An Innocent Abroad On The Baseball Diamonds

The press has managed to get his personality across so well that when I actually met Willie Mays I kept feeling it had happened before. The slightest attempt at humor on my part brought a torrent of appreciative giggles. Jokes of his own were told with a big grin or such mock seriousness that even the gullible would see through. Like all the stars I met, his mind seemed unusually fast. Maybe he lacks a liberal arts education, but his raw intelligence is obviously high.

When he asked why my camera had two lenses (and I explained it was an old stereopticon—a 3-D model) he asked me to take one more picture of him. Just as I clicked, he picked up his mitt and threw it at the camera. Then he clutched his sides in merriment.

The San Francisco Giants as a team were great subjects. Their dugout had a prankish atmosphere reminiscent of my grammar school classroom at P.S. 101. Anything small and light was in the air a good deal of the time. Pebbles particularly. The players gathered pebbles trotting on and off the field at half-inning intervals. And inside the dugout the real game of the day took place.

The rules were simple enough. While all players stared straight ahead at the action on the field, a man at one end of the San Francisco dugout would try to hit a player at the other end. The object was to cause the victim to get up and deliver a short rabbit punch to the upper arm of a falsely accused onlooker.

I concentrated my camera on Willie Mays , whose target was Wes Westrum . As first base coach, Westrum stood with his back only 10 feet or so from his own dugout. And Mays was smart enough to wait until a teammate was racing for first base, thereby calling for 100% of Westrum's attention. At this point, he would lob a small pebble out of the dugout so it hit exactly in the back of Westrum's neck. Before the pebble made contact, however, Mays would strike an innocent position—usually sitting on both hands and chatting with one of his neighbors. Watching Willie's technique, I found myself wishing he had been in my class at P.S. 101, Queens . What spitball artistry he could have performed on old Miss Hamilton! What a joy he would have been to the rest of us! I wouldn't be surprised if "Pebble-o-rama"—or whatever they call the game—might have been responsible for the kind of team spirit that helped win the pennant last year.

ALVIN DARK

I decided to take a shot of all the Giants on the bench. Manager Alvin Dark was in the foreground. He sat nearest the water fountain with his cap on his knee. I decided to take the time to line my picture up properly. I squatted down, as I had seen some of the real photographers do.

"Excuse me," Dark said softly. "Do you happen to know who that is up at bat now?"

It seemed odd that he would ask. They had just announced it on the public address system.

" Ron Santo ," I said.