Action Comics #50

The Professional Baseball Player; The Man Who Came Back; The Island Where Time Stood Still; Blackmail; The Man of a Thousand Lives; The Case of the Man Who Could Not Die last edited by Darkside_of_the_Sun on 10/01/18 07:55PM View full history

“THE PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL PLAYER.” Lois and Clark are on their way to Florida to check out the status of the Metropolis baseball club. On the way there, they spot a young man who has great prowess at pitching and whose only dream is to one day play in the major leagues.

Superman: As Lois and Clark are on their way to Lauderville, Florida, to cover the Metropolis baseball team in training, they stop off at a small town and watch an amateur game in which farmboy Stan Doborak displays stunning pitching skills. They try to convince him to go professional but he says he can't as he is needed on his parents' farm.

As Superman, Clark visits the farm and does all the year's planting in a few minutes. Stan then agrees to enter the training camp in Lauderville.

However, Clark writes up a damaging article in the Planet in which he reports a brawl involving one of the players, and the coach throws him out of the camp. When Stan shows up to enrol, he too is thrown out because he is friends with Clark.

Superman takes Stan back into the camp by avoiding the guards. When the coach sees that Stan has come back despite being told to stay away, he decides to humiliate him by having him pitch against his star batters. Stan, however, strikes out all the batters and is then accepted into the camp.

Later, Lois and Clark discover that Stan has let his success go to his head, and he has become stuck up. When Superman investigates, he finds that Stan is going out with a blonde woman, Mabel Dawson, and that Mabel works for gangster Mike Caputo. Caputo's plan is to get Stan to rig games that the gangsters bet on. Superman forces Caputo to confess, and Stan sees the error of his ways.