Sometimes they still call baseball Our National Pastime; in the early part of the 20th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 20th 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.
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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