NEW YORK -- Gotham bubbled over with baseball enthusiasm today as the Giants and Yanks entered the first game of the world's series.
Thousands of fans, armed with precious reserved seat tickets and other thousands who had to be content to take a chance on "crashing" the general admission ticket windows, started their march on the Polo grounds at sun-up.
Invigorating autumn weather, flavored with a crisp October tang and tempered with friendly sunshine, completed the stage setting for what promises to be the greatest series ever played.
Though the opening game was not scheduled to start until 2 p.m., the intense interest in the battle between the rival New York pennant winners and the limited accommodations at the Polo grounds caused New Yorkers to fall all over each other in the rush for tickets.
The great stadium will comfortably seat some 38,000 fans. About 20,000 of these seats are reserved, the rest being sold at the ticket windows the day of each game.
Conservative estimates place the number of people in the metropolitan district interested in the big series at something over 4,000,000. Forty thousand at most can see each game. It the series should go the full nine games, total attendance will run around 160,000. So it is easy to see what a mass of fans will be forced to see the game from bulletin boards and other mediums.
Ruth outstanding figure
Babe Ruth, king of swat, was the outstanding figure as the teams prepared for battle. The "big bam," with a new home-run record of 59 in a single season and a reputation as a murderer of all kinds of pitching, was the logical candidate for the role of world's series hero.
Ruth is the big ace of the Yanks. He is the keg of T. N. T. Yankee fans are counting on to shatter the defenses of the stalwart Giants. He has hammered baseballs into the stands and over the walls at the Polo Grounds so consistently against the best pitchers in the American league that his admirers can see no way for Giant twirlers to stop him. The more rabid the Yankee fan, the more willing he is to wager that Ruth will monopolize the series.
Thanks to Ruth and his popularity, the Yanks went into the series today carrying a burden of slight favoritism on their shoulders. Betting, however, was at even money for the most part except for sporadic wagers and freak bets among radical partisans of the rival teams.
The intense interest among Gotham fans in this series has been growing over a long period of years. When the Yanks were first planted in New York they failed to attract much attention. It took them years to establish themselves. They merely dragged along. Finally Cols. Ruppert and Huston got hold of them, and they started to get bullish. Later the ambitious colonels got Babe Ruth. Ever since this master stroke of baseball business the Yanks have been cashing and today they have more followers than the Giants.
