DURING THE SUMMER OF 1901, as the infant American League battled for acceptance, New York Giants owner Andrew J. Freedman invited fellow National League magnates John T. Brush of Cincinnati, Arthur Soden of Boston and Frank deHaas Robison of St. Louis to a fateful meeting at his Red Bank, New Jersey estate.

Until the advent of Charles O. Finley and George Steinbrenner, Freedman was widely considered the most unpopular owner in the history of the spoil. A German-Jewish bachelor who grew rich in dry goods and real estate, Freedman became the trusted crony of Tammany Hall’s Richard Croker and even served as his best man. Together the two engineered the election of Robert A. Van Wyck as the first Mayor of the consolidated City of New York. Together with financier August Belmont, he helped finance and control the new Interborough Rapid Transit subway.

By all accounts Freedman was highly unpleasant. Frank Graham termed his “Course vain, arrogant and abusive.” Albert Spalding found him “obnoxious.” Pittsburgh Sporting Life correspondent A. R. Cratty recalled that it was his duty to interview Freedman on each trip the Giants made to that city. “No job was ever harder,” he wrote on Freedman’s death, “unless it be the same act with the late John Tomlinson Brush as the target. Freedman never let you get away from the idea that he was a New Yorker. His whole attitude demanded sort of homage because he was from the big burg on the island. That high bearing cost him many friends on the circuit, or rather in the provinces. Some old and young feared him.”

Freedman once physically assaulted Brush in the barroom of New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. In return he was given a pasting by Brush’s friend, Bert Dasher. He once ran into J. Walter Spalding (A. G. Spalding’s brother), and so vociferously insulted him that Walter resigned from the Giants Board of Directors.

Freedman’s teams were chronic tail-enders as he fired managers with abandon, with four in 1895 alone; including an actor Harvey Watkins whose only qualification was his status as a long-Lime Giants fan. In July 1898 after an anti-Semitic remark by Orioles outfielder “Ducky” Holmes — “Well, I’m glad I’m not working for a Sheeny anymore.” — Freedman even participated in a near riot at the Polo Grounds by pulling the Giants off the field and forfeiting to Baltimore.

Brush had developed a scheme to turn the National League into one giant corporation, the ultimate baseball cartel. The plan remained secret until the National League’s annual meeting began in New York in December in 1901. On December 11 New York Sun broke the story. Common stock would be parceled out among the various clubs as follows: New York 30%; Cincinnati 12%; St. Louis 12%; Boston 12%; Philadelphia 10%; Chicago 10%; Pittsburgh 8%; and Brooklyn 6%. A five-man “Board of Regents”, to be elected by the stockholders, would govern the corporation. All managers at $5,000 each were to be hired through the Board. All players were to be “licensed” by them.

Brush’s scheme for such centralized, overreaching control emerged from an earlier plan of his to crush the American League. In mid-season, he had plotted to lure the weak Detroit and Baltimore clubs away from the American League. He would then force “Ban” Johnson to agree to a new twelve-club circuit, “dominant and in full control of baseball in this country.”

In any case, Brush’s plan drew the resentment of the four owners left out in the cold. It also raised the hackles of an American public decreasingly tolerant of “trusts” and monopolies.

As soon as the League Meeting began, Pittsburgh’s Barney Dreyfuss nominated Albert Spalding for President. As early as February rumors had Spalding replacing de ineffectual Nick Young, so as to better strengthen the circuit’s hand in the coming war. Many viewed Spalding’s election as a foregone conclusion.

It was a false prophecy. The “Red Bank” faction, as they were now called, raised all sorts of technical objections to the nomination and ended up standing firmly against Spalding voting to retain Young.

On the second day of the session, Spalding himself appeared to argue his own case. Spalding’s oratory failed to sway his opponents, however, so he took his case to the members of working press.

“In the event of my election…I will impose some conditions … that will be of lasting benefit to the game,” a perspiring and wildly gesturing Spalding thundered to a huge assemblage of reporters, “One of them I will make bold to state … I will demand that Andrew Freedman … be eliminated from the councils of the body…

The issue is now between Andrew Freedman and A.G. Spalding and when I go back actively into baseball Andrew Freedman gets out. He gets out right away or I’ll get out “

But despite Spalding’s stirring oratory, the deadlock continued for 25 ballots with AG. holding the votes of Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh, while Nick Young just as consistently held the other four.

After the 25th ballot, Freedman Brush and their allies left the room, leaving Nick Young with their proxies. Young then ruled a quorum no longer existed while Philadelphia’s Colonel John Rogers insisted that “once a quorum always a quorum.’

Young then left, but the others remained and elected Rogers chairman pro team. He called for another vote and Albert Goodwill Spalding, who was sound asleep in his hotel room, was “elected: President of the National League four votes to none.

At 4 AM Spalding ordered Young to immediately surrender League records, papers, etc. to him. Young at first demurred, allowing that he would turn the trunk of documents over to his son Robert. As negotiations proceeded, a porter hired by Spalding spirited the trunk away.

Spalding then called a league meeting and proceeded to move in for the kill. Only his four supporters answered his call, but Spalding noted that Giants Secretary Fred Knowles was lurking in the doorway while all this was going on. AG. ruled that by Knowles “presence” New York was represented. Thus, a quorum was created.

Spalding next called for a vote on the Freedman “Syndicate” plan, which not surprisingly, was quickly rejected. While Young was probably relieved to be out of all this turmoil, Andrew Freedman had no intention of surrendering so easily. Freedman went to court, and although his first motion was denied, on March 29,1902 a Judge Truax of New York ruled Spalding’s “election” invalid.

Deadlocked balloting proceeded once more. Finally on April 3, 1902 a compromise of sorts was reached. A triumvirate was named to guide executive functions as the war raged into its second year. Brush chaired the unwieldy group. Nick Young, the eternal Nick Young, was back as Secretary-Treasurer. Some allege that as part of this deal, Andrew Freedman sent word to A.G. Spalding that he would retire from baseball as soon as he gracefully could.

“Ban” Johnson, of course, was elated by such dissension in the opposition’s ranks. In every previous struggle, the National League had been firmly united, while its various interloping competitors had lacked cohesion. Now, the shoe was on the other foot.

“If they fight like a bunch of Kilkenny cats among themselves,” “Ban” Johnson chortled, “I know we have them licked.”

Following the 1901 season, the American League looked still more viable, as Johnson shifted his weak Milwaukee franchise (it drew only 139,034 in 1901) to St. Louis (which, next to Chicago, was the second largest city allowing Sunday ball.) The new franchise would utilize old Sportsman’s Park.

