Southpaw

As the major-league baseball teams passed the season's one-third mark last week, the leading pitcher was neither Bob Feller, Hal Newhouser, Harry Brecheen nor Ewell Blackwell, nor any of the other established celebrities of the mound. On the figures, the best pitcher was a hooknosed, six-foot left-hander named Warren Spahn; habitat Braves Field, Gaffney Street, Boston.

This week, against Pittsburgh's plummeting Pirates, 26-year-old Pitcher Spahn spun his tenth win, breezing through with six strikeouts. That put him one up on Cincinnati's smart Right-Hander Blackwell, two up on Cleveland's swift Feller, and halfway to every pitcher's goal--a 20-game victory total.

Outside Boston, fans and sport columnists, who naturally go for the personalities, have scarcely noticed steady, workmanlike Southpaw Spahn. In Boston, they have not even thought up a nickname that stuck (his Braves mates call him "The Nose"). Except for his high-heeled delivery (see cut) and his knack of nipping runners off first base,* there was not much out of the way about shy, Buffalo-born Warren Spahn. In every baseball manager's book, young left-hander pitchers are automatically listed as eccentric. Not so Spahn. He has what few southpaws have ever shown in their first full big-time season: control, relaxed confidence and a bag of assorted pitches (in 100 innings pitched, he has walked 42 batters, struck out 49).

Like Bob Feller, Warren Spahn learned it from his father: the Spahns worked out on Buffalo's sand lots. He had barely made the Braves in 1942, when the Army took him. He came out of Europe with a wound ("just a scratch on the foot") and a first lieutenancy. Last year, in something more than half the season with the Braves, he won eight and lost five. This year he put together a string of eight wins before his two defeats.

Nobody paid much mind to Manager Billy Southworth when he sounded off about Spahn in Florida: "He'll win 20; he'll be one of the best." Every manager has a right to talk that way about a prospect in training and, besides, wasn't this guy a lefthander? By this week, Warren Spahn was making other National League managers sit up and take notes on him, and making Southworth look very right indeed.

* Which is highly developed, but far short of the form once shown by Diamond Comedian Nick Altrock. In a single game (1901), Southpaw Altrock walked eight batters, picked seven of them off first base.

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