Sport: Harry the Hat

Bat met ball with a crack that sent 32,000 Brooklyn fans into an uproar. It was the league-leading Dodgers’ first home game in three weeks, they led 1 to 0 and First Baseman Jackie Robinson had lined a drive to left center that looked like a sure triple. In center field, the Philadelphia Phillies’ fleet Harry Walker started moving fast. As ball and outfielder converged under the floodlights, Walker pushed his spiked shoes in front of him, dropped to his rump, began to slide. At the last instant he stuck his gloved hand forward and gathered in Robinson’s drive —barely off the grass. The fans gasped, then burst into a cheer. They cheered again the next time Harry Walker came to bat. Whatever his play might cost Brooklyn, it was a beauty.

Harry Walker’s circus catch was not a grandstand play. After an attack of spinal meningitis in the Army three years ago, he was so stiff that doctors doubted he could ever play major-league ball again. He is still so stiff that he cannot make shoestring catches. But by applying base-running technique to his ball-chasing, he manages to be one of the most spectacular fielders in the game. Last week he was doing more than that for Ben Chapman’s last-place Phillies: with a .344 average, he was leading both leagues in hitting and had a 16-point margin over his nearest National League competitor.

As a St. Louis Cardinal in prewar days, easy-swinging Harry Walker was known chiefly as the promising kid brother of Dixie, the “People’s Cherce” of Brooklyn. Back with the Cards last year after a tour of combat duty in Europe, he was used sparingly by Manager Eddie Dyer and had a poor year except for some timely World’s Series hitting. This season he got off to a bad start and the Cardinals traded him to the Phillies. Ben Chapman made him a regular, and Harry immediately began to hit as he had never hit before.

As baseball’s No. 1 cap-straightener and head-rubber at the plate, Harry is known as “Harry the Hat” (not to be confused with the Cards’ “Harry the Cat” Brecheen). He thinks his hitting this year is due partly to being an everyday player, partly to some advice about his batting stance from brother Dixie (when they meet around the circuit, they usually discuss their Alabama hardware business). One of Harry’s neatest tricks this year has been hitting a solid .438 in four games against Cincinnati’s sensational, 16-straight Pitcher Ewell Blackwell. Says Harry: “I guess I’ve just been lucky.”