Sport: Cubs v. Tigers

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Owner Navin's first move was to buy Cochrane. his next to insure his life for $100.000. Manager Cochrane's first move was to buy Outfielder Leon ("Goose") Goslin from the Washington Senators. The semi-miraculous feat of winning a pennant in his first year as manager he then performed with a team otherwise unchanged from the one that had finished fifth the year before.

A big (180-lb.), florid, square-jawed Irishman, easygoing, stubborn, hot-tempered and prodigiously energetic, Cochrane's success as a manager is as hard to analyze as it is apparent. He makes no parade of the thinking processes which it takes to run a big-league ball club but if he is never seen like Connie Mack waving intricately scrawled scorecards, it does not mean that the moves of a baseball game are not as definitely outlined in his mind as those of a chess game in the brain of a blindfolded expert. His players like him because he discusses plans, theories and mistakes with them. He leaves training rules entirely to his players, sometimes utilizes an extensive flow of dressing-room profanity. Off the diamond, Cochrane is as affable as he is tense and irritable when professionally busy. He lives in a nine-room English brick house with his wife and children. Gordon Jr., 10, and Joan. 4. He plays the saxophone, on which his favorite tune is "The Lady in Red." He shares the enthusiasm of most baseballers for hunting, which he expects to do in Wyoming next month. He smokes Camels, has a ping-pong table in his basement, keeps a secretary to answer his fan letters—200 a week.

If Cochrane's success as a manager is hard to define, his popularity in Detroit is not. Twenty-five years ago, the city proudly adopted "Dynamic Detroit'' as a slogan. This ambitious expression of civic pride came to have a somewhat painful sound when the automobile business collapsed in 1932 and when the closing of every bank in town on St. Valentine's Day, 1933, precipitated a national panic. Mickey Cochrane's arrival in Detroit coincided roughly with the revival of the automobile industry and the first signs of revived prosperity. His determined, jolly New England-Irish face grinning from front pages soon came to represent, not only to baseball fans but to all civic-minded citizens, the picture of what a dynamic Detroiter ought to look like. Detroit has lately been a baseball-minded city but this summer it passed all bounds in agitation. Eleven reporters traveled with the team. On a rainy day, one paper ran a four-column picture of Schoolboy Rowe glancing out of the window. Season's attendance at Navin Field has been over 1,000,000 this year, more than twice that of 1933. In the De Soto factory, radios were tuned in on the Tigers' games every afternoon for inspiration.