Thursday 26 July 2007

Saturday, August 13, 1949





              W  L  PCT GB
Yakima ..... 81 42 .659 —
Vancouver .. 76 46 .623 4½
Spokane .... 65 58 .524 16
Wenatchee .. 63 61 .504 18½
Victoria ... 55 70 .440 27
Bremerton .. 52 70 .426 28
Salem ...... 52 71 .423 28½
Tacoma ..... 50 74 .403 31½

VICTORIA, Aug. 13—Base umpire Carl Sandt played the biggest role Saturday night as the Wenatchee Chiefs got by the Victoria Athletics 4-3 to sweep a double-header. The Chiefs won the first game 9-6.
The finale was tied 3-3 entering the seventh inning. Ritchie Myers started it with a single. Hal Rhyne bunted and pitcher Tobey Tobias tossed to second base. But Sandt called the runner safe to amazement of just about everyone. An outfield fly and Dick Faber’s single brought Myers around.
Tobias ended up being charged with the loss, despite stranding 14 Wenatchee runners in the last seven innings.
Wenatchee starter Cy Greenlaw whiffed the side in the first and third innings and had nine strikeouts after only 3 1-3 frames. However, the A’s managed to score their only runs of the game between fanning out.
He dominated the game with strikeouts and fly-outs that his teammates only made two assists.
Clint Cameron was in one both of the Chiefs rallies as they scored twice in the second and once in the fifth, tying the contest both times.
In the opener, the Wenatchee cashed in five runs before Victoria starter Frank Logue was pulled in the second inning. Frank Labrum came in and proved to be no mystery. Cameron made the count 6-0 in the third with a home run and then hit another over in the fifth with a man aboard to provide the winning runs after the A’s had tied it.
Victoria reached Lou McCollum for two runs in the third and four in the fourth.
First Game
Wenatchee ...... 321 020 100—9 16 2
Victoria ........... 002 400 000—6 13 2
McCollum and Pesut, Peterson (7); Logue, Labrum (2) and Morgan.
Second Game
Wenatchee ....... 020 010 100—4 9 1
Victoria ............ 201 000 000—3 11 1
Greenlaw and Winter; Tobias, Logue (9) and Day.

VANCOUVER, Aug. 13—Fortified with some elixir of youth, 44-year-old Spokane manager Jim Brillheart beat the Vancouver Capilanos 7-2 in the afternoon game of a twin-bill Saturday.
He allowed five hits, but struck out none.
“We should have made him world a little fielding some bunts,” Vancouver general manager Bob Brown told the Vancouver Sun. “A couple of innings of that might have finished him. As it was he just stood there and swung his arm and didn’t move off the mound at all.”
Bob Costello started for Vancouver and left in the seventh after Ed Nulty, Paul Zaby and Larry Barton had hit home runs over the right field wall in the space of 1 2-3 innings. The first two homers came in the fifth inning after a double and a walk.
In the nightcap, reliever Hunk Anderson tossed a one-hitter in a complete-game relief job Vancouver won 4-2.
Jim Hedgecock started the game for the Caps and gave up a double, two singles, a walk and two runs before leaving. Anderson pitched to 32 batters in his complete game relief job, as he struck out three and walked four.
Only Jack Parks was able to single off him in the seventh.
Little Bill Werbowski allowed eight hits and eight walks in taking the loss.
First Game
Spokane ......... 000 040 300—7 10 0
Vancouver ..... 000 000 020—2 5 1
Brillheart and Parks; Costello, Gunnarson (7), Robertson (9) and Brenner.
Second Game
Spokane ......... 200 000 000—2 4 0
Vancouver ...... 000 200 20x—4 8 1
Werbowski and Rossi; Hedgecock, Anderson (1) and Sheely.

Salem ......... 000 131 520—12 5 2
Tacoma ...... 010 012 000—4 8 5
Fredericks, Osborn (6) and Burgher; Kerrigan, Lazor (7) and Sheets.

Bremerton .... 100 411 000—7 9 0
Yakima .......... 000 001 101—3 4 2
Baldwin, Pirack (7) and Neal; Dickey, Sporer (4) and Orteig.

ON THE SUNBEAM
By ALF COTTRELL
[Vancouver Sun, Aug. 15, 1949]
From Sisler to Sinovic
Over the weekend I learned with some surprise that the stately old gentleman who manages the Spokane Indians, Jim Brillheart, had on Saturday afternoon pitched himself a 7-2 win over the Vancouver Capilanos.
I have it from several excellent baseball sources that old Jim mixed some slow stuff with some slower stuff and just a dash of legerdemain out of the past to make the youthful, confident Capilanos look like professional carpet beaters.
It was the most intriguing to your truly because on Friday morning in the lobby of the St. Regis the venerable Spokane boss had consented to discuss the occasional difficulties in pitching to such as Tyrus Cobb, George Sisler, Earl Sheeley Sr., Bob Meusel and the like back in 1922 and thereabouts.
He told of Walter Johnson and Smokey Joe Wood fighting a famous duel of fast balls. I knew that as he talked time-tinted pictures were floating before his eyes. You could sense that they were drifting back and lingering, held by his reluctance to let them disappear.
He fanned fondly of his Washington teammates of those days, Joe Judge and Stanley Harris at their respective peaks. Also Sam Rice, Muddy Ruel and an awkward kid named Goose Goslin.
Maybe it was because memories of those giants of his day had come before him that Brillheart decided to go out and beat the guile of a bygone era the next afternoon against a bunch of kids who weren’t even born when he pitched his first big league victory over Ty Cobb and his quarrelsome menagerie of Detroit Lions.
Anderson’s Hunk of Pitching
Because I missed seeing old Jim span two baseball eras Saturday afternoon, I sought out that distinguished historian and horticulturalist, Robert P. Brown, on Sunday. Bob was weeding the recalcitrant corn in the back garden of his Thirty-seventh Avenue home.
Brown was of course a shortstop away back in baseball’s dark ages. Now he directs the Capilanos from a front office pew. Sunday, when he straightened up and grimaced as the kinks came out of his spinal column, he wanted to discuss Hunk Anderson’s Saturday night display in which Hunk set the Spokes back by using a variety of snapping curves and leaping fast balls.
Goodness gracious, yes, he would give old Jim credit. Especially as the latter had never intended to go nine innings. The idea had obviously been, Bob said, that Brillheart would help out his tired pitchers by going as far as he could, then reel out and let a young man take over.
Tricks, of Imagination Maybe
“Darn it, I’m pretty mad at my club for letting Jim get away with it,” he growed. “They should have run him. We got good bunters. They could have worn him out.”
Instead of that, he complained, the Caps kept swinging from their arches. The pitches came inside, outside, a bit high, a bit low. They kept nibbling, seldom getting more than a piece of the ball.
“And you could walk as fast as his pitches were coming in,” said Brown. “Darned if he wasn’t using trick stuff, too, when a pitch meant a little extra. The banned spitter, and maybe, I thought, an emery ball.”
In the latter suggestion, perhaps it was the imagination of Brown the ex-shortstop that was groping back into the past for a once-familiar gripe. After all, he must have felt as if he were seeing a ghost out on the mound at Cap Stadium Saturday afternoon.

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