McCarthy's Bloomer Boys

All spring Boston sportwriters leaped on old Joe McCarthy and his Boston Red Sox. They had boomed the Sox as the team to beat in the American League, and the Sox simply had not lived up to their advance notices. The writers dubbed the team the "bloomer boys," and wrote long, helpful columns telling Marse Joe McCarthy, winner of eight pennants for the New York Yankees, how to run a ball club.

At one point, with the Red Sox in the lower division, the rumor got around that Joe had resigned. Reporters found him in his hotel room, naked except for a towel around his middle, drinking a bottle of beer. McCarthy, who had spent a year and a half in exile after leaving the Yankees, said: "I didn't come back into baseball to quit after two months."

Last week, Boston's sportwriters were eating crow for all the unkind things they had said about Marse Joe. The Sox were battling it out for the American League lead, neck & neck with the Philadelphia A's, the Yankees and the Indians.

It was no surprise to grumpy Joe, the master baseball mechanic, who kept saying all along: "We'll be all right. Let me do the worrying." Like any good mechanic, he knew how much horsepower was at his command. The trick was to get the engine tuned up. It took tinkering and time.

His infield needed tightening. He had a newcomer, Vern Stephens (an expensive refugee from the St. Louis Browns) at shortstop. A reformed shortstop, Johnny Pesky, was playing third base. And Joe had a rookie first baseman, Billy Goodman, who took a while to get warmed up, and was now proving to be one of the league's best.

It had also taken a while for McCarthy's highly touted boys to realize that they had to run to catch fly balls, take a healthy swing to knock a ball out of the infield, hustle to throw an opposing batter out at first.

At week's end the Sox had won 43 of their last 60 games. The experts could think of nothing except fire or flood (or maybe a slump) that would keep them out of the World Series. The tipoff on Red Sox power and depth: when their batting star, Ted Williams, was benched recently with a bad back, the club won 13 out of 15 games. Said Joe McCarthy last week, with the air of a man saying all there was to say, '.'You got to lose some ball games during a season and we happened to lose ours early, that's all."

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