By Patrick Mondout

Kenesaw Mountain Landis was the first commissioner of baseball. Prior to that he was a well-known federal judge. The two jobs were more closely linked than you might at first assume.

Landis was born to a father who may have been a Civil War hero, but had trouble spelling. His father, a physician for the good side, was badly wounded during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and named his next son after the battle that had cost him a leg.

Young "Kennie" earned a law degree from what is now known as Northwestern University in 1891 and soon began practicing law. He was later appointed a federal judge in Chicago by President Roosevelt.

As one of Teddy "Trust-Buster" Roosevelt's appointees, he presided over the Standard Oil antitrust trial. In 1907 he fined them over $29 million - the largest fine in history to that point - for accepting rail freight rebates. This made him a hero to millions of Americans who were surprised to see a judge stand up to a huge corporation. There was even talk of a presidential run, though Landis quickly dismissed it.

In 1914 the Federal League attempted to challenge the AL/NL monopoly and filed an antitrust suit against the major leagues. Who better to hear the case than perhaps the most famous antitrust jurist of them all? The Federal League filed the suit in Chicago hoping to land Landis.

We've all heard the advice about being careful with regards to what you wish for. Well, the Federal League owners got just what they wanted, but it seems Landis was against the upstart league from the beginning and eventually (perhaps inevitably) ruled against them. 

A few years later the Black Sox scandal emerged and the baseball owners decided that they needed an impartial authority figure to restore the illusion of integrity to the game. So the grateful magnates offered Landis a slight raise over his $7,500 a year salary as a federal judge. Landis accepted their $50,000 a year offer (which can be viewed as a quid pro quo for the Federal League ruling), but also decided to remain a federal judge! It was not until two years later when he was threatened with impeachment that he finally relinquished his role as a judge - and accepted a raise to $65,000 a year to remain commissioner.

His long tenure as commissioner (1920 to his death in 1944) was marked by controversial decisions and his unwillingness to address the color line. He instantly gained credibility as a no-nonsense enforcer by banning Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven others for their part in the aforementioned Black Sox scandal. But Bill Veeck (as in wreck) later claimed Landis interfered with his plan to by the Phillies when it was made clear he intended to integrate them.

Not coincidentally, Jackie Robinson broke the color line when was signed less than a year after Landis's death.

Judge Landis

It is difficult to find a picture of the man smiling. He often looks in pictures like a slave master ready to punish any who dare oppose him. Indeed, he was dubbed "the baseball tyrant" by the press. That same press elected him to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1944, in a special election held one month after his death and Major League Baseball's Most Valuable Player Award is officially known as the Kenesaw Mountain Landis Award in his honor.

Henry Fowles Pringle wrote of Judge Landis in his book Big Frogs, which contained biographies of Herbert Hoover and Teddy Roosevelt, among others. The chapter on Landis is reprinted below and gives an excellent and contemporary look at the man.

A Grand Stand Judge

THE BATTLE OF KENNESAW MOUNTAIN, ACCORDING TO Rhodes' history of the Civil War period, is generally considered by military experts to have been the one blunder in the drive of General Sherman from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The engagement took place on the morning of June 27, 1864, and was a foolhardy and futile attempt to storm the mountain where the strongly entrenched Confederate forces were blocking the march through Georgia. Sherman was thrown back, lost three thousand men, and later explained that it had been a "moral victory." Eventually, of course, Kennesaw Mountain was taken by a flank movement and the Union commander continued on through Atlanta and to the sea.

The unfortunate battle of June twenty-seventh has been but lightly touched upon by many Northern historians. It might actually by now be entirely forgotten had not one of the participants been Dr. Abraham H. Landis, an assistant surgeon in the Thirty-fifth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Doctor Landis, while performing an amputation on the battlefield, was struck by a twelve-pound cannon ball, luckily almost spent. About two years later he limped out of a hospital and went to his home at Millville, Ohio. There, in due time, he became the father of a son his sixth child, but entitled to distinction for being the first since the War. After a heated family debate the soldier-surgeon named him Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Thus was the blunder of General Sherman immortalized.

