Fielder's Choice

In a crusade to suppress sin and soup up circulation, the New York Post Home News last week inflated a new dragon. It launched a series called "Millions on Every Pitch," supposedly exposing a nationwide, $33 million-a-day gambling racket based on professional baseball. Cried the Post: "Powerful gambling syndicates, ruthless bookmakers and gangsters, common cutthroats and other criminal vermin [make millions] at the expense of the great sport of American youth."

Next day Post readers advised young (33) Editor James A. Wechsler to take a look at his own sport section. For the benefit of criminal vermin and ordinary baseball bettors among its readers, the Post was running "Today's Pitching Form" --"official" daily gambling odds on the big-league games. In an editorial, Jimmy Wechsler lamely explained that he was just giving his readers a fielder's choice. Wrote he: "We do not believe the gambling urge would vanish if we left this arithmetical intelligence out of this newspaper . . ." The Post gets its odds from a "reliable" Jersey handbook, presumably a member of one of the "powerful gambling syndicates."

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