The Glory Of Their Times – Lawrence S. Ritter, 1966 ★★★★½

Scraping Off the Sepia

Sometimes they still call baseball Our National Pastime; in the early part of the 20^th century it really was the only game in town. Yet what went on in the Major Leagues then seems impossible today.

Cy Young threw 511 career victories, and 750 complete games. In 1909, Ty Cobb led the majors both in batting average (.377) and home runs (9). Cobb’s teammate Sam Crawford hit over 300 triples in his career.

When Rube Marquard and Babe Adams pitched against each other on July 17, 1914, both went the distance – 21 innings.

How does one process such numbers? Lawrence S. Ritter’s The Glory Of Their Times moves beyond statistics and gets to the heart of the game back then, the players themselves. An economics professor, Ritter invested his downtime from 1962-66 interviewing retired baseball players who knew what it was like to face a Walter Johnson fastball, or meet Cobb sliding into a base.

Boston Red Sox great Smoky Joe Wood recalls getting his professional start dressing up as a “Bloomer Girl,” an all-female team which wasn’t as it turned out all-female:

I think everybody except maybe some of the farmer boys must have known some of us weren’t actually girls, but the crowds turned out and had a lot of fun anyway. In case you’re interested, by the way, the first team Rogers Hornsby ever played on was a Bloomer Girls team, too. So I’m not in such bad company.

Smoky Joe Wood. In 1912 he won 34 games in the regular season and three more in the World Series. After injuring his arm the next season, he found a second wind as an outfielder, hitting two home runs in a 1918 game. Image from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-great-baseball-rivalry-118ce290bc38

Individuality was one common denominator: “People were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other,” says Davy Jones, who played on the Tigers with Cobb and Crawford. “Now people are all more or less alike, company men, security minded, conformity – that sort of stuff. In everything, not just baseball.”

Ritter’s interviews with Jones, Wood and 20 other former players, including Crawford and seven other Hall of Famers, constitute The Glory Of Their Times, first published in 1966 and later extended with four more interviews in 1984. All give testimony and color for the game as it was then.

Bill Wambsganss tells about his unassisted triple play in the 1920 World Series, and how Ring Lardner once used his last name to rhyme with “clam’s chance” and “Ray Chapman’s pants.” Jimmy Austin recalls joining the New York Yankees back when they were still calling themselves the Highlanders and how fierce a competitor Ty Cobb was on the basepaths.

July 23, 1910. Ty Cobb slides into third as Jimmy Austin tries to tag him. Above, a famous cropped image; below, the photo from which it was taken. Austin tells Ritter: "Look at Cobb's face. That guy wanted to win in the worst way." Photo by Charles Conlon from https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/ty-cobb-photo-charles-conlon-july-23-1910/5mwjjscgixg91rg5faje7qb9l.

They didn’t just play hardball with the opposition. Tommy Leach of the Pittsburgh Pirates recalled a nasty surprise after his first game in the majors in 1900:

While I was dressing, I went over to the end of the clubhouse and, doggone it, there was my bat, sawed into three pieces. Boy, was I ever sore. That was my only bat, and nobody would ever let you borrow theirs. Besides, my bat was something special: a kid had made it in school for me and given it to me as a present. I challenged that whole ball club. All 135 pounds of me. I swore I’d rip whoever did a thing like that into a thousand pieces. And while I was jumping up and down I happened to look over at the manager, and there he was, Fred Clarke, laughing his head off.

It was a rowdier game. Players brawled with fans, umpires, and one another. Alcoholism was common, especially during Prohibition. “They used to say he didn’t spit on the ball: he blew his breath on it, and the ball would come up drunk,” Hall-of-Famer Rube Marquard says of his fellow Giants pitcher Bugs Raymond.

Harry Hooper was with the Boston Red Sox in 1914 when George Herman Ruth (above) joined the team. "You probably remember him with that big belly he got later on," Hooper says of the Babe. "But that wasn't there in 1914. George was six foot two and weighed 198 pounds, all of it muscle." Image from https://www.chatsports.com/boston-red-sox/a/source/contract-sending-babe-ruth-from-red-sox-to-yankees-at-auction-13558747.

Ritter’s approach takes himself completely out of the picture, except for a brief Preface. “Here is what it felt like to be young and a big leaguer in a high-spirited country a long time ago,” he writes. You don’t even read his questions in the interviews, just the answers, like the old-timers were giving monologues.

Normally I would miss this opportunity to get a more organic back-and-forth, but the players’ stories work so well on their own that the approach enhances the book’s impact. At times you feel the players talking to you from across the mists of time, as real as life.

It’s not a comprehensive history of early baseball. But you do get detail on some of the more recognizable highlights. Edd Roush of the Cincinnati recalls hearing stories about a fix involving players of the Chicago White Sox he was playing against in the 1919 World Series. When Fred Merkle failed to step on a base in 1908, the resulting out cost his New York Giants a pennant and became immortalized as “Merkle’s Boner,” though the players interviewed are unanimous that Merkle did nothing wrong. Al Bridwell, who was at the plate, even blames himself.