It is inconceivable artistically, at least that an infant christened to commemorate a battle should become anything but a singular, even fantastic, figure in American life. And it is one of the rare perfections of reality that now, after sixty years, the face of Kenesaw Mountain Landis is almost as familiar to the public as that of Charlie Chaplin. Its angular contours, topped by a shock of hair as white as the locks of David Belasco, are seldom absent for long from the rotogravure sections or the tabloids. For the last eight years Judge Landis has been High Commissioner of Baseball with autocratic powers over recalcitrant ball teams, managers, and players. He hands down decisions upon such matters as the ethics of the spitball, barnstorming trips by Babe Ruth, and the degree to which umpires are in peril if soda pop is sold to the sporting public in glass bottles.

Landis first put on the black robes of judicial office when, in 1905, he was appointed to the bench of the United States District Court at Chicago. Two years later he gained national and even international fame by fining the Standard Oil Company of Indiana $29,240,000 for accepting freight rebates. In all the seventeen years he was on the bench, although a few carping critics say he waited eagerly for the opportunity, Landis was never able to duplicate this magnificent judicial decision. It landed him on the front pages for days and formed a background for everything he was destined to do or say. Eventually, the higher courts found that he had made a number of reversible errors, and the Standard Oil never paid a nickel for its sins.

The courts were destined, from that time on, to reverse him with startling frequency; so much so that he once struck back at the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Northern District of Illinois by calling it the "Department of Chemistry and Microscopy." But now those unhappy days are over. As Czar of Baseball at $65,000 a year, his word is final. Ball players shift their chewing tobacco nervously when Judge Landis casts his piercing eye in their direction. There is no appeal from what he says, and he can fine them any sum they happen to have, suspend them indefinitely from the joys and profits of the diamond, or hurl them into the oblivion of working for a living.

During the years of his judgeship in Chicago Landis became a symbol to the general public for all that was good and noble, honest and wise. It did not matter that his decisions were so often reversed; somehow the reversals were seldom given prominence in the newspapers. Few residents of the city that sprawls by Lake Michigan listened to grumbling by a few members of the Bar that Landis was not learned in the law, that he wasted time in court, often treated them with scant respect, and invariably played to the gallery. He grew gradually to be an object of local civic pride like the stockyards. Visitors to the city were taken to see him in action on the bench, and rarely missed a performance long to be remembered. Somehow, when Landis turned the crank, the mill of justice never failed to produce some dazed unfortunate who had stolen a few postage stamps, a wealthy bootlegger, or a bankrupt whose wife, seated in the courtroom, was covered with jewelry. It was then that he blandly ignored the law in the interest of what he conceived to be justice. The postal thief quite likely would be set free or fined one cent. The bootlegger for Landis was an ardent prohibitionist went summarily to jail for the maximum term. The bankrupt's wife was stripped of her baubles in court in behalf of her husband's creditors.

"My, my! Such a very hard case for me to decide," the Judge drawled one morning as a youth, charged with having stolen a parcel-post package, stood in front of him. Near the boy was a young woman carrying an infant.

"Here's a boy who admits stealing a package of jewelry out of the parcel post," the Court continued. "And here," looking at the young woman, "here's his little wife, just recently a mother and heartsick over the troubles of her husband! What is the right thing for me to do?"

Judge Landis leaned half over the bench and rested his white head on his hands in meditation. Profound silence held the courtroom, broken only by the ticking of a clock on the wall, an ancient timepiece brought from the Judge's boyhood home. The reporters waited expectantly; it was a typical Landis opportunity. Some minutes passed. Then the Judge straightened up and stuck out his jaw,

"Son!" he said. "You go on back home. Take your little wife and your baby and go home! In one month come back and tell me how you're getting along. I'll not have that child the child of a convict!"

It was while feminine visitors were drying their eyes after some such touching scene that Landis would relieve the tension with what he considered humor. Unfortunately, the judicial sense of humor was hardly subtle. When a prisoner had been sentenced to jail and was in the hands of a burly marshal, the Judge would order that official to "take him up to Mabel's room" meaning the detention pen. He liked to sentence minor offenders to "sit in the back row of the courtroom for six hours and repent". He delighted in the exchange of heavy-handed jokes with attendants, attorneys, and reporters.

It was partly in love of practical joking, but also partly a hang-over from his furious war patriotism, that prompted Landis on many occasions to make inquiry regarding the war records of those appearing before him. In 1919, on one of these quests for truth, he demanded the military histories of several attorneys who happened to be wearing wrist watches. These, it was his belief, should be reserved for men in uniform or ex-soldiers. The offending lawyers, upon being cross-examined, admitted that they had served their country from behind the lines.

