Fifteen Sports Stories

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His eyes remote, his face bleak, P. J. Lace sat high in the stands behind home plate. His solid hands rested on meaty thighs and he was as wide and hard as a man of fifty can be. He sat and mourned his son. He mourned a little death that had occurred within his son.

Johnny Lace was on the mound. He should have exuded the confidence of a big leaguer in exile among the bush leagues. But there was no confidence in him. P. J. Lace, watching from afar, could see the taut nervousness, the deep-drawn lines parenthesizing the tightened lips.

The count was two and two on the batter. It was the top half of the sixth and the team for which Johnny was pitching, the Bay City Sailors, were in front over the Jamiston Jets by a score of one to nothing.

The first batter had undercut the hall for a that looped back over second base. The green second baseman had been slow to move and the ball had brushed the tip of his gloved fingers, which put a runner on first and an error on the board.

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