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stockings are cut away at heel and toe, leaving a stirrup under the arch and exposing a scallop of white understocking fore and aft. Custom-made stockings can bring the cutouts halfway up the shin and calf, giving the wearer’s legs the unmistakable look of whitewall tires. Robinson’s late-Gothic cutouts soar to within an inch or so of his long, skin-tight pants, and the stocking stripes have disappeared under the pant legs. Last year, league executives tried to limit the length of cutouts, but nothing came of it, of course. What does affect the fad is the opinion within the trade that .250 hitters and other noncelebrities look silly in high cutouts. Robinson’s cutout rival in the other league is Willie McCovey.
    Watching Robinson in a game against the White Sox, I could sense that he was ready to challenge Yastrzemski this year for every one of those batting titles. Robinson missed a month of the season last year after a base-path collision but still wound up with thirty homers and an average of .311. He does not conceal his bitterness over the fact that nothing like the total celebrity that has descended on Yastrzemski came to him in 1966 after his triple crown, fine World Series, and Most Valuable Player award. The Yaz-Robby race would have to wait, but in the Sarasota game there was an absorbing contrast of baseball styles and instincts between Robinson and Tommy Davis. Robinson, who is a threat to break up a game each time he comes up, attempts to dominate the plate, but Davis wants only to dominate the bat. Twice already in Florida I had seen him stroke a hit-and-run ball to exactly the spot just vacated by the second baseman, and now, in the first inning against the Orioles, he singled straight up the middle on another hit-and-run. In the third inning, with Aparicio on third base after a triple, Davis swung away twice and then, on a 1–2 count, shortened his swing almost to a half-stroke and slapped an outside pitch to right for a dinky single and the run batted in. This kind of batting is sometimes underestimated, especially if the hitter plays for a team perpetually in need of catch-up homers in the late innings, which was Davis’s lot with the Mets last year. Davis is not fast or particularly aggressive in the field, and this spring he has required cortisone shots in his throwing shoulder. (His manager, Eddie Stanky, wanting that bat in his lineup, told him to kick the ball back to the infield if he had to.) The outcome of the White Sox’ adventures this summer will depend in good part on the margin between Davis’s success at the plate and his deficiencies in the field, and the other contending teams conducted probing operations this spring. In the fourth inning of the Orioles game, Robinson hit a low drive to left field, and then challenged Davis by steaming along to second, drawing only a weak and perfunctory throw. A moment later, there was another hit to left, and Robinson loped confidently around third, only to be nailed at the plate by Davis’s high-backed but dead-accurate peg. Robinson got up laughing and shaking his head.
    Eddie Stanky, a famously sharp-tongued and combustible manager (last summer he called Yastrzemski a “Most Valuable Player from the neck down”) has promised his wife to limit himself this year to “three or four aggravations.” He also told reporters in Florida that he would not attempt much lineup tinkering (in one game last September he used twelve pinch batters and base-runners in one-third of an inning), but would merely play his best hitters (“my big buffaloes”) every day. He has benefited from a series of remarkable trades in the past year, which has brought him such estimable senior buffaloes as Ken Boyer, Russ Snyder, Davis, and Aparicio while keeping his pitching intact, and it may be that he will at last be able to count on winning some ball games on base hits, instead of on nerve, defense, and opponent-baiting. When I last saw the White Sox—they beat the