"McGraw was an improviser, a teacher. He brought much to the game that keeps baseball fresh and suspenseful today—the hit-and-run play, the steal, the squeeze play, the uses of the bunt and the defenses against it. He helped turn the game into a thing of fluid beauty, infielders charging the plate or roaming far from their bases, outfielders moving with each pitch, racing in for base hits before them, backing each other in the outfield, entering the infield itself on rundown plays. Yet when the game changed radically, with the introduction of the livelier baseball, McGraw naturally shifted to a power emphasis, founding his team about such men as George Kelly, Bill Terry, Mel Ott. He knew, too, that the old pitching style of permitting a man to hit a deadened ball because it would then be caught in the big fields had to be changed, and his staffs led the league year after year in strikeouts, in earned-runs."
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Academics from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesEditors from the United StatesBiographers from the United StatesNovelists from New York City
Original Language: English
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From Greatest Giants of Them All, pp. 248–249.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arnold_Hano
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Arnold Hano
Arnold Philip Hano ((March 2, 1922 – October 24, 2021) was an American editor, novelist, biographer and journalist, best known for his non-fiction work, A Day in the Bleachers, a critically acclaimed e
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