- Popular with everyone he meets, his winter work is as smooth as his pitching.
Publication Date: November 13, 1921 Age 30
The St Louis Star and Times
NOW this mauve tie is really the latest, or perhaps you would prefer this classy violet shade.”
Sounds like the opening line in an old-time melodrama entitled, “Bessie, the Beautiful Boilermaker,” doesn’t it? Not so. Not a-tall! It’s a quite possible speech being made daily by Blond Bill Doak, the ace of the Cardinals’ pitching staff during those months that the “frost is on the pumpkin” and baseball gives way to sports which require the tingle of winter to warm the blood of the spectators, paradoxically speaking.
A Smooth Winter Delivery.
Bill, who heaves a wicked spitter during the pennant race, has developed a smooth delivery for the winter, and those who, in the big men’s furnishing store In Pittsburgh {Kaufman’s?} fall under his spell in the winter seldom fail to part with bunches, large or small, of Uncle Sam’s currency in exchange for some “doll-up” necessities of the male. Doak doesn’t believe in wasting his time during the off-season, and a day or two after he doffs the Cardinal spangles, dons civilian garb in his home town of steel and smoke and gets busy.
The store in which Bill delivers in the winter is one of the largest of its kind In Pittsburgh. Everything for men is sold and a corps of specialists sees that desires of customers are attended to. With money as tight as it is, right now, one has to be a specialist to make good in selling everything. During the high-price war period anybody could sell anything. As a matter of fact, salesmen those days were merely order takers. Now salesmanship is required to get rid of a package of pins.
Popular in Pittsburgh.
Though he has acquired the habit of beating his home-town Pirates with charming frequency during the playing season, Blond Bill is most popular in Pittsburgh. His hosts of friends refuse to buy even a collar button unless Bill is on the hurling end, and not a big leaguer passes through the city at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela that doesn’t feel in need of some furbelow. Anyway, the price of whatever Is bought is none too great for a brief talk with Bill.
Gratitude Due Doak.
If there is such a thing as gratitude, every spit-ball pitcher in both the big leagues should purchase steadily from Doak, for it was the St. Louis veteran whose appeal to the moguls saved the wet-fingers from banishment. It will be remembered that at the end of the 1920 season the powers that be ruled that spit-ball pitchers should have but one more year with the queer delivery and that then they should have to pass out, joining in the shadows hurlers of the shine and emery balls.
A Hardship on Veterans.
This seemed a hardship for those veterans who had developed the spit-ball delivery by order of the magnates and managers for whom they had played, and Doak went to the front for his colleagues to such good purpose that the owners realized that injustice would be done to some mighty good men by the order and changed it so that the spit-ball veterans might finish their careers continuing to use the delivery to be banned. However, it was ruled that no new pitchers should “come up” and use the spitter. Hence Burleigh Grimes of Brooklyn, Dana Fillingim of Boston, Phil Douglas of the Giants, Stan Coveleskie of Cleveland, Marvin Goodwin of the Cards, Urb Shocker of the Browns, Jack Quinn of the Yanks, Al Sothoron of the Indians, and others, should patronize Bill’s store extensively.
A Pitcher, Not a Hitter.
While Doak is recognized as a master pitcher, he has never made Hornsby, Sisler, Heilman or Cobb jealous because of his batting ability. In fact, in the words of Aristophanes the Just or whoever was nicknamed the Just, Bill is a “punk” hitter. His lifetime average in the big show is about .089, though that figure may flatter Bill a bit. In the season just passed, Doak reached the amazing mark (for him) of .145, making ten safeties in sixty-nine times up.
Doak’s “Day of Days.”
His “day of days” in the hitting line was on September 29 against Pittsburgh, when in three times up Bill got two hits – one a single to right and the other a real, clean and lusty triple to left center. On the last hit Doak scampered around to third with all sails set. He wanted that triple. It was the longest hit of his career. He made it all right but had to retire from the box soon after. The shock had been too great.
Bill is a cagey chap and a grand character. Popular with everyone he meets, his winter work is as smooth as his pitching. And that’s some compliment.
Elsewhere in Sports: William Glenn Killinger was an American football, basketball, and baseball player, coach, and college athletics administrator. He lettered in three sports at Pennsylvania State University, where he was an All-American in football in 1921.
