1954 Topps Cartoons - #7 Criminal Activity

This is turning out to be sort of a lost weekend for drawing/posting although I did participate in the greatest baseball game I will ever witness yesterday and got to watch enough ponies with my daughter to keep Elmer's supplied for the rest of the decade. I want to get one Topps cartoon out this weekend so this series doesn't end up taking 5 years to finish. This toon goes out to Good 'Ol Steve who is having an extraordinarily interesting life at the moment. Hang in there, buddy!

 Here's a card of Ferris Fain, two time AL batting champ. How did this guy hit so well?

One day in '51, Ferris watched some kids play baseball. 


When they left they forgot the bat. Fain, in a batting slump took it. 


He started using it. That old bat not only ended his slump but helped win the batting crown!

Yep, ol' Ferris won the batting title AFTER SWIPING SOME KID'S BAT. Although the way that bat looks in the second panel, the kid might have been trying to get that bat swiped for quite some time. It worked for Ferris though! I wonder how long that bat lasted in the bigs before it broke or an equipment manager mistook it for a table leg and sent it to the scrap heap. Ferris was actually a fantastic hitter in his own right and had a lifetime OBP of .424. He was also a bit of a nut, which caused friction in the clubhouse and ended up getting him run from the league. If Ferris was born 50 years later with an OBP like that, he'd have a 200 million dollar contract, his face would be painted 100 feet high on Nike's corporate offices and Bill James would start a new religion dedicated to the worship of Ferris. Hey, there's worse things to worship besides OBP...

Nothing down here today, I really gotta go...