Slattery’s Druthers: BOS vs. CLE

In honor of NotGraphs prose hero W.J. Slattery and as sorta-kinda suggested by Notgraphs reader and thinking-man’s pugilist Reillocity, I’m giving the Slattery-style treatment to yesterday’s Red Sox-Indians tilt. Long may you run, W.J. Slattery. Long may you run.

CLEVE’S-LAND OF THE OHIO – The Blood-Colored Leggings of Boston Town entered this docket in the Land o’ Cleve with expectations as heavy as President Taft, that flatulent Yalie, but, lo, they have buckled and sunk under Job’s burdens like the U.S.S. Maine.

It shouldn’t have been such a tight scratch, but the Injuns charged at them, hammer and tongs, and dropped the anointed champeens to zero and five plus another, which be this one.

Mr. Carmona, the fizzing Cleve’s-Land tosser, betokened the approaching misery by setting down a trinity of swingers in the first frame. Among the Red bats-men, only Mr. Scutaro brought his barking-iron and his dash-fire to this row. He smote the ball favorably and recorded a deuce of safeties on the day, but his messmates left him stranded each and every times both.

Across the way, Mr. Lester tossed with the honest flint of a Christian and a Virginian (tho’ he is not the lattermost, and recent fates make this scribe doubt he’s the formermost), but, thanks to the Boston bats soft as kidney pie, his efforts in the end were but ragamuffin’s gullyfluff in an urchin’s trouser pocket.

The real konk on the smeller came in the eighth turn, when Mr. Cabrera, of the A. not the O., plopped down an Irish hoist, plated Mr. Everett — that discommoding rusty-guts — and made the tally nothings to the ones. It stood. It stood because as warm and rightwise a patriot as Andrew Jackson could not have tamed these Indians on this day.

Wiseacres without wit, money or manners will observe that the season is not yet weaning age, but that’s merely the tune the old cow died of. Be it what it would, the Leggings have a buckskin’s toil in front of and aweather them. God’s blessing, they’ll return to the hearth on the morrow. There, they can fill the bellows with New English air, have some hochmagundy with the wives, enjoy a plate of butchered beef’s haslet, pull up their sit-upons, shut their mewling bone boxes, and get to business.

As for the Royal Rooters, their cogitations are too abundant to chronicle. If the catarrh or the Pock doesn’t get them, then the home-town nine surely will.