GEORGE UHLE: Someone once told me that Mr. Navin had made the remark that I was just as great a pitcher as Christy Mathewson, that I made pitching look so easy. But that first year with Detroit I had adhesions so bad I could hardly throw. A couple of pitchers I knew who lived out on the West Coast tipped me off to a Dr. Spencer, who stretched arms. I thought stretching the arm was a good idea, so Mr. Navin let me go out a couple of weeks ahead of the team, which trained in Phoenix that spring. Dr. Spencer stretched my arm and broke those adhesions. And I'm telling you, the first three or four days that you'd get a stretching from him, he'd pert near make you cry. He could tell by your expression just where he was hurting you and where the adhesions were the worst.

The next couple springs we went out to California for training, and I got some additional stretching done while we were there. Jimmy Dugan, our trainer, watched Dr. Spencer at times, just so that he could have some idea of how to stretch an arm. He got to where he could do a fairly good job.

I pitched a lot for Bucky Harris in Detroit, and that probably didn't help my arm. We never had any relief pitching. There was only Vic Sorrell, Earl Whitehill, and myself, and no relief pitching to help us out. Back in those days, there was only one real relief pitcher in baseball, and that was Fred Marberry with Washington. They didn't start that relief business until a few years later. Now, of course, it's become a science. Today, starters are tickled to death to go six or seven innings. But then, your best pitchers started and they were expected to pitch the whole game.

I won my first nine games with Detroit in '29. Number eight was a twenty-one-inning game against Chicago. Pitched twenty innings of that game. It's my own fault that I went on for as long as I did. I got five hits off of Ted Lyons. I got a big kick out of that. Every inning after the ninth, why, Bucky'd look at me and say, "How about it?" And I'd say, "I might be up to bat next inning."

So I'd pitch and I'd get a base hit, and it'd be another couple innings or so and I'd tell Bucky, "Well, I'm going to come to bat again next inning." It kept that way all the way up to the top of the twenty-first inning, when I got a base hit leading off. Bucky put in a pinch runner for me and we were lucky enough to score. Lil Stoner came in, pitched the bottom half of the inning, and we won the ball game.

After I pitched that game, I want to tell you something, Dr. Spencer sent the most sarcastic telegram you'd ever want to read to Bucky Harris for letting me go twenty innings with my arm, as bad as it was. But the funny thing was, my arm felt fine. A couple of starts after that, I beat Washington, 7-5 or 6-4, something like that, one of those games where there was a lot of base runners on. My arm felt worse after that game than it did after the twenty-inning game.

Then something happened under my shoulder blade. I didn't know it until the same thing happened to me again later, but I had caught a cold under my shoulder.

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