DEATH COMES TO THE UMPIRE

As battery candidates go through their limbering up exercises and Briggs cage resounds daily to the tune of hitting and fielding practice, the baseball team takes its first flight into the atmosphere of the 1937 season. But despite the fact that Harvard tied with Dartmouth for a grip on the league pennant last year, the team starts the new year's venture under a cloud of official disfavor which rained heavily in Mr. Bingham's late report on the state of athletics. For in last year's games the custom of badgering umpires reached such a peak that self-respecting umpires took their lives in their hands in attempting to referee Harvard contests.

In the past few years killing the umpire at every close play has taken root because of the fear of bias in umpires chosen only by the home team. If visitors at Harvard crab decisions made by Harvard umpires, the Harvard bench must rise to protect its interests. At games away, on the other hand, the team must ride the officials in order to get a fair deal. Thus, by a subtly growing process, the bench turns into a concentration camp of hatred, and the professional spirit,--that the game must be won by whatever hook or crook comes in handy,--tends to displace the amateur ideal of playing for the sake of the sport.

Doubtless the ball team has had a real grievance in the partisan selection of umpires. But for the season now opening umpires are to be chosen by the A.A. from a list of officials approved by the New England Conference of Colleges, just as in hockey, basketball, and other minor sports. Hence-forth, then, the cry of unfairness and preconceived bias cannot be levelled at the umpires with any shred of justice or right.

But though the technical device of choosing umpires can alleviate a real or exaggerated grievance, the rest of the remedy must be supplied by the team itself. The ideology of professionalism,--of taking every advantage of the enemy, whether foul of fair,--has no place in Harvard athletics. And it is up to the coaches, who have been far from spotless in the past, to set an example of sportsmanship to their charges, as well as to inspire them with the lust to win.

When George Moriarty, embattled mentor of the American League, gave an address recently, he kept up an unceasing pace, walking to and fro on the platform before his audience, remarking that "its harder to hit a moving object with a pop bottle than a stationary one." Pop bottles are as out of place at Soldiers Field as they are welcome at Fenway Park, and the Harvard team can rise to new heights of baseball proficiency when pop bottle tactics are banished from the bench and the bases.