Late in the 1902 season, Andrew Freedman, much to the relief of his fellow magnates, bowed out of the game. He sold the Giants to John T. Brush, who in turn disposed of his Cincinnati holdings. After that season, jumping to the American League continued. Even Christy Mathewson and catcher Frank Bowerman were hopping from the Giants to the Browns.

The American Leagues invasion of Manhattan was now about to occur. Obtaining a field in Manhattan was always the major issue delaying the incursion as Andrew Freedman enjoyed considerable favor from the local politicians, so much so that any site considered would soon have a street cut through it by the City Fathers.

In December 1902 Johnson located a promising site between 142nd and 145th Streets and Lenox Avenue and the Harlem River. It was, moreover near a new station of the interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway. Johnson’s agents convinced John B. McDonald, an IRT contractor, to purchase the land and lease it to the American League. McDonald persuaded financier August Belmont II to come aboard. However, an IRT Director — one Andrew Freedman — soon killed the plan.

“You know that I am out of baseball, having sold my controlling interest in the New York club to Mr. Brush,” gloated Freedman to the press in early January 1902, “but you may quote me as saying that someone has been stringing these Western fellows all along.”

That situation was changing, however, and fast. On February 18, 1902 the estate of one Josephine Peyton had auctioned off twelve parcels of land for $377,800 to John J. Byrne, a nephew of “Big Bill” Devery. Devery, one of the Big Apple’s foremost gamblers, was a very active Democrat in the borough’s Ninth District, and, oh yes, a former city Police Chief.

Devery soon was in business with Frank Farrell, another major operator. Ex-saloonkeeper Farrell owned 250 pool halls in the city and was closely connected to “Boss” Sullivan, an even greater star in New York’s underworld firmament.

Coal dealer Joseph Gordon, acting as front man for Farrell and Devery approached Johnson telling him his group could easily arrange for a park to be built if given a franchise. Devery and Farrell paid $18,000 for the Baltimore franchise and installed Gordon as President. Devery’s name was missing from those listed as stockholders, although it was well known he had contributed approximately $100 000 to the enterprise.

“Me a backer!” Devery modestly, if somewhat dishonestly, exclaimed, “I only wished I did own some stock in a baseball club. I’m a poor man and don’t own stock in anything. Besides, how could I pitch a ball with this stomach.”

That’s one version of the story. Frank Graham in The New York Yankees tells another. According to sportswriter Graham, Johnson and his new ownership group were brought together by the New York Sun‘s Joe Vila. Vila had known Johnson since the League President’s own sportswriting days and introduced him to Frank Farrell.

Farrell was more than eager to purchase the Baltimore franchise, although Johnson was sure about his prospective new club owner. His reticence evaporated when Farrell produced a $25,000 check and handed it over to Johnson, proclaiming, “Take this as a guarantee of good faith. If I don’t put this ball club across, keep it.”

“That’s a pretty big forfeit,” replied an amazed Johnson.

“He bets that much on a horse race, Ban,” Vila informed him.

In any case the deal was made between the American League and its somewhat shady triumvirate. For $75,000 in actual construction costs (plus $200,000 in excavating the rocky, hilly terrain) rickety wooden 16,000 seat Hilltop Park was constructed. A local Democratic politico, Thomas McAvoy received contracts for both phases. A full five hundred workmen went to work, excavating 12,000 cubic yards of bedrock replacing it with 30,000 cubic yards of fill. On May 30, 1903 the Highlanders opened up before 16,243 fans and defeated Washington 6-2 behind “Happy Jack” Chesbro.

To help shore up the weak New York roster — which after all had finished dead-last in Baltimore — “Ban” Johnson dispatched reinforcements. Clark Griffiths, his pitching career winding down, would manage. Outfielder “Wee Willie” Keeler was lured from Brooklyn for a sizable sum. I signed Keeler, myself,” boasted Johnson,”and I found him an easy man to deal with” The strengthened club would finish a respectable fourth in 1903.

American League baseball — and with it a team to be known as the New York Yankees — had begun in New York City, the Big Apple.

One ballplayer who enlisted when his country’s call to duty was sounded, but who in now all but forgotten was Edward Leslie Grant. Grant was born on May 21, 1883 in Franklin, Massachusetts. For ten years he was a mediocre player with a batting average of .249. He played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, and the New York Giants. With the Giants, Grant was a backup third baseman and an excellent dugout assistant. But his major distinction was that he was the first major leaguer to be killed in the raging combat of World War I.

At the end of the 1915 season, Grant retired from baseball to enter his law practice. He acquired the nickname of “Harvard” Eddie Grant to signify his alma mater.

When war was declared in 1917, Grant enlisted and went to Officers Training School where he soon rose to the rank of Captain. Grant was later sent to France after his training was complete and assigned to the 307th Infantry Unit of the 77th Division. On October 5, 1918, while leading a patrol into the Argonne Forest to locate and rescue Colonel Charles Whittleby’s “Lost Battalion,” Grant was killed.

In Noel Hynd’s fine work The Giants of the Polo Grounds, he states Grant “was buried where he fell. After the war, his body was never located.”

On Memorial Day May 29, 1921, representatives from the armed forces, baseball and sisters of the slain Grant unveiled a monument in deep centerfold of the Polo Grounds. It was dedicated to the memory of Captain Edward L. Grant: a professional both on and off the field.

“Boy could he throw. My, my, what a man,” Berman said that day. His age made it difficult for him to remember much, but Walter Johnson was indelibly marked in his mind. “I loved that man. He was my God down there. Walter Johnson, I’d do anything for him. I followed him around like a dog follows his master.’

Bob Berman, in his day, was like the Moonlight Graham character in the movie Field of Dreams. Despite spending most of the season with the Washington Senators in 1918, he played in only two games. He never got an at-bat that whole season. But, at 19, he caught Johnson.

“Johnson, who would win 23 games that season and was possibly the best pitcher in baseball, was summoned in relief in the last inning against the Browns to try to protect a 6-4 lead,” wrote Ira Berkow in a New York Times column about Berman. “The Senators had rallied in the late innings and had used up their other two catchers — one was pinch-hit for, the other pinch-hit. No one was left to catch Johnson except the third string catcher, Robert Leon Berman.’

It was June 12, 1918. The box score showed that Berman — “Bergman,” it called him — had two putouts on Johnson strikeouts, and no miscues. It was the end of his major league career.

