CLYDE SUKEFORTH IS SMILING. He's holding a Brooklyn Dodgers cap in one hand and pointing to the sky with the other.
He's one of the characters in the Norman Rockwell painting "Tough Call," although you can barely see him poking out behind the three umpires at home. The men in black are deciding whether to call off the game at Ebbets Field, and Sukeforth is representing optimism, while his counterpart, Pittsburgh manager Billy Meyer, is playing up the foreboding conditions. Painted by Rockwell for the April 23, 1949, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, this masterpiece of Americana now hangs in the art gallery of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.