St. Louis Takes the Lead

The St. Louis Cardinals looked good, on paper. They had not always looked good on the field. There were times when the indignant citizens of St. Louis were convinced that calm little Eddie Dyer, in his first year as the Cards' manager, ought to go back to Texas and the oil business. Last week, Eddie Dyer's Cards, after racing neck & neck with the Brooklyn Dodgers, pulled into a 2 1/2-game lead and all was right with Eddie Dyer's world.

Durocher's Trick. The big surprise of the season was what had kept the Brooklyn bums up so long. The answer was easy: it was all an Indian rope trick by the Dodgers' dapper Leo Ernest ("The Lip") Durocher (pronounced Dee-ro-ture in Brooklyn), a man who owns 20 pairs of shoes and pays $175 apiece for his suits.

The Lip had played hunches and hustle all season. If the mood came over him, he would take out a batter who already had two strikes on him, put in a pinch hitter Says he: "I just get a feeling." He kept his bullpen in a stew: sometimes, against a single batter, he deliberately used one pitcher for a fast ball, another for a curve. For 15 weeks, with only about four first-rate men (Ed Stanky, Peewee Reese, Dixie Walker and Pete Reiser), Durocher had held the Dodgers at the top of the league. It was a great performance, worthy of making Durocher "manager of the year," but it was not enough to keep the talented, slow-starting Cards out of first place last week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.