Equinoctial Climax
(See front cover)
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Crack! Thrown by the Boston centerfielder, the ball hit the catcher's mitt in the same split-second that Travis Jackson of the New York Giants slid for the plate. An instant later, a cloud of dust, settling slowly in the bright September sun, revealed the emphatic figure of Umpire George Magerkurth leaning toward the plate with his hand pointed toward the ground, palm down.
Loudly questioned by the Boston crowd, the Boston press and the Boston team, which swarmed angrily out onto the field, that gesture last week was highly significant. It meant a run for the Giants in the tenth inning. The run—on a hit by Pitcher Hal Schumacher who a few minutes later retired the next three Boston batters—meant that the Giants won a close ball game, 2-to-1. Winning the ball game meant that the Giants had won the National League Pennant, set the stage for a World Series that will be not merely the equinoctial climax of a great baseball year but a sporting freak of the first order.
All this year's games for baseball's "world championship" will be played on two fields not much more than a good outfielder's throw apart: the Polo Grounds, home field of young Horace Stoneham's New York Giants, and the Yankee Stadium, home field of old Jacob Ruppert's New York Yankees.
In New York last week, 37-year-old Manager-First Baseman Bill Terry of the Giants, whose left knee is now so stiff that playing baseball is acutely painful, announced that he would retire after the Series, direct the team from the bench next year. Non-playing Manager Joe McCarthy of the Yankees was photographed with his happy beer-brewing employer who pays him $35,000 a year and will get some of it back in sales of his brew at the World Series games. Owner Stoneham, who inherited the Giants from his father last January and has followed them on road trips this summer, hurried arrangements for improving his grandstand as a result of the Pennant he had just won in his first season as a big-league owner. Delighted with the prospect of another "subway series," New York's Interborough Rapid Transit Co. promised to double the length of its trains to take care of the 100,000 extra passengers who will use them every afternoon of play.
The first World Series which exhibited dramatic unity of place was played between the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox in 1906. There have been only three since, in 1921-22-23, all in New York. This year, in a race as remarkably one-sided as the National League's was close, the Yankees clinched the American League Pennant on Sept. 9, a record. Last week, while the Giants were nosing out the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, the Yankees were topping off their season by piling up some of the most impressive figures ever made by a Pennant winner.