Berman lived most of his life in New York City, and on Long Island. But by June, 1987 he had moved to his daughters house in suburban Connecticut. That is where we met one afternoon. Sitting around the living room, his memory prodded by his daughter Barbara Berman Cassidy, Berman looked al the old black-and-while pictures of a handsome young man in a Senators uniform and tried, earnestly but with difficulty, to remember what it was like growing up n New York. “I was an honest-to-goodness Jewish youngster growing up on the lower cast side, he said. `Then we moved to the Bronx. We had our tough times. There were three of us, myself, my two sisters — we were the children.’

They grew up on Fulton Avenue across the street from Crotona Park, where Berman played baseball with neighborhood boys. “So that meant there were no houses there at all. All clear. Lovely!”

His family was not always as lovely. “I had a father, may the good lord rest his soul.” His father was a marble polisher, born in Russia. “He was a tough guy. Five-foot-eleven, weighed about 180, 190 pounds, with a temper that went with it. And he drank all the time.” When Berman was getting out of public school, his mother took him aside.

“Bobby, do me a favor,” she said. “I want you to promise me one thing. Don’t ever take a drink.”

Berman responded, “Mother, I understand. I shall never drink in my life.”

He paused. “You want to know something? I never have?” Another pause. “It used to gall him to think that his only begotten son, when it came to the holidays like Passover and so on, wouldn’t touch the wine.”

Berman’s mother never lived long enough to see him enter professional baseball. His parents’ first choice was for young Bobby to become a professional. “A professional, yes. A doctor, or a lawyer. And the next best thing would be [to go to] City College of New York (CCNY). My mother, she was expecting me to be a Latin teacher.”

But at Townsend-Harris High School, a Manhattan prep school for CCNY where one of his cousins had graduated, Berman preferred baseball to academics. “It was one of those real high-class schools,” Berman said. “Well, I wasn’t a very, very fine student; I was a good student. If I liked the subject, I studied for it.

“I wanted to get into [baseball], and here I was getting too much studying. You had to make a certain average, and you had to work hard, and I couldn’t see myself doing that.” He had a falling-out with a teacher, and left the school.

So he went to Evander Childs High School in the Bronx; they needed a catcher.

The Israelis, it is said, find the desert-blooming flower called the sabra to symbolize what they see as their national character: prickly on the outside, sweet inside. The sabra could also represent Bob Berman: prickly for those who crossed him — especially if they crossed his religion. Every few minutes, as if it were a mantra, Berman said something like, “Nobody was ever going to call me ‘Jew-this’ or `Jew-that’ and get away with it. He had to put up his hands.”

After Berman graduated high school he went directly into baseball. Barbara Cassidy asks her father who tried to sign him.

“Branch Rickey, wasn’t it?”

“Branch Rickey. That’s it.”

“What club was it?’

“He had some kind of club. I don’t recall it,”

“Anyway,” she continues, seeming having heard it several hundred times growing up, “he had this contract all signed with Branch Rickey. And then he asked you, ‘What is your profession of faith,’ or whatever. And you said, ‘Are you saying you do not want Jews on your team?’ And you took the contract and tore it up.”

“That’s right, that’s right. “Now I get that.”

“Which was very cute of him,” she said.

Berman’s most blatant incident of anti-Semitism occurred during a spring training trip with the Senators in New Bern, South Carolina.

“Oh, and this one guy, I’ll never forget. This one fellow, I forget his name now, he was a pitcher. A farm boy, about six-foot-two or -three. Something like that. Probably about 190 pounds. Big kid. And this is his first season with the ballclub, too. He’s trying to make the ballclub, just like I’m trying to make it.

“We’re in an intrasquad game and he got pummeled one inning. He’s coming back to the bench. The guys started to kid him, which is normal. He turns around and says, `What do you expect ii you have this Jew? With an epithet attached to it. ‘This catcher, he doesn’t know how to call ’em, or anything like that.’

“I didn’t say anything. I put my glove down, took my mask off took my chest protector off, took my shin guards off, and I said, ‘Pardon me? What did you say? I didn’t hear you.’

“And he repeated it again. And — Bing! — I hit him. Down he goes. Can’t get up. The fellows of the team are getting all excited. he says, ‘I didn’t mean it.’

“I said, ‘No. He’s going to apologize. Otherwise I’m going to beat the living life outta him. Nobody can do what he did to me. I don’t care who he is. I’ll take a beating, too’. And he was made to apologize.

“Walter was the one who interfered, nicely. He said, ‘Thataboy!’ And from then on the word went out. ‘Leave that kid alone. He’s got the guts to fight and he’ll fight.’ And I made the ballclub.”

Berman was sent to Jersey City after his season in the sun; he later became part of the first known all-Jewish battery, with Al Schacht, in his pre-Clown Prince of Baseball days. After a couple years in the International League, and played semipro ball until the mid 1930’s. “I was a star then,” Berman said.

One team he played for was the South Philadelphia Hebrews knows as the SPHAs. “We were, next to pro, the finest semipro [club] you could find anywhere,” he said. They barnstormed all over, playing teams both black and white. “I don’t know how the hell we went, but we traveled. Listen, we’re talking about 1918, 1919. Things were pretty tough. Money was scarce, and here you are a Jewish ball team. Strictly Jewish. Mama mia!”

Did the opposing players bench jockey him? He is asked. “I guess they did. I don’t know. I had resigned myself to go through life down there, learn to take certain things, and show them you’re not afraid to back what you say. I didn’t lie to them. Whatever I said was the truth. I was a different character from most of these people. I had more education than most of them. I had been to college and all that. I would take a beating, but [the other guy] would too.”

Berman refused to do what almost every other Jewish ballplayer would have done in that era: change his name. “I wouldn’t change my name for anybody. I was born Robert L. Berman. That was it. And if you don’t like it you can do the next best thing.”

He married Dorothy Schrampf in 1926; their marriage lasted until her death, 50 years later. (Berman did not keep up Jewish observance past his childhood.) Meanwhile, a CCNY degree in hand, he began to teach — not Latin, but physical education. He spent some time teaching and coaching at Stuyvesant High School, the bulk of his post-baseball career was spent at Franklin K. Lane School in Brooklyn. One of the students he coached, Bob Grim, made the Yankees in the late 1950s. At one point Berman introduced the art of ballroom dancing into the New York City schools, and continued teaching it for years. (He even taught for a while at Arthur Murray’s dance studio.) He retired from Lane in 1968.

