Huston Horn

On this team. I'm the stopper," said an all-American boy named Donald Scott Drysdale one summery day in 1959. He was facing facts, not bragging. "When the Dodgers drop a couple of games, I pitch. When we want to get off to a good start in a critical series, I pitch. I'm not supposed to lose." Man and boy, these words pretty much tell the talc of the Dodgers' mule-strong right-hander, and they are truer than ever this year.

The batting cage is baseball's Rialto. There that rowdy, fooling, profane company—the big leaguers-greet each other, heroic children at the sandbox. Not long ago, behind the cage in Sarasota, where old men murmur like old grass in the stands, Luis Aparicio met Yogi Berra. Aparicio plays shortstop for the Chicago White Sox with major grace, passion and invention and a little hot dog; Berra is the senior catcher from New York. "Hello, Shorty," said Luis; nifty, crafty, canny little face.

How tall are you?" said Cassius Clay to Douglas Jones the other day. "Why do you ask that?" said Jones, warily. "So's I can know in advance how far to step back when you fall in four," said Cassius merrily, and waltzed away with his knot of laughing admirers. Jones did not fall in four, or six, or at any other time during his 10-round fight last week with the bumptious Clay.