Of all the great hitters I faced and teamed with -- Ruth and Gehrig, Greenberg and Gehringer, Williams and DiMaggio -- nobody showed me more than Jimmie Foxx did one day in St. Louis.

Dogged by hay fever, he was having a lot of sinus trouble. He had asthma and often would have trouble sleeping because he would get so plugged up. I woke up in the middle of the night and he was in the bathroom, tending to a relentless nosebleed. It was bleeding like hell. I got up and asked how long he had been in there. He guessed it was about a half an hour.

"We've got to do something about this, Jimmie," I said.

"Ah, it'll stop," he said, tough as ever. But it didn't stop, so I called the trainer and told him to come up to our room. He stuffed Jimmie's nose with cotton and it finally stopped, but not until he lost what must have been about a quart of blood. It scared the daylights out of me.

We always went downstairs and had breakfast together around 7:30, but on this morning he was so sound asleep after his rough night that I quietly slipped out of the room and ate alone. When I returned to the room he was just waking up.

I told him he should stay in bed. "We're only playing the Browns," I told him. "We ought to be able to beat them without you."

"Ah, I'll see how I feel," he said. "You go on to the park. I'll see how I feel."

We had taken batting practice and were ready to get the game started when in walks Foxxy. He came in and put his uniform on, but hadn't taken any batting practice. His first time at bat, he hit a line drive into the center-field bleachers at Sportsman's Park. It was a 450-foot shot if it was a foot. He hit a line drive out there like you never saw. How the hell he did that, I'll never know. He was one strong boy, could really hit a ball hard.

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