Judge Landis looked stern. "Enter an order," he told the clerk, "requiring all attorneys wearing wrist watches to notify you what branch of the service they represent."

The newspaper men present grinned at the disconcerted legal lights and dashed out to their typewriters. But the Judge's quip, published all over the country, fell somewhat flat. A United States Senator even arose from his seat at the Capitol to denounce it as "a clumsy joke".

"Don't it beat the devil," mused Landis when he heard of the rebuke, "what some Senators will do to pass the time?"

As Booth could dominate a stage, so Landis for years dominated the stuffy courtroom in Chicago. For footlights, he had the desk lamp on his bench, so placed that when he thrust forward his shaggy head the sharp angles of his face were cut in silhouette against the gleam. Men stopped to listen when his drawling, backcountry voice broke in to question a witness, when he assumed the role as fancy moved him of prosecutor or defense counsel or technical expert. Sometimes he would lunge far out, shaking a gaunt finger and twisting his face into a fearful contortion. It was thus that he interrogated some evasive unfortunate whom he suspected of perjury and reduced the man to a nervous wreck.

When Landis presided as Judge of the Federal Court he was the star of his show. His name appeared in larger type than that of any other performer. A curtain seemed slowly to rise as court was convened. The district attorney, the expensive lawyer, and the prisoner at the bar all stepped hastily into the wings, for the star wished to tread the boards alone. An excellent actor of the old school, Judge Landis had one vast advantage over all other actors every performance was for him a first night. The critics were always in their seats at the press table. Greatest blessing of all, delirious dream of the dramatic profession, they were invariably friendly critics, for otherwise they faced jail for contempt of court.

"His career," wrote Heywood Broun profoundly of Landis some years ago, "typifies the heights to which dramatic talent may carry a man in America if only he has the foresight not to go on the stage."

II

Except for the shrewd wisdom assuring his subconscious of the publicity value of the histrionic, Kenesaw Mountain Landis has lived by emotion rather than reason in almost everything he has done. The distinction is important, for by any rule of reason his life has been a confused tangle of notions, prejudices, enthusiasms, and contradictions. In his early years he was a Democrat, because by being so he could serve a politician who had been his father's commanding officer in the Civil War. Having later joined the machine Republicans of Illinois, he eventually shifted his allegiance to the Bull Moose rebels not because he was much of a Progressive, but because Roosevelt's furious protestations appealed to him. Emotion a factor not recognized in law and therefore a leading cause of his frequent reversals by the higher courts sat with him on the bench in Chicago.

After a decade or so, it would seem, the emotional outlook had become a habit beyond control. On the bench, for instance, Landis' salary was only $7,500 a year and, in common with the rest of the honest federal judges, he had constantly been worried by financial problems. It is no secret that the offer in 1920 of $50,000 from organized baseball was alluring chiefly from a pecuniary point of view. If it had not been for the salary attached to the position of Supreme Umpire it is almost certain that he would have declined the job. In accepting it, however, he said little about this feature but rejoiced publicly that through his act the small boys of the nation would be able to keep steadfast their faith in the great national game.

While considering the proposition, he later explained, he attended a ball game with his son, Reed G. Landis. Together father and son grew sentimental. Reed pleaded with his father to accept so that "the old game" might not be taken away from "the millions of little kids made happy by baseball".

"I had been thinking about the game in that light for forty years," concluded the Judge, "and I expect to think of it in that light forty years more. The money means little when the spirit of the game is thought of."

III

Born on November 20, 1866, the boy named Kenesaw Mountain grew up according to the approved pattern for youths destined to greatness in America. His father, again a country doctor after the glories of war, was having difficulty collecting enough bills to feed and educate his large family. "Kennie" attended the public schools of Logansport, Indiana, where his family had moved soon after he was born. Before school he delivered papers and after hours did odd jobs. In the summer he worked on nearby farms. For a time he was a reporter for the local newspaper and first came into contact with the legal process when he mastered the mysteries of shorthand and qualified as a court stenographer. The trade of lawyer appealed to him and in 1891 he was graduated from the Union College Law School of Chicago.

