All Odds & Ends

How does a seventh-place ball club turn into a first-place ball club? Well, first it gets a manager who never played a day in the major leagues. He then converts his rightfielder into a pitcher, his second baseman into a leftfielder, and his leftfielder into a third baseman. Guess what happens next? The right-fielder-turned-pitcher wins five out of six games, the second baseman-turned-leftfielder bats .308, the leftfielder-turned-third baseman drives in 20 runs --and the Cincinnati Reds lead the National League by 3 1/2 games.

They may not be on top at season's end. Cincinnati's only pennant in the past 25 years came in 1961, and everybody connected with the club has been trying to forget it ever since: the Reds lost the World Series in five games to the New York Yankees. Leftfielder Pete Rose, 26, is the only .300 hitter in the lineup, and the club's batting average is .247--33 points below the second-place St. Louis Cardinals.

But, oh, that pitching. Righthander Mel Queen, 25, the converted outfielder, has a 5-1 record and a 1.85 earned-run average, credits his instant success to the undoubted fact that "the batters are scared. They don't know what to expect from a guy who hasn't done any pitching before." The batters could hardly feel much safer facing Cincinnati's No. 2 pitcher, Gary Nolan, who is 18 and had barely two months of minor-league pitching before moving up to the Reds--which may account for his 3-1 record and 2.12 ERA. Two other Cincinnati starters, Bill McCool (at 2.15) and Sammy Ellis (at 2.18), rank among the league's top five in earned-run averages.

Then there is Dave Bristol, who can be identified as the Cincinnati manager mainly by the size of the chaw in his cheek. A onetime high school history teacher, Bristol, 33, never got past Class B ball as a player, had only a few months of coaching experience in the majors. "Oh, no," were Bristol's first words when he was informed late last season that he had been appointed manager. His next words were, "Boys, baseball is a game where you gotta have fun. You do that by winning. So let's have fun."

Presumably, they are.

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