When I saw him in 1987 he said he still exercised every day, despite an arthritic hip. “It’s tough, but it’s up to the individual, that’s all. The good thing that helped me [was that] I loved to dance.” Thus his concern with my less-than-perfect posture.

The next time I saw him, five months later, he spent most of his time at a daycare center. The man had lost more of his memory, but none of his charm. He was overjoyed when I brought him a Washington Senators cap.

Less than a year later, in August 1988, Bob Berman died, four months after moving into a nursing home and five months short of his ninetieth birthday. The newspaper ran a death notice, a little bit smaller than the box score they had printed back in 1918.

“I was getting $150 a month,” he had said a year before he died. “And — listen to this — I would have played for nothing! Just to be playing ball there. I was in seventh heaven. I was in the major leagues and nobody can take that away from me.”

He was right. Nobody can.

My first week on the baseball beat I covered two no-hitters. It was my start on a rollercoaster ride through major-league baseball for the next 42 seasons, in which I would cover 11 more no-hitters, more than 6,000 regular season games, more than 200 World Series games and 40 All-Star Games.

What a thrill it has been.

I can’t imagine anyone having a more enjoyable life than I have had for 40 years, going to a game every day. Throw in two months in Florida every year for spring training and you can understand why it wasn’t hard to take. How many people wake up every morning and can’t wait to get to work? I couldn’t.

Oh, it wasn’t always easy. There were all those days and nights on the road and being away from my wife and children. There was endless travel and living out of suitcases arriving home from trips at 3 am with a day game to follow.

But I wouldn’t trade one day of it for anything else I could have done. There were too many pluses to outweigh the minuses if you love baseball as I do.

For more than 40 years I have lived and worked with some of the top people in my craft writers Dick Young, Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Dan Daniel, Milt Gross, Dave Anderson, Dan Parker, Bill Roeder, George Vecsey Sr. and Jr. and countless others.

And then there were the players, the great I developed friendships. The greatest of these as an individual and a ballplayer was Pee Wee Reese. But there were so many others … Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Bud Harrelson, Tom Seaver, Johnny Bench, Steve Garvey, Rusty Staub, Harmon Killlebrew, Jerry Koosman, the Torre brothers, Frank and Joe, Stan Musial and Ralph Kiner.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being a major-league baseball writer was the people I got to meet and know intimately. My greatest friendships have developed with the people I worked with, the writers I traveled with and visited in other cities. There is a camaraderie in the baseball writing fraternity that does not exist in other sports. Perhaps it is because we are thrown together to work and live nearly every day for eight months of every year. It’s like family after a while.

Great friendships developed with some of these men, as they did with broadcasters who traveled the same road.

I saw Vin Scully break in as a kid out of Fordham and go on to become the top man in his field. Red Barber, Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, Mel Allen, Kiner, Ernie Harwell and Jack Buck are a few of the play-by-play men with whom I developed strong relationships.

It all began so simply in 1946 when I was fresh out of the Army and working for the now defunct Long Island Press. I had decided shortly out of high school that what I wanted to be a baseball writer. The Press did not cover baseball on a regular basis then, but it leaned strongly on local angles. So I began going to Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium whenever the Dodgers and Yanks were home. I would write feature stories on Long Island players in the majors … Ford, Hank Behrman, Mickey Harris Bob Chipman, Sam Mele, Phil Rizzuto and so many others.

Then one day it happened.

As long as you’re going there everyday,” Mike Lee, my sports editor said to me, “you might as well cover the game.” All of a sudden I was a “beat” writer covering the Brooklyn Dodgers on a daily basis. I covered the Dodgers on a daily basis. I covered the Dodgers during their glory years in Brooklyn from 1946 until they left in 1957. Then I covered the Yankees during the Mantle-Maris era — under the great Casey Stengel from 1958-60 and under Ralph Houk in 1961. And when the Mets were born in 1962, I was assigned to follow them. The Long Island Press went out of business in March 1977, and I was out of work for eight hours before the Daily News hired me. I was “traded” from one paper to another in spring training and never missed a game.

One of the first major-league games I covered was a no-hitter that Ed Head pitched for Brooklyn against the Boston Braves on April 23, 1946. A week later — on April 30 — I covered a no-hitter. I covered 13. The others I covered were pitched by Rex Barney, Vern Bickford, Carl Erskine (2), Sal Maglie, Hoyt Wilhelm, Sandy Koufax, Bob Moose, Bill Stoneman and Ed Halicki. And, of course the perfect game by Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series.

I must confess that I did not see the last inning of a great many no-hitters. When I worked for an afternoon paper, myself and other reporters usually were parked outside a clubhouse door under the stands waiting to rush in to interview the pitcher. We got the final inning by radio or word of mouth.

Of the teams I covered on a regular basis — the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets — the most enjoyable days were spent with the Dodgers from the late ’40s until they left for Los Angeles. Strong friendships with the players developed because we lived together — players, writers, club officials — in the old barracks of what had been a war-time naval air base in Vero Beach. We ate our meals in the same dining room, writers’ families and the players families and in the evening we sat around in the headquarters lobby and played cards, pool, the jukebox or listened to Cal Abrams’ mother play piano. Walter O’Malley was always the big winner in the press-room poker games, and on Saturday nights, we moved the jukebox back into the press room and had parties. It was one happy family.

In those days when the team left Florida, it was usually to barnstorm north through a series of towns. We’d travel in two or three private train cars with a dinner and a club car. During Charlie Dressen’s days every night was a party night in that club car.

Of course the Dodgers of that era had a team that stayed together for so many years — Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Billy Cox, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Rube Walker, Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, and managers Burt Shotton, Charlie Dressen and Walter Alston — so you really got to know each other.

The wives always got together when we went on road trips. Dottie Reese and Millie Walker were my wife’s guests at our home when we were away, and my wife was always invited to the bridal or maternity shower for a player’s wife. Writers today don’t have that kind of relationship with players.

In the early years when I lived in Elmont and Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella lived in St. Albans, they frequently gave me a lift home after day games. I got to know both well. In Vero Beach, we were babysitters for the Campanellas when they went out, and Ruth and Roy sat for us when we went out. We sat for Roy Jr., now a successful Hollywood producer.

Pee Wee Reese was the leader of that club, and he set the tone for the relationships with the writers.

“If I have a bad day, I never read the papers the next day,” Reese would say. “These guys are my friends, but I know they have a job to do.”

Traveling by train overnight, or night and day, you got to know players better than nowadays, when travel is by plane and you’re only up in the air a few hours. There’s not as much conversation between the players and writers as there was then.

