags and then takes all kinds of chances. There was never an attempt on his part to slide around a baseman. Just a dash, a leap—and spikes straight for the baseman’s shin.
I didn’t suspect that anything was wrong between Nelligan and Davis during that first series, because our youngster was on the bench with a split finger.
Of course, when I saw Sandy Macpherson talking interestedly to Nelligan, I asked him what was up, and he told me that he had been looking for fireworks between Nelligan and Davis. And when I cornered him, he just shrugged and told me to wait until the first series together when Nelligan worked behind the bat.
Of all the men I’ve ever known, I think I’d least rather have Nelligan as an enemy. Clean as a hound’s tooth he is, and honest, but Lordy! That square jaw of his and the level, gray eyes are enough to strike terror to the heart of an ordinary mortal.
And after Sandy had tipped me off to the fact that there was something doing between them, I watched Nelligan more closely, and I saw an ugly look come into his eyes at sight of Davis. That night, curiosity got the better of me, and I cornered Nellie, as we called him, in the hotel billiard room. I gassed about everything from the European war to bush league averages and finally shifted around to the topic I’d started out to discuss in the first place.
“You hear what they’re calling Bill Davis now?” I asked casually.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw his eyes narrow into viciously glinting slits and his fists balled involuntarily—and then relaxed slowly.
“What?” He bit off the word like he didn’t like the taste of it.
“The wild man!” I said.
He turned angrily. “Wild man!” he snorted. “Honest, Tom, I didn’t think that these here big leaguers would fall for that melodrama. I played out on the coast with that stiff, and there was a half dozen men out there that he didn’t dare try to spike. If one of these guys would knock his block off—”
“But he’s within his rights,” I argued. “He has the right of way on the base-line, and if a player gets in his way—”
“Yeh! That sounds good, it does; but you forget that Ty Cobb and a lot of the other best base-runners in the world don’t spike men all the time. Just because a runner has the right of way doesn’t give him license to deliberately poke his spikes into a man’s shins or ankles every chance. There’s such a thing as abusing a privilege, an’—”
“And you think some one ought to knock his block off, eh?”
“Yes. If he ever tries that stunt with me!”
“Didn’t he ever on the coast?”
“Yeh—a bunch of times. But he never got by with it. Once his spikes slammed into my shin guards in San Francisco, but they didn’t cut through. Good thing for him they didn’t, too.”
“Is he yellow?”
Nellie was as honest as the day is long. “No, he ain’t. But then again he ain’t a fool, and he don’t take chances with men who won’t stand for it. If he ever tries his shenanigans with me—”
“Sandy tells me that you and he ain’t any particular friends?”
“No!” he exploded the word. “We ain’t. And one of these days I’m going to get him. You watch.”
I did.
* * * *
We jumped around our Eastern trip and then received the Eastern teams at home. It was quite some time before we played the Reds again, and by then Davis was universally spoken of as the Wild Man. His list of victims was appallingly long. And every time news of a fresh spiking appeared in the papers, I watched Nelligan, and I saw his jaw get grimmer and grimmer.
The very first day of our second series with the Reds, they put me in the box and Nellie behind the bat. We were playing at home and the park was fairly jammed. For the first time in years the Panthers—that’s us—were near the top of the heap and going like a house afire.
The Wild Man was first at bat. As he stood there at the plate, swinging his bats while the team was getting into position, I heard a little dialogue between Nelligan and Davis.
Said Nelligan: “You’ve been spiking these guys around the circuit, Davis, and getting away with it. Maybe you’re within your rights according to the rules of the National Commission. But if you try any funny business with me there’s going to be trouble, see?”
Davis laughed superciliously.
“Scared already, Nellie? I got the right of the base-line—see? And if you happen to be there, why—well, I ain’t gonna make any difference between you and anyone else. Get that?”
Davis flied out to Shay that time at bat, and the next time he singled and died on first. The third time up he sacrificed a runner, but the fourth time he poled out a double to left.
That was in the ninth inning.
We were three runs ahead and had the game sewed up, but still we weren’t taking chances. A baseball game’s never over until the last man’s out, specially when you’re playing Scrappy Connor’s bunch. And every time Davis had come to bat there’d been nasty words between him and Nellie.
Sure enough, next man up slammed out a daisy cutter over second, and Davis started like a streak around third for home. Man, could he run! He just simply burned up the turf.
Sandy MacPherson, out in center, choked the ball and lined it home. He has a great wing, has Sandy. Mike Donnelley
