The Sunday Funnies

Pitchers and catchers report this week, so let's wrap up this offseason's Funnies with a spring training classic:

It's the late 1930s, and the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees are each holding their spring training in St. Petersburg, Fla. Cardinals manager Frankie Frisch assembles his squad and delivers an opening of camp address in which he informs his charges that they will hold two workouts a day.

Pepper Martin interrupts the Fordham Flash. Martin notes that the Yankees, across town, are holding just one practice a day, and they won the World Series last year; maybe the Cardinals would do well to do the same.

No, Frisch says, the Yankees might be champions, but we want to be champions, "and the way to get there is to work twice as hard as them, and that means two practices a day and -- what is it this time, Pepper?"

"Frankie," Martin says, "I got me a mule back in Oklahoma, and you can work him from sunup til sundown, and he ain't never gonna win the Kentucky Derby."

The Sunday Funnies

Frankie Frisch, the player-manager of the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 1930s, is approaching the main entrance of the team's hotel when a paper bag filled with water zooms past his head and splats on the sidewalk.

Frisch is no fool. He knows who's responsible. And the Fordham Flash hotfoots it to the room of one Pepper Martin, leadoff hitter, third baseman and general pain in the kiester.

Frisch finds Martin in his eighth-floor room sitting next to an open window overlooking the scene of the crime and starts chewing him out.

Martin interrupts: "Gee, Frankie, you wouldn't have wanted me to hold that bag out the window all day and tire out my arm, would ya?"