Flag Fights

Old Satchel Paige took one long, pleased look at the 78,382 fans. Said Satch: "I should be working on percentage." The crowd that jammed Cleveland's Municipal Stadium last week was the largest in major-league night baseball. All Cleveland had come to see 1948's biggest drawing card pitch the league-leading Indians into their eighth straight victory.

Satchel, who might have ranked with such major-league greats as Mathewson, Walsh and Johnson had he been born white, and given a big-league chance before he was 44, was too good a showman to disappoint a crowd like that. Sticking mainly to his fast ball against the last-place Chicago White Sox, Paige worked with the kind of control that is almost a lost art among modern pitchers. He walked only one, struck out five, let only two runners get past first, won his fifth victory, 1-0.

Slender Lead. It was the fourth consecutive shutout by Manager Lou Boudreau's Indians, tying a league record set by Cleveland in 1903. What did Satch think of his performance? Said he, matter-of-factly: "I'm getting back in shape." But it would take more than Satch Paige in shape for Cleveland to clinch its first pennant in 28 years. The Indians promptly dropped three in a row to the White Sox, and hung precariously to their lead.

This week, only three games separated the four first-division American League clubs. The. invisible wires that held up ancient Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics had unraveled a bit; the A's dropped from second to fourth, behind the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Manager Bucky Harris had desperately shaken up his in & out Yankees after losing four straight games (the new first baseman: Outfielder Tommy Henrich), and sent to Newark for 24-year-old Pitcher Bob Porterfield. Rookie Porterfield won two of his first three games.

Rags to Riches. In the National League, the race was just as tight, the scrambling just as fierce. Back in July, the first-place Boston Braves had a comfortable six-game margin. The embarrassed Brooklyn Dodgers, last year's champions, grumbled in last place. Fourteen days later the Dodgers, already on the way back, switched from loud Manager Leo Durocher to patient Burt Shotton, and kept going. Last week, in an Ebbets Field doubleheader that had some of the tenseness and all the excitement of a World Series, the rags-to-riches Bums beat the Braves in the opener, 8-7, and seized first place amid pandemonium in the bleachers. A couple of hours later, amid more pandemonium, the Braves took it back, 2-1, and Brooklyn's bright blue banner was hauled down. One big reason why it was too soon to count the faltering Braves out: Shortstop Alvin Dark, whose fat .331 batting average, made him a likely Rookie-of-the-Year.

Right alongside the Dodgers this week were the St. Louis Cardinals, thanks mainly to a modest young outfielder named Stan Musial, who owns the league's most sensational batting average (.381) and also leads the league in runs batted in (95), hits, runs, doubles and triples.

At this point, only the incurably partisan and the bold were making any bets on who would play in the World Series.

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