A big difference in my early years of baseball writing was that writers remained on the beat until they retired. It was considered the best job on any sports staff. But now, all the night games and extended travel, plus the big emphasis on pro football and basketball, it is no longer the desirable beat it once was. Baseball writers remain on the beat only a few years and move on to something else.

Covering the Dodgers in the ’50s was the greatest experience a writer could have. The team was in the pennant race every year and finished first six of 12 years. Usually, they were in the race up to the final week or final day.

It also was the Jackie Robinson era, and for most of the time, Ebbets Field was packed. It was fun working where so many people were coming to have fun.

When I switched to the Yankees in 1958, the transfer was eased by two people — Whitey Ford and Casey Stengel. I had written about Ford when he was a minor-leaguer from Long Island, so he knew me. His friendship with Mantle and the other “insiders” on the Yankees helped get me accepted by the team.

But being around Casey was the greatest pleasure of all. What a joy he was. Casey was indefatigable, and if you wanted to talk baseball, he would sit and talk for hours. In the dugout, a hotel lobby, a plane or a train, and always at a bar. I closed many a bar with Casey or left him to close them.

Like Reese, Casey also knew what a writer’s job was all about and was always ready with a story.

Next to Casey, what I remember most about my four years with the Yankees was 1961 — the Maris year. In September, when Maris was closing in on Babe Ruth’s home-run record, myself and other writers covering the club wrote about him every day. I don’t think that has happened with any other player, expect maybe Pete Rose. But not before 1961.

Maris was that story, and the games that month were almost incidental. Despite whatever else you might have read, Maris was great with the Yankee beat writers. He made himself available and gave us the stories we were looking for.

The Yankees won pennants three of the four years I covered them, so that made for a much more enjoyable assignment.

I was happy to switch back to the National league in 1962, especially with Casey at the helm of the Mets. But it was the first time I covered a loser. It also gave me the opportunity of keeping records on the club from Day One — records that would provide stories. The Mets — with losses and ineptness — were not inclined to provide writers with records. Because most of those the Mets set were negative, I became known as the “Keeper of the Neggies.” The ballclub, especially team president George Weiss, abhorred the records. The other writers loved them.

Covering the Mets in those early years was like traveling with a circus. We had a ringmaster named Stengel, a bunch of clowns in uniform, and we were welcome in every town we visited. Why not? A visit from the Mets usually meant two or three victories.

One thing about the Mets, though: They may have been awful, but they went first class. Charter flights to and from, and Frank Thomas, the club’s leading home-run hitter, serving the meals. “The Big Donkey,” as he was known, delighted in playing host.

During the Mets’ mediocre seasons after Casey retired, things were somewhat dull until first Tom Seaver and then Gil Hodges arrived. The Mets went from bottom to top in two years, and remained contenders for several years. They lucked into a pennant in 1973 when no one else seemed to want it, and almost beat the Oakland A’s in the World Series.

But it was all downhill after that, and the dreariest years I spent covering baseball were during the late ’70s when Lorinda deRoulet and her daughters operated the Mets. They didn’t have the money required to run a major-league club and they were amateurs.

One day, when they were trying to figure out how to save money, Bebe deRoulet suggested they take the old baseballs, wash them and use them again.

The fans quickly gave up on the team. It was no fun going to empty Shea Stadium night after night.

But Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon poured money back into the club, starting in 1980, and it became a vibrant franchise again, a good club to cover.

Writing baseball has always been fun for me, but a new aspect was added to my job in 1966 when I was elected by fellow writers to the office of secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

My duties have been to conduct the elections every year for the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year Awards, as well as supervise the Hall of Fame voting. In my capacity as secretary-treasurer I get to call the winners. You have no idea what a joy that is. As Billy Williams who goes into the Hall of Fame today, said when he saw me at the All Star Game: “You’re the good-news man.’

As I sat on that cement street corner at Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, wrapped in an old Army blanker, holding a brown bag of two salami sandwiches and an apple close to my chest, I was as close to heaven as a boy could get.

Rex Barney would start against the Yankees that day in the World Series and by the time I got to my bleacher seat many hours later, my eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

Joe DiMaggio of the hated Yankees would hit a homer and I would feel the anguish for days afterward.

I clung to that ticket receipt for many years, carrying it with me to combat in Korea some years later, to small newspaper offices in Indiana and Pennsylvania, to the hushed halls of Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated magazine and finally, in the early 1960s, to the New York Post.

The kid from Brooklyn, fanatic about Jackie and Pee Wee, Duke and Oisk, Carl and Campy, had made it big.

I remember covering my first game with the Mets and staring over at the giants of my trade, Jimmy Cannon, whose columns I read faithfully a few years earlier in the Pacific Stars and Stripes, Dan Parker, Dick Young, Joe Trimble, Joe King, Harold Rosenthal, Dan Daniel, Barney Kremenko, Milton, Gross, and the exalted Red Smith.

Soon I was traveling with a new team called the Mets, staying up late in hotel bars with Casey Stengel, arguing about Ron Hunt with Young, working next to Gross on one of his sensitive days, breaking bread with Snider and Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, the saintly Gil Hodges and all the others of my youth who were passing through the team in those early years.

Baseball had been more to me than God and religion. It had been life itself, dying a thousand deaths when Bobby Thomson connected, bleeding for Ralphie, cheering uncontrollably in a barracks in Japan when Elston Howard rolled out to Pee Wee for the final 1955 out and that championship season at last, clipping pictures and saving cards.

Now in the 1960s I was one of them, sitting next to Gil one day and talking about his frustrating Series, listening to Duke complain about a smart aleck kid first baseman named Kranepool, and over all watching the antics of the beloved Stengel.

Baseball writing is more than words on paper. It is the love of the game, the fraternalism of the press box, the joys of ribald humor, the sharing of secret dreams, the emotional high of the big scoop when a player trusts that you can handle this urgent message with dignified behavior.

For a year or two I watched the giants work. I said little. I observed. I saw these names I had read in the pages of the News, the Times, the Post, the Journal American, the Telegram, the Tribune as great teachers. All were generous with advice and time.

Soon I was becoming established. Others came to me for information about Rod Kanehl and Graig Anderson, asked my opinions of Marvelous Marv, congratulated me on a scoop about Larry Bearnarth.

The old names passed the scene and the Mets won in 1969 as the Yankees faded. Then the Yankees came back with Bill and Reggie and Goose and the rest, and the Mets struggled.

