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► ■ Barrow Recalls Half Century In Baseball on 83d Birthday ! f FRANK STRANAHAN — One of the favorites in the Walker Cup matches opening tomorrow in England. ► Regrets He Refused Offer To Be Commissioner; 7979 White Sox Games Greatest By STEVE SNIDER United Press Sports Writer NEW YORK, N. Y., May 9.— Cousin Ed Barrow, long known as the man behind the New York Yankees, celebrates his 83rd birthday tomorrow and hell be looking back on "my 50 years in baseball" with keener interest than usual. The words in quotes form the title of cousin Eds new book, a tale of strife, some sadness, much success and only one note of regret, that he still isnt connected with the game he loves so well. The bushy-browed executive who made the Yankees a team his manager "could run with push buttons" turned down a chance to become baseball commissioner at the age of 77, but admits his decision would have been different if he had known in advance his health would have held up as well as it did. So there are times when Barrow is a lonely man and after his "50 years" its easy to see why. His career spanned baseballs most glittering history. Barrow could have split his book into two parts — the first 25 years and the Yankee years. For a quarter century he bounced from job to job, finally settling with the Yankees where he produced 14 pennant winners and 10 world champions in the second 25 years. Broke in at Pittsburgh Much of the Yankee story is too recent history to some fans — the swashbuckling, roistering teams of the Babe Ruth era, the more methodical champs of the Joe DiMaggio years, his firm backing up of manager Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy when dissension threatened. But Ed is at his best describing the jumbled early years when he broke into baseball in Pittsburgh as a partner in a concessions enterprise and went on from there to manager, owner, league president and finally general manager of the Yankees. Barrows string of successes is long but he can chuckle now over some of his misdeals — how he lost a couple of young ball players named Ty Cobb and Pie Traynor. There was a low point in his career in 1906, after he had quit as manager at Detroit and was hanging on as Indianapolis manager. He was offered a youngster named Cobb, and one other player, for 00 but he was in no mood for deals and anyway, his mind was on a young lady he had met as manager at Toronto, so he turned down the deal. The young lady became Mrs. Barrow and Ed never loses a chance to remind her jokingly how she cost him Ty Cobb. Later on he had Traynor "farmed out" in a coverup deal but the club to which Traynor was assigned sold Pie to Pittsburgh. Ed had a gentlemans agreement with the minor league owner but as he admitted, that owner was no gentleman. One of Barrows first discoveries was Honus Wagner, whom he calls the greatest player that ever lived, but he had to sell Honus for only ,000 because Wagner was so ungainly afield. But he took a chance on Tony Lazzeri and Joe DiMaggio, two young players whose infirmities had frightened away other clubs, and they became among the greatest of the Yankees. Much as he loved the Yankees, Ed had to admit the greatest team of all time was the 1919 Chicago White Sox — who won going away only to fall into the Black Sox scandal in the resulting World Series. Ed got a lift from Jim Kahn in setting down these bulging memoirs. Its published by Coward -McCann.