It was in those years that the United States was beginning to feel its oats as a world power. It was anxious to convince the rest of creation that it was no longer a frontier country, with Indians ready to swoop down on Manhattan from Yonkers, but almost civilized. It failed to appreciate Rudyard Kipling's fascinated enthusiasm for the new nation, as later expressed in his "American Notes", because the English visitor had presumed to hold his breath and pray fervently when crossing some of the rickety railroad trestles in the West. The United States, then, was slightly arrogant toward its South American neighbors and was expressing its ego in a highly developed jingo streak. The youthful Landis lived in the official midst of all this, serving as personal aide to Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham in the second administration of Grover Cleveland. Gresham had been Colonel of the regiment in which Landis pere had fought and bled.

The Department of State, the young aide found, took itself very seriously. Its underlings referred to it as the "Foreign Office", wore cutaways when there was the slightest excuse, and talked down their noses to the clerks of the Post Office, the Army, and the Navy bureaucracies. Fresh from the Middle West, Landis typified an entirely opposite school of American thought that which professed to believe that virtue lay in being poorly dressed, in near illiteracy, and honest poverty. He was given considerable authority by Secretary Gresham, and proceeded to make life miserable for the exquisites of the "Foreign Office" by shuffling around in baggy trousers and an ancient hat. He was a plain man whose very lack of ostentation was ostentatious. Sometime afterwards it was said of him that, "he tried to treat a rich man with all the respect that he did a poor one". The period marked the budding of the actor that Landis was destined to become, but he was not yet skilled in the art and he overplayed the role. He even uttered homely bromides about the benefits of hard work.

"Necessity," he is said to have been fond of declaring, "is a great teacher."

A year or so later President Cleveland offered him the post of Minister to Venezuela; but Landis had no intention of playing to so obscure and distant an audience. He went back to Chicago and resumed the practice of law with moderate success. Meanwhile a young veteran of the Spanish-American war, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, had been making a name for himself by a liberalism that was little short of startling. Landis was building up his practice when Roosevelt, supposed to have been safely shelved in the Vice-Presidency, became President through the assassination of McKinley. The Chicago lawyer was soon a devoted follower of the man who had a gift for the dramatic greater even than his own. Soon after taking office, it is related, President Roosevelt went to Chicago and was accorded the usual enthusiastic reception in the streets. As the presidential carriage rolled down Michigan Avenue, the story goes on, a young man, whose hair was already beginning to whiten, rushed out from the crowd and waved an American flag in front of the Chief Executive. In 1905 this demonstrative spectator was appointed by the President to the federal bench in Chicago.

We know who Landis voted for!

No one suggests, of course, that there is any connection between the two incidents. Landis was elevated to the office in the routine way, through the endorsement of the Illinois Republican organization. Certainly Roosevelt, when he signed the appointment, did not recall the excited pedestrian who had jumped up and down with a flag in the streets of Chicago. It was not long, however, before Judge Landis brought himself very forcibly to the attention of the White House. In April of 1907, acting under orders from Roosevelt, the Attorney General brought action against the Standard Oil Company of Indiana for accepting rebates from the Chicago and Alton Railway. The case was called for trial in the United States District Court in Chicago, and Landis, only forty-one years old and one of the youngest judges on the bench, presided. In a few days the New York newspapers were rushing their staff men to cover the sessions, for the Court had demanded the appearance of John D. Rockefeller and other notable oil men. The Rockefeller attorneys protested in vain that their client had no knowledge of the affairs of the Indiana company. In due time Rockefeller went on the stand, and the Government made every effort to prove that the company on trial was controlled in New York.

[[BaseballChronology note: We have an article written by Roosevelt in 1890 on professionalism in sports .]]

In August the jury found for conviction. Judge Landis took several days to deliberate on the size of the fine to be imposed and then staggered the financial world by announcing, while the crowds in the courtroom applauded, the sum of $29,240,000. It was the largest fine in history. The next day, known throughout the country, Landis was hailed as the judge without fear. The New York World called his decision "a great event in American political and financial history". He was stopped in the streets of Chicago to be congratulated and was praised as Roosevelt's greatest ally in the "Big Stick" campaign against the trusts. All this delighted him, but he expressed indignation when it was suggested that he run for President.