I flew to Los Angeles and San Francisco and Cincinnati and Dallas for big games. I ate in the finest restaurants. I lived in luxury hotels. I drank in whirling hotel bars with $100 a night hookers asking for my favors. I bought breakfast and actually picked up the tab for kids named Nolan Ryan and Jerry Koosman, Ron Blomberg and Ron Swoboda, Fritz Peterson and Tom Seaver.

The Mets won again in 1986. It didn’t matter much to me then. It had only become a job. The thrill was gone. I had grown older and the players had grown richer. The stories about contracts, free agency and salary arbitration and agents bored me to tears. The 25-year-olds who respectfully called me Mr. Allen when I was 35 years old, now yelled obscenities at me across a locker room.

Baseball writing lost its romance as it lost many of its best practitioners. Wise guy journalism became the style of the 1980s, knocking everything and everyone, exporting the game of baseball and the game of life before their powder was dry. Women sportswriters paraded through locker rooms. Radio “foofs” thrust microphones into every locker and ripped off the questions of the writers for a sound bite.

The travel was wearisome. The games were too long. The politics of the papers was too much.

I resigned from the Post in 1988. I now write a new column and an occasional sports column for the Gannett Newspapers out of Westchester. Nobody tells me to bleep myself anymore.

Television is now king, of course, but there are occasional stories I read that still sing to me. I thank the writer if I see him or offer a note to them from far away.

The thrill isn’t completely gone. I never miss an installation in Cooperstown. I still get breathless when Pee Wee walks up to me, grins, sticks out his hand and says, “Hi, Maury.”

How could a grown man with gray hair tell a little Colonel from Kentucky that he still loves him?

The date was June 26, 1920 when New York city’s High School of Commerce conquered Lane Tech High School of Chicago 12-6 for the inter-city baseball championship at Wrigley Field, known at that time as Cubs Park.

The game was featured by a home run over the right field wall by Louis Gherig (sic), the New York lad known as the “Babe Ruth” of high schools.

The real Babe never poled one more thrilling. The bases were filled, two were out and it was the ninth inning. Lane Tech pitcher Tom Walsh complained of a sore arm and was replaced by Norring Ryerholm.

Ryerholm, Lane Tech’s star player, shifted from shortstop to catcher to the mound. Ryerholm got the first two batters, but walked the next two. An error filled the bases.

Gehrig had been up five times and made nary a hit. He walked twice, but hadn’t been able to get hold of the ball. The crowd was wondering if the stories of his batting prowess were all myths. This time he made good. Ryerholm grooved one and the “Babe” landed on it.

The ball sailed out high and far over the right field screen by many feet, finally landing in Sheffield Avenue, and bouncing onto a front porch across the street.

It was a blow of which any big leaguer would have been proud and was walloped by a boy who hadn’t yet started to shave. For the first time the name Gherig (sic) went over the wires that stretch across the country.

“It was a homer mentioned in the corridors of Lane for many decades,” said Emil Roth, who recently retired as assistant principal at Lane Tech. “He looked the same when he was a Yankee first baseman thick legged, and wide-shouldered.”

The fabled homer is a good one for trivia buffs. Next time anyone asks “In which big league park did Gehrig hit his first homer?” You can answer Wrigley Field. And then add “they spelled his name Gherig.”

Most of Brooklyn’s pre-Ebbets history revolves around a territory known collectively and individually as Washington Park. Three separate structures housed the grand old game in Brooklyn.

Organized ball fist set fool on the site (Washington Park I) in 1883 when a team representing the Interstate League, an offshoot of the Old American Association, set up shop. The operation was such a success that owner Charles H. Byrne picked up an American Association franchise and Major League ball came in on May 5, 1884. Coincidentally the locale was also the site of the first Mets-Orioles clash (the American Association’s New York Mets and the National League’s Baltimore Orioles) in an 1887 exhibition and portions of both the 1887 and 1888 World Series.

The wooden stadium burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances on May 29, 1889, but was quickly rebuilt (Washington Park II) and re-occupied by June of that season. The National League appeared for the first time the next year, but by 1891 the ballpark was abandoned. As part of a settlement with former Brooklyn Players League owner George Chauncey the team moved out to Eastern Park in East New York.

Eastern Park, home of the Superbas was geographically to far east for the fans, so President Charles Ebbets wanted to move back to Washington Park. Unfortunately, the land have been sold and simply no longer available. Ebbets then did the next best thing; building a new park (Washington III) diagonally across the street from the old field.

Ebbets opened the third and last Washington Park onApril30, 1898, and it was home until the new era of steel and concrete stadiums almost instantly forced the stadium into obsolescence. When Ebbets Field made its debut with the 1913 season the Ward Brothers of the Federal League Brookfeds took ownership of the Washington Park pouring $250,000 worth of concrete and brick to erect bleachers and a 12 foot high wall around the field.

On one beautiful Saturday morning, I set off in a search of these fabled grounds, taking the F Train, and debarking at the Carroll Street Station. The surrounding neighborhood is quite pleasant, but proceeding down Third Street, and crossing the colorful Gowanus Canal.

Walking past junk yards, garages, and printing plants one soon spies a Consolidated Edison facility at First Avenue. The brick wall all along First Avenue is the 12 foot high barrier the Wards had built in 1914, and more of it can be seen along First Street.

Some of the Con Ed employees are well aware – and quite proud – of their workplace’s physical position in baseball history. Other, newer workers, are hearing about it for the first time. At one time, I was told there was a plaque marking the site, but alas that is long gone.

Continuing along Third Street, one comes across the James J. Byrne Memorial Playground which contains a small fieldstone, two story house, with a peeling red roof. At first glance it is nothing more than a run down comfort station..at second glance too.

But this field house is much more – it should be a baseball shrine. Firstly, the building dates back to 1699. Known to some as the Vechte-Cortelyou House of the Old Stone House of Gowanus, it was rebuilt in 1935 from the structure’s original stones. The Battle of Long Island with General Cornwallis defeating George Washington took place there and it is for this reason alone that Washington Parks I, II and III are so named. Moreover, this playground with ballgloves and spaldeens still in evidence is the site of Washington Parks I and II, and the field house served as a clubhouse for the Brooklyn teams of that era.

While the locals may gawk and stare at someone in a suit and tie taking pictures of the place, they are calmed at learning of their Brooklyn neighborhood’s roots in baseball history. Interestingly, even though there is no plaque on the building the people know all about George Washington, so now the historical score is tied and the race is on to see who gets a plaque up there first.

