The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Lawrence S. Ritter

“Well, I should certainly hope so,” he said, “bein’ as I’m him.”

It seems to me now that I was trying to recapture that unforgettable ritual of childhood and draw closer to a father I would never see again—and I think that, through The Glory of Their Times, I somehow succeeded.

It is about man’s hopes, his struggles, his triumphs, and his failures.

they re-create with dramatic impact the sights and sounds, the vigor and the vitality, of an era that can never return.

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished Columbia University philosopher, wrote that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

Ty Cobb symbolized America from the turn of the century to World War I perhaps better than any other single figure, just as Babe Ruth symbolized America between the wars and, in so many ways, Mantle, Mays, and Koufax do today.

And in those instances where something had been added, the embellishments invariably were those of the artist: they served to dramatize a point, to emphasize a contrast, or to reveal a truth. This, then, is the way it was. Listen!

From Cleveland, Ohio, I bummed my way to Waterloo, Iowa. I was sixteen years old and I’d never been away from home before. It took me five days and five nights, riding freight trains, sleeping in open fields, hitching rides any way I could.

And boy, for years after that, whenever the Giants would come to Chicago I’d go out to that firehouse. I’d sit out front and talk for hours.

Bugs Raymond! What a terrific spitball pitcher he was. Bugs drank a lot, you know, and sometimes it seemed like the more he drank the better he pitched. They used to say he didn’t spit on the ball: he blew his breath on it, and the ball would come up drunk.

I always said you can’t burn the candle at both ends.

And it also turned out that while Honus was the best third baseman in the league, he was also the best first baseman, the best second baseman, the best shortstop, and the best outfielder. That was in fielding. And since he led the league in batting eight times between 1900 and 1911, you know that he was the best hitter, too. As well as the best base runner.

The fans were part of the game in those days. They’d pour right out onto the field and argue with the players and the umpires. Was sort of hard to keep the game going sometimes, to say the least.

He just ate the ball up with his big hands, like a scoop shovel, and when he threw it to first base you’d see pebbles and dirt and everything else flying over there along with the ball. It was quite a sight! The greatest shortstop ever. The greatest everything ever.

For sheer excitement, I don’t think anything can beat when you see that guy go tearing around the bases and come sliding into third or into the plate, with the ball coming in on a line from the outfield at the same time. Now that’s something to write home about.

We had stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country.

Back at the turn of the century, you know, we didn’t have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays. We didn’t have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other. Now people are all more or less alike, company men, security minded, conformity—that sort of stuff. In everything, not just baseball.

I doubt if fellows like that could exist in baseball today. Too rambunctious, you know. They’d upset the applecart.

Ha! That’s baseball. A hero one day and a bum the next.

Neither one of which exists any longer, a fact for which I assure you I can in no way be held responsible.

He was one of the greatest players who ever lived, and yet he had so few friends. I always felt sorry for him.

Being the lead-off man, by the way, resulted in my holding the unique distinction of being the first man to ever face Walter Johnson in a major-league game.

“Let the dead past bury its dead.”

But I don’t think we’ll ever repeat the old days in baseball. They’ll never come back. Everything has changed too much.

think that ball disintegrated on the way to the plate and the catcher put it back together again. I swear, when it went past the plate it was just the spit went by.

Of course, the greatest of them all was Walter Johnson.

Cobb was great, there’s no doubt about that; one of the greatest. But not the greatest. In my opinion, the greatest all-around player who ever lived was Honus Wagner.

good team man, too, and the sweetest disposition in the world. The greatest ballplayer who ever lived, in my book.

Mays is one of the few modern players who are just as good as the best of the old-timers. Although I guess the best center fielder of them all was Tris Speaker.

Cobb never tried to spike anybody. The base line belongs to the runner. If the infielders get in the way, that’s their lookout.

But Ty was dynamite on the base paths. He really was. Talk about strategy and playing with your head, that was Cobb all the way.

It was that Cobb was so fast in his thinking. He didn’t outhit the opposition and he didn’t outrun them. He outthought them!

He came up from the South, you know, and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us. Well, who knows, maybe if he hadn’t had that persecution complex he never would have been the great ballplayer he was. He was always trying to prove he was the best, on the field and off. And maybe he was, at that.

When they think of Sam Crawford in a Detroit uniform I want them to think of me the way I was way back then, and no other way.

“Well, good old Sam, he wasn’t such a bad guy, after all. Everything considered, he was pretty fair and square. We’ll miss him.” That’s the way I’d like it to be.

The pressure never lets up. Doesn’t matter what you did yesterday. That’s history. It’s tomorrow that counts. So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.

Well, I won, 1–0, but don’t let that fool you. In my opinion the greatest pitcher who ever lived was Walter Johnson.

But they can kill us all the time—make everything out of us they want. Every night you see them on the television—killing us Indians. That’s all they do.

In the old days, you know, a shake of your hand was your word and your honor. In those days, if anything was honest and upright, we’d say it was “on the square.”

I guess I’m like the venerable old warrior Chief of the Great Six Nations, who announced his retirement by saying, “I am like an old hemlock. My head is still high, but the winds of close to a hundred winters have whistled through my branches, and I have been witness to many wondrous and many tragic things. My eyes perceive the present, but my roots are imbedded deeply in the grandeur of the past.”

Wonder quote

You know, baseball is a matter of razor-edge precision. It’s not a game of inches, like you hear people say. It’s a game of hundredths of inches.

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s a matter of record now. Forget about that game. Win the next one.” That’s all he said.

You couldn’t figure Cobb. It was impossible.

And Cobb had that terrific fire, that unbelievable drive. He wasn’t too well liked, but he didn’t care about that.

I never saw anybody like him. It was his base. It was his game. Everything was his. The most feared man in the history of baseball.

By golly, darned if all of a sudden he didn’t start gritting those teeth to beat the band, looking as fierce as Mephistopheles himself.

when Elmer Smith hit the first grand-slam home run ever hit in a World Series,

Now summer goes And tomorrow’s snows Will soon be deep, And the sky of blue Which summer knew Sees shadows creep. As the gleam tonight Which is silver bright Spans ghostly forms, The winds rush by With a warning cry Of coming storms. So the laurel fades In the snow-swept glades Of flying years, And the dreams of youth Find the bitter truth Of pain and tears. Through the cheering mass Let the victors pass To find fate’s thrust, As tomorrow’s fame Writes another name On drifting dust.

Poem

Ripley put that in “Believe It or Not.”

“There are only so many pitches in this old arm, and I don’t believe in wasting them throwing to first base.”