For McKechnie and McCarthy

Last week the Cincinnati Reds were leading the National League by seven and a half games and the New York Yankees were leading the American League by eight. To most baseball fans this was not surprising. The majority of pre-season prognosticates had picked the Reds and Yankees as favorites in the 1939 pennant race. What was surprising were the names of the two pitchers who had so far been the push that put them in front: Bucky Walters and Atley Donald.

Last spring when everyone was shouting about the Reds' great pitching staff, no one hailed 29-year-old William Henry ("Bucky") Walters as an approaching tornado. A made-over third baseman whom Manager Bill McKechnie had bought from the Phillies last summer, Pitcher Walters had a natural sinker (the reason he flopped as an infielder) and miracle Manager McKechnie had taught him some tricks of the trade; but the Reds had much abler pitchers in Johnny Vander Meer, Lee Grissom, Paul Derringer.

Last week, however, hardworking, lanky Bucky Walters whizzed past them all. So far this season he had won 19 games--five more than Derringer, twelve more than Grissom, 14 more than Vander Meer --and he was batting .338 to boot. He was not only the No. 1 pitcher of both major leagues but the difference between success and failure in the Reds' pennant race.

The Yankees' outstanding pitcher, 26-year-old Atley Donald, is even more of a dark horse and even more of a twirlwind. Brought up from the minor-league Newark team last spring to learn the ways of the Big Time, the earnest Louisiana farm boy, who had gone uninvited to the Yankee training camp five years before to beg Manager Joe McCarthy for a tryout, was completely overshadowed by the famed Yankee pitching roster of Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Monte Pearson and a half dozen others.

In May, Donald won the first major-league game he pitched. Then he won another and another and another. Baseball fans began to notice the Yanks' rookie. Skeptics said he was just lucky: he was aided by the heavy hitting and smart fielding of his mighty teammates. But after he had won nine games in a row, even the toughest skeptic had to admit that the Yankees were not making Donald but that Donald was helping make the Yankees. Last week, trying for his 13th consecutive victory, Rookie Donald, whose outstanding assets are a sneaky fast ball, a gimlet eye and a photographic mind, was defeated (by the Tigers) for the first time this year. He not only went down in the record books as the first pitcher ever to win twelve successive games in his first year as a major-leaguer, but presented Manager McCarthy with at least twelve games from an unexpected source.

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