Brooklyn starter Rube Mellon and his older cousin, Giants starter Cliff shared a family trail of big ears. A sportswriter quipped; “Between them, the two Meltons couldn’t get through a revolving door.” Because of the way the Dodgers were pitching, they resembled a revolving door; giving up a total of 26 runs on 18 hits.

The Giants unleashed their barrage in the first, with the Dodgers ahead 2-0. Rube gave up three bases on balls picking off one of the runners. He then served up a homer to Giants first baseman Phil Weintraub making the score 3-2. After one inning, Durocher has seen enough of Cliff’s cousin and brought in Les Webber to start the next inning. Webber then proceeded to give up three more runs; including a two-run homer by shortstop Buddy Kerr.

It had all the makings of a Marx Brothers picture, the more Durocher brought in pitchers the stranger it got.

The next victim called to mound was Al Zachary.

Zachary picked up where Webber left off, allowing two Giants to reach first on passes, and letting two of them advance home. Fred Ostermueller was next out of the bullpen, but wished he’d stayed in bed. He allowed eight runs on just two hits and walked two. (Ostermueller must have set a major league record for walks in an inning!)

While the Giants were cruising with a 16-7 lead in the sixth, Durocher brought in another victim to the mound. This time, Tom Warren gave up two more runs.

By this time, Leo was tearing out what little hair he had left. In an attempt to probably fire up the troops, Leo decided to talk to “friends”, the men in blue. He started talking with home plate umpire “Beans” Reardon. When Leo was finished, home plate was covered with dirt.

With act one of his skit over, Leo brought up the next curtain by appearing with first base umpire Tom Dunn in order to get the umps approval. And Dunn, having given Leo enough time, acted in concert with the other umpires gave Durocher the thumb and out he went. While Leo was making his grand exit fans showed their disapproval by converting the playing field into a trash heap.

The Giants continued the hit parade in the eighth; scoring eight more runs and setting a new team record for runs scored with 26. They broke the old record by one run, which coincidentally was set by the New York Giants in a game against Cincinnati in June of 1901 where the final score was 25-13.

Harry Feldman came on in the fourth for New York after Cliff Melton faltered and gave up seven runs on seven hits.

When the “variety” show was finally over, the Giants and Dodgers were making their way to the clubhouse when a fan allegedly took aim and let a bottle fly in the direction of Joe Medwick striking him in the groin.

The smoke had cleared, Feldman had given up only one run off of five hits in the five and two- thirds innings for the win. The Polo Grounds hit men banged out a total of 18 hits, with their star first baseman Phil Weintraub knocking in 11 runs with a home run, triple, two doubles and missed by one RBI the record of “Sunny” Jim Bottomley set in 1926. Catcher Ernie Lombardi and Mel Ott both had good days in their own right: Lombardi drove in 7 runs, while Ott walked 6 times tying his own record set 15 years earlier.

The Dodgers issued a total of 17 free passes tying the major league record ironically set by the Dodgers team of 1903 against Philadelphia.

Lost in the shuffle was Dodgers’ first baseman Howie Schultz, who went 3 for 4 with 2 homers in a losing cause.

The Giants gave their fans something to cheer about, even though they would lose the nightcap by a score of 5-4. For the first time since 1937, the Giants would do better in the standings than their neighborhood rivals from Flatbush. It would not be until 1951 that they would give their fans something more to cheer about.

If there is such a thing as “a fully matured baseball fan”, I was one when the Dodgers left New York. Unfortunately, I was only nine years old. Trapped in a child’s body, I couldn’t convince my father that, although we lived only a crosstown bus away from Yankee Stadium, going there just wouldn’t do.

I was a Dodger fan and I wasn’t interested in any house that Ruth built. But I never did get to the tangible Ebbets Field before it was too late.

I took the departure of the Dodgers as a test of faith. Descended from a people for 800 years heartened by the knowledge that the British would soon be leaving their island I knew that the Dodgers had been around longer than O’Malley and would be around when he was gone.

Turning away from my team was the last thing on my mind. Instead I learned what I could about the players who called Ebbets Field home. I was most surprised to find that the Dodgers, too, once had a guy named Babe who had hit .333 one year- as high as Ruth or any other Yankee ever had.

And there was more — the 241 hits — a total never matched by a Yankee; the 143 runs scored, 416 total bases, and .678 slugging average — figures unequalled by any other New York National Leaguer, although none would lead the league in 1930 as Hack Wilson, Chuck Klein and Bill Terry racked up still unbroken records. (This wasn’t new for Herman, I found -the year before he had hit .381 and missed the batting title then too.)

But the final surprise Babe Herman would give me waited until 1981, as I watched the introduction of players of six decades in a Dodger Stadium World Series pre-game ceremony. There in my TV screen stood the guy Dazzy Vance called “the Headless Horseman of Ebbets Field” — a man I always assumed already belonged to the ages — Floyd Caves Herman.

For a few months before he died I spent a lot of time thinking about Herman because I had landed a bit part in the writing of an encyclopedia of baseball biography and drew him as one of my assignments. The 150 words allowed me to depict a man who left as strong an imprint on the Dodgers as any who ever set foot on Ebbets Field, did not allow me to do justice to him. And so I toyed with the idea of writing or even calling him, with the vague notion of maybe putting together something longer to try and set the record straight on a few things.

Of course, I had always known that there were severe limits as to how straight the record could be set. We, after all, talking of a man who had to deny having been hit on the head by a fly ball, admit to having been hit on the chest, and refuse bets on whether he might be hit on the shoulder.

Some, like Casey Stengel, claimed that these stories were misleading — that Herman really wasn’t a bad fielder, just a little absent minded.

While I suspected that, on the while, they were correct, it is a matter of record that after Herman led all national league first basemen in errors in 1927, manager Wilbert Robinson decided to move him to the outfield to get the bat of the less mobile Del Bissonnette into the lineup.

As far as putting some jolt into the batting order, the move worked. Herman batted .340 and Bissonnette hit 25 home runs to set a new record for rookies. But the results in the field were at least as impressive.

Bissonnette more than filled Herman’s shoes — leading both leagues in errors at first base. And the Babe didn’t let the move affect his defense at all — he led the majors in errors at his new position.

Since my initial discovery of New York’s forgotten.390 hitter, I had come to realize that Herman’s batting achievements were eclipsed more by these tales than by anything Wilson, Klein or Terry achieved. Herman personified the madness of Brooklyn baseball during the 1920-1941 pennant drought. When his name was mentioned, no strange story seem out of place.

