News from the Grapefruit Circuit

Sportswriters were wiring home 6,000,000 words a week from the Florida and California baseball training camps. But all the words they wrote could be summed up in two: job jitters. Nobody felt safe, and everybody hustled.

It was baseball's first real spring training spree since 1942, and never had so many been after so few jobs. The sun-brown Florida shopkeepers and orange pickers who watch Grapefruit League exhibition games nodded sagely: it looked like a good season.

In the old days, if a player got his sweat shirt damp by working too hard, it usually took him a leisurely hour in the clubhouse to change; now the men were back on the field in five minutes. The competition was threeway: 1) a crop of rookies just blooming when draft boards nipped them; 2) big-name stars, back after a year or two in service and looking for their old spots; 3) the wartime stand-ins who refused to believe all the bad things said about them.

Evers Has a Chance. Not even the great Joe Di Maggio, after three G.I. years, was taking any chances. Hollow-cheeked, 31, and still nursing ulcers, Di Mag stepped to bat one day last week, swung as if the final game of the World Series depended on it, clouted one homer, one double, and two singles in four times up. Ex-Marine Ted Williams, 27, once content to be baseball's best batsman, was now working at his fielding, too. Brooklyn's Dixie Walker, the pride of Flatbush, was no cinch to be a regular.

At spring training's halfway point, most of the wartimers were going down, the oldtimers were coming up; and a half dozen flashy rookies were having both ups & downs. One little slip by any one of the trio of Wakefield, Mullin and McCosky. and a well-muscled youngster named Hoot Evers* would make Detroit's outfield. (But Evers himself slipped this week, fractured his ankle, will be out for about eight weeks.) Dick Sisler, who hits the ball farther but not as often as his famous father, was trying to catch the Cardinals' Ray Sanders off first base. But the rookies expected to shine brightest were two boys with the same name, but different ways of spelling it: stumpy Grady ("Hoss") Hatton of the Cincinnati Reds and screwball Joe Hatten of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Heavy Bets on Hoss. Scouts from 15 of the 16 big-league teams had knocked on the door of Third Baseman Hoss Hatton's home in Beaumont, Tex. He is 23, has legs like a piano and arms like a buggy-whip, and specializes in line drives that often go clean out of the park. In four years at the University of Texas and two with an Army team, he had hit into but one double play.

Hoss picked carefully among his offers : he turned down the Yankees because the competition would be too stiff and he might wind up on the farm team in Newark; he rejected the Dodgers (who offered the most money) because he didn't think he'd like Brooklyn; a Card scout wrote him a nine-page letter, but he thought the Cardinals were too penny-pinching. Finally he took a $27,500 bonus for joining the Reds. If Hoss doesn't play third base this year, General Manager Warren Giles says he will have to fire five scouts.

Pitcher Joe Hatten, a 28-year-old southpaw, looks like the nearest thing to a freshman Dizzy Dean. He has a deadly sidearm motion that should baffle right-handed hitters, has a curve ball that can turn a corner. The Dodgers thought enough of him before he entered the Navy to give up a seasoned pitcher, Van Lingle Mungo, in a straight trade. Like most southpaws, Hatten is regarded with some suspicion as a wild man. Already some tall stories are being told about him. Sample: once when his team was just one run ahead at Minneapolis, he deliberately walked three men, just to see if he could strike out the next three with the heat on. He did.

* No kin to John J. (Johnny) Evers of the famed double-play terrors, Tinker to Evers to Chance.

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