Sport: Cubs v. Tigers

The batter, Bill Lee of the Chicago Cubs, swung sharply. The pitcher, Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals, slapped at the hard-hit ball with his bare hand but could not stop it. While it rolled to the outfield, Stanley Hack, who had started from second base with the crack of the bat, crossed the plate with the winning run.

That play, with the score tied, 2-to-2 in the fourth inning at Sportsman's Park St. Louis, one day last week, was the decisive moment of the 1935 major-league baseball season. It won the game (three runs made later were superfluous) for the Chicago Cubs. The game decided the National League pennant race.

Having clinched the pennant, the Cubs proceeded to beat the Cards once more thus prolonging to 21 games the longest major-league winning streak since the Giants were undefeated for 26 in a row in 1916. Then the Cubs coasted through ie season's last two games, benching four regulars to rest them for the World Series against Detroit, on which betting opened 4-t05 with Detroit the favorite.

The Cubs. In the polls of expert opinion conducted every year before the baseball season starts, the Cubs last spring were generally picked to finish fourth A team composed of young if not untried players they appeared to lack the batting strength of the world champion Cardinals, the pitching of the New York Giants. While the Giants were getting off to a nine-game lead by the Fourth of July the Cubs lived down to their rating in fourth place. In August the Giants went into a sudden decline for the second year in a row and the Cardinals caught up with them. The Cubs by this time were in third place but still nobody took them seriously as pennant contenders until their winning streak started early in September.

By no means as eccentric as 'the St. Louis Cardinals, whose rowdy characteristics have earned them the nickname of "Gas House Gang," the Cubs have at least a half-dozen stars whose names will be household words after this week. Catcher Gabby Hartnett, their heaviest hitter is a huge, red-faced Irishman who has been with the Cubs since 1922. Lon Warneke a lanky, hay-pitching, coon-hunting 26-year-old from Arkansas, is the right-handed ace of the pitching staff (Warneke, French, Root, Lee), which rotated with rhythmic brilliance through their winning streak. At the start of the season, Manager Grimm was the Cubs' regular first baseman. Nineteen-year-old Phil Cayarretta, one year out of a North Side Chicago high school, played the position so well that Manager Grimm let him keep it. He, Third-Baseman Stanley Hack, Outfielders Augie Galan and Frankie Demaree are playing their first season as regulars.