"To think that I would accept political preferment as a reward for what I have done on the bench," he said, "is to impeach my integrity as a judge and my honor as a man."

In July of 1908 the Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision which took Landis severely to task, revoked the $29,240,000 penalty and ordered a new trial for the Standard Oil. It was never held. The nation had been rocked by the panic of the fall of 1907, and Roosevelt was soon to go out of office.

IV

Judge Landis

During the decade that followed Judge Landis was comparatively quiet. His hair grew snow-white and his reputation for wisdom increased accordingly. The Standard Oil fine was still remembered, but for the most part his flourishes in the courtroom were chiefly of local interest, and the press associations mentioned him less and less. With the entrance of the United States into the World War in 1917 he again flashed into national prominence, however. He began to typify a country mad with patriotism, and once again his reasoning powers were submerged by waves of emotion. Few men have been as zealous in the suppression of minorities, and his charges to juries were dangerously similar to patriotic addresses.

But in time of war almost anything is possible, and this fire-eater was permitted to sit in judgment upon men charged with disloyalty and conspiracy against the Government. Even if Judge Landis had been the essence of keen, cold intellect instead of a bundle of emotions, it is doubtful whether he could have been impartial. For one thing, his cherished son was flying with the A. E. F. in France, and he lived in constant dread of a telegram announcing that the boy had been killed.

The first wartime defendants to be tried before him were several score of stupid and confused members of the I.W.W. forces, gathered in by energetic agents of the Department of Justice. Even Landis felt sorry for some of them, admitted them to bail, and did what he could to make their lot easier. He felt that, at the worst, they were ineffectual and rather absurd. But he did not protest, in the name of justice, when a brass band that was whooping up the citizenry for the Liberty Loan blared unceasingly under the rotunda of the Post Office Building where his courtroom was located. Sometimes the patriotic music was so loud that witnesses could scarcely be heard. The chances of men on trial for sedition were slim indeed under such conditions. And upon the inevitable verdicts of guilty, Judge Landis sent the bewildered defendants to Leavenworth Prison for maximum terms. If he had a measure of contemptuous sympathy for the Wobblies, he hated and even feared the Socialists, more intelligent and, therefore, dangerous. When Congressman Victor L. Berger and four other leaders of the National Socialist party were so unfortunate as to be tried before him on similar charges, Judge Landis found it difficult to maintain even a wartime semblance of justice in the proceedings. After these defendants, too, had been convicted he imposed ten-to twenty-year terms in prison again the largest penalties possible under the law.

"It was my great disappointment," he said in an address before the American Legion some months afterward, "to give Berger only twenty years in Leavenworth. I believe the law should have enabled me to have had Berger lined up against a wall and shot."

Most of the I.W.W. defendants and all of the five Socialists were later liberated by the higher courts. In the latter trial Landis was specifically held to have been prejudiced against the accused men.

It should, perhaps, be said in his behalf that he was no worse than the majority of his fellow citizens and certainly not the only jurist in the United States who did his bit from the bench to help the boys in France. The people of Chicago approved heartily of his conduct, and by Armistice Day he had become a sort of Windy City Solomon. A kindly man, except when torn by patriotism, he could not refuse to listen in chambers to the private quarrels of citizens who came to him. And it is to his credit that by doing so he prevented many a long and expensive lawsuit. These activities as arbiter were, incidentally, excellent preparation for the work he was destined shortly to do in saving from destruction the game of baseball.

Judge Landis had first come into contact with baseball officially when the independent Federal League sought in 1916 to bring action under the Sherman antitrust law against the existing big leagues. Landis heard the case and dismissed the action, remarking in his opinion that the "Court's expert knowledge of baseball, obtained by more than thirty years of observation of the game," convinced him that the suit would have been "if not destructive, at least vitally injurious to the game".

Landis' claim that he had long been a student of baseball was no mere boast. For years, aside from fishing, it had been his favorite hobby. He had often been photographed attending crucial games. In 1920 the faith of the nation in the game was shattered when it developed that the World Series of the year before had been a fraud and that a half dozen players had been led astray by the gambling interests. There had been rumors, before, that all was not well, but this was the first irrefutable proof of dishonesty. The outcry was agonized and long. Editorial writers took cognizance of the gravity of the situation. Sporting writers throughout the country demanded that something be done.