Manhattan's Polo Grounds in 1908, the same year it was the site of Fred Merkle's baserunning "boner." Merkle failed to touch second as Giants fans swarmed the field after Al Bridwell singled in what everyone but Chicago Cubs infielder Johnny Evers thought was the pennant-clinching run. Image from https://twitter.com/otbaseballphoto/status/821516428843085824

Another witness to that event, Fred Snodgrass, had his own famous “muff” to live down:

For over half a century I’ve had to live with the fact that I dropped a ball in the World Series – “Oh yes, you’re the guy that dropped that fly ball, aren’t you?” – and for years and years, whenever I’d be introduced to somebody, they’d start to say something and then stop, you know, afraid of hurting my feelings. But nevertheless, those were wonderful years, and if I had the chance I’d gladly do it all over again, every bit of it.

The fact the Major Leagues in the early 20^th century were all-white is never brought up. Opinions differ as to whether the game was played better then or at the time of the book’s writing, with several singling out Willie Mays as comparable to the best players of their era. Others seem pretty convinced they lived in a golden age that will never return.

The yin and yang of baseball personalities, ornery manager John McGraw (left) and amiable shortstop Honus Wagner (right). Yet infielder Hans Lobert tells Ritter how both men befriended him. Image from https://www.baseballhistorycomesalive.com/two-old-baseball-warriors-john-mcgraw-and-honus-wagner/.

Al Bridwell recalls growing up in rigidly, sometimes violently segregated Portsmouth, Ohio where baseball was the one thing everyone played and helped to bring about needed change:

Well, the colored teams and white teams started to challenge each other, and before you know it we were playing each other all the time and not thinking a thing about it. Did away with all that trouble we had before, and brought us all together.

Baseball was a vehicle for diversity of other kinds. William “Dummy” Hoy was one of two baseball stars of his time who was a deaf-mute, and is credited here (perhaps erroneously) for the invention of umpire hand signals. John Meyers was a catcher for the Giants and one of two Native American stars who went by the nickname “Chief.”

John "Chief" Meyers at the 1911 World Series with opposing pitcher Charlie "Chief" Bender of the Philadelphia Athletics. Meyers was Cahuilla, while Bender was Chippewa. Meyers also played with a third Native American sports legend, Jim Thorpe. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/.

Meyers was interviewed by Ritter and talks about Christy Mathewson, one of baseball’s winningest pitchers ever:

He was a great checker player, too. He’d play several men at once. Actually, that’s what made him a great pitcher. His wonderful retentive memory. Any time you hit a ball hard off of him, you never got another pitch in that spot again.

The natural good humor of the retired players comes through often. I love how Crawford keeps telling Ritter he hasn’t much time to talk, while giving Ritter one of the longest and most entertaining interviews in the book, describing how players would allow themselves to be rubbed down with “Go Fast,” a noxious combination of Vaseline and Tabasco sauce that made them sweat like a sauna.

Despite being a Hall of Famer, Goose Goslin often makes himself the butt of his stories, like the time he hit into four consecutive double plays:

What makes me mad, though, it was tied by a boy name of Mike Kreevich. He did the same thing about five years later. Tied my record. I didn’t like that one bit. I wanted to be undisputed double-play champ!

Bill Wambsganss (in white, upper left) tags out Brooklyn's Otto Miller in Game 5 of the 1920 World Series, completing his unassisted triple play which began with catching a liner and then stepping on second, doubling up Pete Kilduff (who is already on third looking back in this photo). "I simply took a step or two over and touched him lightly on the right shoulder, and that was it. Three out," he told Ritter. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_triple_play. 

The hardest thing for me to wrap my head around was reading the conditions they played under:

• Rube Marquard pitched without a contract for his first minor-league team, who refused to pay him anything after he registered a win in his debut performance.

• Infielder Tommy Leach, who played in the first-ever World Series in 1903, remembers raking the field himself to avoid bad bounces.

• Paul Waner tells how a coach ignored his complaints of a sore arm and made him throw anyway, ruining a promising pitching career but sending him instead on a path to become one of the best hitters of all time.

Outfielder Lefty O’Doul recalls the hard train travel:

If you opened the window you’d be eating soot and cinders all night long. If you closed the window you’d roast to death. Get off the morning either filthy or without a wink of sleep. Usually both.

An economics professor at New York University when he wrote Glory Of Their Times, Lawrence Ritter (standing here) became a leading baseball authority after his book's success, while still finding time to write about finance. He died in 2004.

Yet the overall enjoyment for the game among all who participated in Ritter’s book is palpable, and contagious. The players recall being cocky and confident, yet at the same time in awe at the many legends like Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson with whom they contended.

Chief Meyers explains his perspective on the game by quoting a chief of the Six Nations: “My eyes perceive the present, but my roots are embedded deeply in the grandeur of the past.” The feeling one gets after reading The Glory Of Their Times is similar.