Baseball Lessons

Last week, while major-league baseball players were polishing their golf clubs in preparation for the coming spring-training season, many a U. S. youth, with a yearlong accumulation of hard-earned nickels & dimes in his pocket, was hitchhiking south to one of the dozen baseball schools that have sprung up in the last five years. Baseball schools (geared to precede spring training) charge from $40 to $75 tuition for four-to six-week courses, make no guarantees to place graduates, serve as a showroom for talent as well as a classroom for instruction.

Largest and most publicized of the"Se institutions is Ray Doan's Baseball School, transplanted this year from Hot Springs, Ark. to Jackson, Miss. Ray Doan, a forthright promoter, once managed the bearded House of David baseball team. He specializes in big-name "professors" (this year he has engaged Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Burleigh Grimes, Gabby Street), lures some 300 pupils every spring thereby. In six years 500 Doan graduates have found jobs in organized baseball--mostly in Class D leagues where they might have landed the same job by going directly to the club for a tryout.

In Ray Doan's former quarters at Hot Springs, famed Batsman Rogers Hornsby has opened an establishment called the Rogers Hornsby Baseball College Classrooms. Associated with Hornsby College is a school for umpires, now in its fifth year, operated by National League Umpire George Barr. Barr pupils will get their field work umpiring the games of the Hornsby Collegemen this year, just as they previously did at Doan intramural games. Professor Barr charges $60 for a six-week course. Enrolled this year are 60 students, aged 21 to 40. He has made umpires out of doctors, lawyers, barbers, boilermakers, has placed 76 in the minor leagues--"and a Barr graduate has never been discharged for improper umpiring."

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