Eventually even the baseball magnates were disturbed, since it seemed as though the gate receipts might fall off. Finally some one suggested that a Czar of Baseball, with complete control over every department of the industry, be appointed. William Howard Taft was nominated and then "Big Bill" Edwards, famous as a Princeton sportsman. But the baseball owners reacted most favorably to the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis. They had come into contact with him during the Federal League litigation. They recalled the Standard Oil fine and his talent for publicity. They knew of his great reputation for wisdom and honesty. So they offered him the job at $50,000 a year, promised to do without question whatever he ordered, and told him to reestablish the game.

It is an open secret that they wished him to remain on the bench, knowing Federal Judge Landis to be more impressive than Landis, former Judge. For two years he held both jobs, despite a flood of criticism from Congress, the press, and the American Bar Association. Then, after even impeachment had been discussed, he resigned from the bench with the explanation that he had not the time for his numerous duties.

In his private life Judge Landis has many of the characteristics of the small-town squire. As a judge he loved to be recognized in the street and congratulated for some decision. He still likes to be called upon to attend banquets, sit at the speakers' tables and make an address. He has recently taken up golf, another outlet for profanity in which art he is said to be more profuse than original.

Judge Landis makes no secret of his eccentricities, nor does he object to being photographed in weird poses, such as eating "hot dogs" in the grand stand or yelping for home runs. He has always been enough of a publicist to know that a good story about him is worth columns of dignified editorial praise. One of the stories he enjoys telling upon himself, which may prove that the incident never happened, concerns a slippery night when he was bound for the opera with Mrs. Landis. The pavements outside of the opera house were very treacherous and the Judge was exceedingly apprehensive that his wife might fall. Just as she got out of the cab he warned her, but a second too late. He lunged for her arm and with difficulty held her up.

Judge Landis throwing out the first pitch. His wife is at his lower-left.

"Look out, darling!" he burst out in exasperation. "You'll break your goddam neck!"

He thoroughly relished his job as judge of the federal court; more, probably, than he does his present more lucrative one. Now he presides over meetings that are customarily held behind doors. Then he ruled in the open and gloried in the bowing and scraping of those summoned to his courtroom. He liked to strut through the corridors in his robes of office, to march into the dingy restaurant and have the waitress scream: "Swiss on rye and milk the cow for the government!" while all the other lunchers stopped eating to watch.

When, in 1922, he resigned from the bench, his last day in court provided an outlet for a sentimental orgy unparalleled in the annals of the judiciary or the stage.

He almost wept as the spectators stood for the last time while he pulled his gown about him and court was adjourned at the end of the day. Back in his chambers, he held a reception. Old attendants, clerks and stenographers who had served him for seventeen years came in to tell him what a great man he was. The newspaper men detailed to the courthouse called in a body and handed him a testimonial done on parchment. Most of them suspected that he was nine-tenths hokum. Many, having first seen him as cub reporters, had learned from him their first lesson in disillusionment. But all were fond of him and wished him well now that he was to devote all of his time to baseball. Judge Landis looked at them and then around his chambers. Workmen were carting out his personal possessions, among them the propellers of his son's wartime airplane. It was then that his mask dropped away.

"Oh, Hell!" he burst out. "What can I say to you fellows? These people come in and say I'm a great man. But I know you fellows made me. You printed stuff about me and that's the reason I've got a fifty-thousand dollar job now. I don't kid myself."

On the whole he has been successful as the first of the American Romanoffs. Most of the sporting writers are his ardent supporters. He was reflected for another seven-year term two years ago and his salary was boosted to $65,000 despite grumbling from some of the magnates that he had been more of an autocrat than any one had intended. The Judge has been subjected to considerable unfavorable criticism since his pay was raised. This arose from his precipitate action, shortly afterwards, in making public apparently uncorroborated charges against Cobb and Speaker, two revered figures of baseball who had retired from the game some months previous. Many fans said that Landis should have waited for proof; some went as far as to insinuate that he had been less than judicial. An editorial in the World remarked that "the 'Czar' who is paid $65,000 a year to keep baseball 'clean' has only succeeded in smearing it up with muck". But all of this, it is likely, will be forgotten and the Judge will return to high favor when Babe Ruth starts hitting home runs in the spring.

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