Still, I was a little surprised when the news of his passing reached us here in the northern suburbs of the Bronx a while back, and the Boston Globe described him, not as a slugger, but as a base stealing star with the ‘Daffiness Boys’ Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1920’s.

I wondered was this a subtle, and astute allusion to the fact that Herman also finished second in the National League in steals the same year he had done all that hitting, or simply a reference to Herman’s most famous steal of third base-the time there were already two guys on it?

Herman used to argue that the incredible scene with the three of them on third base was Dazzy Vance’s fault, as the pitcher shouldn’t have been running back to third while Herman was sliding into it. But that really didn’t speak to the fact of Chick Fewster in there between the two of them.

But then even history has not spoken on the question of who was coaching the whole mess. It’s twenty five years since Otto Miller, the Dodgers third base coach of the time, went to his grave privately claiming not to have been out there that inning. He used to explain that he took credit for it at the baseball dinners anyhow, because it was easier to take the bows than to tell the story of who had actually been in the coaching box — and why.

In the Bronx, back when the Yankees were the only team in town, they used to think that Babe Ruth’s records would never be broken. That was before Roger Maris and Hank Aaron. And Lou Brock and Pete Rose were no kinder to Ty Cobb.

Some will claim that the pages he wrote in the history of the national pastime were the work of a baseball dyslexic, but the fact remains that Babe Herman’s legacy cannot be eroded in the same way as Ruth’s or Cobb’s.”

The Bums got three men on base. “Terrific — which base?” You can’t top that — no one is going to put four men on third base.

But as to the question of putting a woman on base — well, Herman came about as dose to doing it as anyone. In 1935, from the midst of a raucous Cincinnati crowd watching one of the first major league night games, strode a female night club singer, bat in hand. The chanteuse made her way to the plate and told Dizzy Dean’s brother Paul to pitch to her.

The on-deck batter who gave her the bat she grounded out with? As Leo Durocher put it-Who else would it be? — Babe Herman.

We won’t get to find out what was going through his mind as he handed over the bat that night in Cincinnati, or even who was coaching third on the day he became a myth.

I knew that I should have written to the Brooklyn’s Babe, but at least, I made sure to write to Duke Snider when he had his recent triple bypass operation a while back — they’re just not making Brooklyn Dodgers anymore.

It would have been great to know Floyd Caves Herman. But it was real good just to know that we Dodger fans had our Babe too, back before Ebbets Field was a high rise.

Berg will have a particular interest in Peacock inasmuch as both of them started their professional baseball careers in positions other than that behind the bat, Peacock, however, did have this on his teacher. He did catch as a semi-pro and also as a collegian in the University of North Carolina whereas Berg made the Princeton baseball team as a shortstop. When he left Princeton, he had his mind made up to be a lawyer and decided that professional baseball would give him the money to carry out his ambition.

As a result, he joined the Brooklyn club as an infielder. That was in 1923. He went to Paris, that winter and attended the University of Paris extending his hobby of studying the romantic languages which he thought might be useful in law. That one year in the Sorbonne, added to his four years in Princeton enabled him to read Latin, Greek, French, Provencal Spanish, Italian and Portuguese in addition to Hebrew and English while he also found himself able to converse fairly well in French, Spanish and Italian. Incidentally, it might be mentioned that when he was ten years of age he read the five books of the Mosaic law in the original Hebrew, showing that he combined intense study with his sports activities.

“But,” says Moe, “My linguistic accomplishments never helped me get base-hits off Lefty Gomez, a Spaniard, Joe Cascarella, an Italian or pitchers of any nationality. In baseball, the fact that a player can talk several languages means nothing if he is up there with the bases filled and two out. Baseball is the most democratic of games. I have roomed with players who never finished their high school education and found them quick witted, able to carry on a conversation intelligently on general subjects, and, in some cases, owning a better knowledge of baseball than I did.”

From Brooklyn, Berg went to Minneapolis, to Toledo, to Reading, Pa. It was then he was bought by the Chicago White Sox; as a utility infielder, a role in which he could make good. In 1927, Manager and catcher Ray Schalk broke his thumb. Buck Crouse, now manager at Baltimore, replaced him behind the bat. A foul tip put him out of commission without delay, putting the catching up to Harry McCurdy. A few days later, he broke a finger and Berg volunteered to catch until one of the three regulars was able to supplant him.

Moe never went back to infielding. He caught 107 games in 1929. In 1930, however, he injured his knee and was released to Cleveland in `31. Cleveland let him go to Washington in `32. When that season was ended, he joined a team that visited Honolulu and Japan, remaining in Japan for several weeks to coach the Nipponese players and also adding their language to his repertoire. In `34, when the American League sent a star team to Japan and Manila, Berg went along. While he was touring, Washington released him but when he stepped off the boat the day after the 1935 campaign opened, it was to find a Boston contract waiting for him.

Berg did not have an error in his last seven games in `31. He caught seventy-five games in `32 and thirty-five in `33 and the first six games of `34 went without a misplay, giving him a run of 117 games in succession without an error, having 324 put outs and forty-seven assists.

At the present time, Berg is a member of law firm in New York City having studied law at Columbia University during the winter months and being admitted to the bar close to ten years ago. But, he still loves baseball.

Now, take Peacock’s career. When he quit the University of North Carolina in 1933 after four years of baseball, football and basketball at high school, one year in all three sports at the Episcopal school and four years of baseball and two years of football at college, he looked around for a job suitable for one of his talents. Like Berg, he found baseball the most advantageous. He joined the Wilmington, N.C. Club and was assigned to the outfield and infield duties.

In 1934, he divided his time between the outfield and catching but when sent to Toronto in 1935, he was used behind the bat in only twenty-five games. He was patrolling the outfield or guarding second base the rest of the time. Cincinnati, which had controlled him for two years, sent him to Nashville for the 1936 season. There he was a catcher once more with pinch hitting on the side. While he showed faults as a catcher he starred with the bat.

It was at the end of that season that Commissioner Landis declared him a free agent. The Red Sox stepped in and, outbidding several other major league clubs, induced him to sign a Boston contract. Still too green for major league duty, Peacock served with distinction for Minneapolis in ’37, catching ninety-four games and batting .311. Finishing the season with the Red Sox, Manager Cronin placed the stamp of approval on him and said that under the tutelage of Moe Berg he would become a regular in 1938.

“I am glad I turned to professional baseball,” said Peacock last September. “I have found it more enjoyable each year and certainly more profitable in a financial way. I hope to have to good fortune to realize by ambition of being a big league regular for many years to come.”