COMPLIMENTS OF WHEATIES ET AL.

The U. S. major-league baseball parks seat altogether about 700,000 fans. For millions of other followers of baseball, next best thing to a seat in the bleachers is to hear a game over the radio. This week the radio starts its biggest baseball season in history.

For the first time every major-league team will have at least one sponsor. Procter & Gamble Co., for example, will broadcast some of the New York Yankees, Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers games to boost Ivory Soap. Atlantic Refining Co.--sponsoring a share of the games of the two Boston teams, the two Philadelphia teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates and a host of minor leaguers--will give players $5 books of gas-&-oil coupons for home runs and shutouts. Socony-Vacuum will cover twelve major-league teams, many minors. Biggest plunger of all will be a perennial baseball sponsor, General Mills Inc., with 14 major-league teams (all but the Boston Bees and Red Sox) and most of the minors, playing their hearts out for its Wheaties.

Wheaties' style of reporting ("Crack! A hot liner over second. Boy, Ducky-Wucky Medwick must have had a heaping dish of Wheaties this morning.") has become a running gag among baseball players, but it sells. The biggest (230 Ibs.) and the best Wheaties' announcer, 37-year-old Arch McDonald from Arkansas, adds a lingo of his own. A baseball buff from boyhood and a baseball announcer for the last eight seasons, Arch McDonald has the job of covering the home games of the World Champion Yankees and the Giants this season over WABC. He will collect a salary of $25,000, will broadcast in turn for Wheaties, Mobiloil and Mobilgas, Ivory Soap.

Big, bearlike, bluff, Arch McDonald attracted a huge following during four years as "Ambassador of Sports" at Washington's WJSV. Rabid fan John Nance Garner called him "the World's Greatest Baseball Announcer." Thousands cheered him when he once dared obscene and unidentified telephoners to meet him somewhere and fight like men.* When he broke his ankle last summer and broadcast from a hospital bed, small boys sneaked past guards, climbed through transoms, even hid in ambulances to visit Arch. Those who couldn't get in shouted questions at his window, and Arch shouted answers back.

One reason Arch McDonald is high favorite of the fans is that he avoids the hackneyed "hot-corner," "keystone-sack" school of baseball idiom. With Arch a pitcher is a pitcher, not a twirler; a catcher catches, he does not "do the receiving chore." The lingo he uses is his own or fresh from the dugout. Announcing a double play, for example, Arch is likely to report laconically: "two dead birds"; his fans know an easy fly as "a can of corn," an easy, high-hopping grounder as "Big Bill," a curve ball as "No. 2," and a slow ball as "the set of dishes." A pitcher easy for a particular batter to hit is that batter's "cousin." A hard hitter "lays the wood to it." Base runners are "ducks on the pond."

*A sure way to pick a fight with Arch McDonald is to touch him with peach fuzz. He has a holy horror of it, once broke the jaw of a joker who rubbed some on him.

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