Life & Death

In Cleveland, there was a wake. After 113 days of squatting on a platform above his confectionery store "until the Indians got back in first place," Exhibitionist Charley Lupica (TIME, Aug. 19) was invited down last week by Bill Veeck, exhibitionist president of the Cleveland baseball club. In the mathematics of the 1949 pennant race, the Indians, World Series winners a year ago, were dead. To mourn the sad occasion, Veeck, crowned with a silk hat but still without a tie (he never wears one), drove a horse-drawn hearse into Municipal Stadium with all the Indians trailing along as pallbearers and mourners. They buried last year's pennant beneath a cardboard tombstone back of the center-field fence.

Elsewhere, as the season entered its final week, baseball was alive and kicking, and the National and American League pennant fights getting more hair-raising day by day. The Brooklyn Dodgers, whose revitalized pitchers were suddenly throwing more strikes, fewer home-run balls, rolled into St. Louis for their final whack at the front-running Cardinals. They led with their ace, Pitcher Don Newcombe, and lost a heartbreaker, 1-0. Then, instead of curling up, they walloped the Cardinals in the next two, the last time to the roaring tune of 19-6, and rolled out of St. Louis only half a game out of first place. Early this week, the Dodgers stumbled in a game with the third-place Phillies while the Cards were beating the last-place Cubs--and the Dodgers slid to 1 1/2 games behind.

In the American League, the New York Yankees felt more & more like the defenders of Thermopylae. After leading the league all season with the help of pitching, a lot of team courage and the wiles of Manager Casey Stengel, they were looking like warriors who were about to drop their blunted swords. They blew a seven-run lead to the inept Chicago White Sox to lose, 10-9, threw away another game to the cellar-dwelling Washington Senators, 9-8, when two Yankee infielders let an easy pop fly fall between them for a hit. This week, after losing two straight to the challenging Boston Red Sox, the Yankees saw their lead vanish as Boston drew up into a dead tie for first. In spite of ill luck and an astonishing succession of injuries (70 since the season began), the nervy Yankees had hung on until the final week of the season. Then, after a third straight loss to Boston, they sank wearily to second and the Sox went out in front.

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