With Big Green Teams
Trackmen Lead Spring Sports Parade, as Baseball Team, Lacking Power at Plate, Is Held to a Single Win to Date
WHAT WITH ONE thing and another, our heroes have managed to win one baseball game to date. The events that have combined to present this melancholy record are (1) bad weather, which has washed out several contests, and (2) the superior skill of the opposition, which has rendered our boys so impotent that they have been held to one victory. The scores of the completed games to the time of our going to press are as follows: Princeton 2-0 and 6-4; Cornell 7-2 and 0-5 (our one win); and Quonset Carrier Aircraft Service Unit 11-2. One game with the Quonset Naval Air Station was rained out and one with the Army was likewise flooded into limbo. The rest is silence.
The Green started the season on April 28 at Princeton with a double defeat, in which they managed to pile up the impressive total of three hits in each game. The first game was a pitcher's duel between Princeton's Dutch Rohner (who incidentally pitched both games) and our own Jim Sheekey, in which the latter held the Orange and Black to two hits but lost the contest. The three Dartmouth blows were collected by Shallow, Mueller, and Warburton, but that was all that came of them when the Green was unable to push anybody around the bases.
The second Princeton game was a more loosely played affair, with Dartmouth piling up four runs on three hits and the opposition capitalizing upon the wildneSs of the two Green pitchers, Kuehm and Swanson. Bob Shallow at shortstop, who played last year for Brown, contributed some of the minimal Dartmouth color in this game, with one of the three hits and the fielding gem of the day to his credit. With Princeton's Rohner throwing them in to the tune of three scattered blows, there was nothing much the Dartmouth boys could do about it.
On a water-soaked diamond (which has been getting steadily more water-soaked since) and before a Quarterdeck Hop crowd, the Indians managed to break their short string of defeats and go on to a decisive win over Cornell in the second game of a double-header. Cornell won the first game 7-a after Lefty Fred Kuehm had been unable to locate home plate during the course of the first four innings. He was followed on the mound by Biggie and Callaghy (the latter transferred from third base for the purpose), but they were unable to better conditions to any appreciable extent. Dartmouth gained a brief two-run lead in the first inning, following a series of walks and a couple of dubious hits, in which the swampy ground partially immobilized the Cornell fielders. But this was not enough and seven Cornell runs clattered across the plate to close the contest on another negative note.
The second Cornell game was more fun. Big Hal Swanson, the burly fullback and pitcher, blazed a one-hit shutout past the bewildered Cornell batters to notch the initial Dartmouth win of the season. The Dartmouth runs came in the first inning from such fortuitous events as two walks, an error by the second baseman, a wild pitch, a base hit, and an error by the right fielder. This succession came in the first inning and produced the four runs necessary to win the game, with Swanson pitching unbeatable ball throughout the entire contest. This aoo-pounder has a good fast ball, a tremendous physique, and great personal confidence, attributes which will take him a long way on or off the diamond.
The Quonset Carrier Aircraft Service Unit walloped the Green on May 12 at Quonset Point by the score of 11-2 in a contest marked by the introduction of a new pitcher for Dartmouth and the complete collapse of the Green defense. The new pitcher is a marine named Dave Lingle, who reputedly has a blazing fast ball and a large and wily assortment of stuff. These alleged resources did him but little good when the roof fell in in the form of a number of Dartmouth fielding lapses. The game with the Quonset Naval Air Station the next day was started, only to be washed out by a torrential burst of rain in the third inning. At this point, our boys were trailing by the score of 4-2, so maybe it was just as well.
Local sports lovers had been looking forward to the scheduled appearance of the Army nine in Hanover on May 19 with the same fascinated anticipation with which some people like to watch a rabbit being ingested by a boa constrictor. The Army football team last fall was definitely in a class with the Chicago Bears in their palmiest days; the Army track team this spring could probably take on the New York A. C. in its prime and give that aggregation a run for its money; the Army basketball team last winter was strictly in a class by itself; and the baseball team should be playing exclusively with the St. Louis Cardinals. Army has won eleven straight games to date, two of them from the Brooklyn Dodgers who are themselves currently right up there in the National League. In their last three games against Ivy League opposition, the Army has scored a modest total of 54 runs.
So it was with mixed feelings that the local powers notified the Army on the Friday morning before the game that the field was completely unplayable by that time and would probably get worse. With the Army running up strictly football scores in their current games, the contest, if such it might be called, would have been fun to watch. It is possible that Swanson might have caused the men from the Point a few bad moments if he had been in the same form he displayed against Cornell a couple of weeks before. But aside from his heroic efforts, if and when delivered, the Green would have been somewhat over-matched. And that is the understatement of the month.
GREEN DIAMOND LEADER. Pvt. Carl McKinnon '46 of the V-12 Marine detachment, who won letters as guard on the 1942, and 1944 football teams, has been named by the DCAC to captain this spring's baseball club.
