Baseball with a Brush

Baseball with a Brush Philadelphia's Tom Meehan is a young (29) artist who loves baseball so much that he has worked for the past two years at putting it on canvas. In a Philadelphia gallery last week. Painter Meehan was showing off the results of his concentration--22 brightly colored studies of the Philadelphia Phillies. Consensus: Painter Meehan might have missed a home run, but he had at least cracked a clean single.

Instead of settling for the sport illustrator's poster realism, Meehan filled his paintings with blurred, dusty action as seen through the eyes of an impressionist.

He showed his Phillies hurtling into home plate, reaching for high throws, waiting narrow-eyed for the pitch. His crowds sit in the smoky blue haze of night games, ripple away like waves as a pop foul lands in their midst.

Equipped with season passes, Meehan spent two full summers painting the Phillies. Day after day, he roamed Shibe Park from opening to closing, filling notebooks with sketches, then going home to put them on canvas. The players paid little attention, but a lot of fans thought he was crazy. "It got so bad," says Meehan, "I pretended I was just keeping score."

But the fans enjoyed the show. In the first ten days, 9,000 dropped in for a look, some to see the art and some chiefly to check up on Painter Meehan's baseball. One visitor was Robin Roberts, the Phillies' ace right-hander and the National League's top pitcher (28 games won) last year. Meehan found him frowning over a painting of himself pouring a pitch toward the plate during a night game, pressed him for an opinion. Pitcher Roberts explained that this was the first time he had ever been "within half a mile" of an art show, but he wanted to know: "What's my shortstop doing out of position, and looking towards the Scoreboard instead of the plate?" Painter Meehan will be more careful next season. Also, he wants to spend some time on another favorite sport: basketball.

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