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

I was just a utility player with the Louisville club for what remained of that ’98 season. In those days, they didn’t take extra players on the road, so when the team went on a trip they left me behind in Louisville.

The American League had started in 1901, but the two leagues couldn’t get together to play each other until 1903. I hit four triples in that Series, but it didn’t help, because the Boston Red Sox beat us anyway. I think they were called the Boston Pilgrims then, by the way.

That year, 1903, was also the year Honus became a full-time shortstop. Up until 1903 he played almost every position on the team, one day at short, the next day in the outfield, the day after at first base.

cap, and at the same time gave him a good healthy kick in the shins. We were about to really go to it when the game started again, and I think the inning ended on the next pitch, so that was that.

Later, after Ed died in that tragic way at Niagara Falls, the big hero of all the kids in Cleveland became Napoleon Lajoie, the Cleveland second baseman. What a ballplayer that man was! Every play he made was executed so gracefully that it looked like it was the easiest thing in the world. He was a pleasure to play

against, too, always laughing and joking. Even when the son of a gun was blocking you off the base, he was smiling and kidding with you. You just had to like the guy.

To give you an idea about its respectability, I was going with a girl at the time and after I became a professional ballplayer her parents refused to let her see me any more. Wouldn’t let her have anything more to do with me.

I always got along with Sam just wonderfully. In a lot of ways we were very much alike. He’s still one of my very best friends. Cobb, though—he was a very complex person—never did have many friends. Trouble was he had such a rotten disposition that it was damn hard to be his friend. I was probably the best

friend he had on the club.

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

In combination, these elements resulted in 312 major-league triples, still the most three-baggers ever hit by one man.

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.

They always talk about Cobb playing dirty, trying to spike guys and all. Cobb never tried to spike anybody.

Talk about strategy and playing with your head, that was Cobb all the way. It wasn’t that he was so fast on his feet, although he was fast enough. There were others who were faster, though, like Clyde Milan, for instance. 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!

Every rookie gets a little hazing, but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way. He came up with an antagonistic attitude, which in his mind turned any little razzing into a life-or-death struggle. He always figured everybody was

ganging up against him. 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.

I hope I haven’t said anything I shouldn’t. There

are a lot of the old-timers still left, you know, and they’re liable to say, “That fathead, who the hell does he think he is, anyway, popping off like that!” I wouldn’t want them to say that. Because I’d rather they remember me as a pretty straight sort of a guy, you know. So that when I kick off they’ll say, “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.”

In a few years I was behind the plate for Montreal, which was then in the Eastern League. I didn’t get paid much, but it sure beat hauling bricks!

was Branch’s Sunday manager, you know. He’d promised

his mother and father he’d never go near a ballpark on Sunday, so I managed the team for him every Sunday all the time he was with the Browns.

I remember one day Walter had us beat, 10–2 or something like that, and he yells in to me, “Here’s one right in there. Let’s see you hit it.” Well, he threw a medium fast one in, letter-high, and I hit it clear over the right-field fence. Laugh? I don’t know which one of us was laughing harder

Doggone it, though, when game time came, darned if Rube wasn’t out there ready to pitch. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. He went along all right for three innings, but in the fourth we got two men on base and then Rube grooved one to me, which I promptly hit over the fence. As I’m trotting around the bases Rube is watching me all the way, and as he kept turning around on top of the mound he got dizzy, and by golly he fell over right on

his rear end. Fell over right flat on his can!

Now Babe Ruth, he was different. What a warmhearted, generous soul he was. Always friendly, always time for a laugh or a wisecrack. The Babe always had a twinkle in his eye, and when he’d hit a homer against us he’d never trot past third without giving me a wink.

And Mathewson! The great pitcher that he was! He pitched a complete game almost every time he went out there. Matty was the greatest pitcher who ever lived, in my opinion. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, too, a reserved sort of fellow, a little hard to get close to. But once you got to know him, he was a truly good friend.

Most people think it was Merkle lost the 1908 pennant for the Giants. Well, they’re wrong. It was Harry Coveleski. He was just a rookie, but he beat the Giants three times in the last week of the season. Pitched every other day for a week, and beat them three in a row. That was after the Merkle business and that’s what lost the pennant for McGraw that year.

Which means a 72-hour week, if you care to figure it up. For those 72 hours I got $3.75. About 5¢ an hour. There was nothing strange in those days about a twelve-year-old Polish kid in the mines for 72 hours a week at a nickel an hour. What was strange was that I ever got out of there.

I pitched for Lancaster for a few years, then went up for a trial with the Athletics late in 1912. With Connie Mack. Connie was a good manager. He was a very considerate man. If you did something wrong, he’d never bawl you out on the bench, or in the clubhouse. In the evening he’d ask you to take a walk with him, and on the way he’d tell you what you’d done wrong.

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Actually, I don’t think the greatest man in baseball was Cobb or Ruth or Wagner. I think it was Branch Rickey. I think he’s done more for baseball than any man who ever lived.

When I was thirteen years old I quit school and went to work in a shoe factory. Ten hours a day, six days a week, and I got $1.25 a week.

You know, I saw it all happen, from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can’t believe what I saw: this nineteen-year-old

old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over—a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god.

Well, I won, 1–0, but don’t let that fool you. In my opinion the greatest pitcher who ever lived was Walter Johnson. If he’d ever had a good ball club behind him what records he would have set!

But once a Giant, always a Giant. That’s the truth. It was because of Mr. McGraw. What a great man he was! Oh, we held him in high esteem. We respected him in every way. According to

Mr. McGraw, his ball team never lost a game; he lost it, not his players. He fought for his ballplayers, and protected them.

Those were great Giant teams the years I was there. Take, for instance, Mathewson. I caught almost every game he pitched for seven years. What a pitcher he was! The greatest that ever lived. He had almost perfect control.

And they strike out so much today. A lot of players with l00 strikeouts, 150 strikeouts. It’s hard to believe! As old Al Smith used to say there in New York, “Let’s take a look at the record.” If you do, you’ll find out that I’d only strike out two or three times a season. We didn’t strike out, that’s all. We hit the ball.

As the years went by, the smartest man on the club was the “bonehead,” Mr. Merkle. McGraw never consulted anybody except Merkle on a question of strategy or something of that sort. He never asked Matty, he never asked me. He’d say, “Fred, what do you think of this?” The bonehead! What a misnomer! One of the smartest men in baseball, Fred Merkle.

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.”

Naturally, living near Pittsburgh and all, my idol was Honus Wagner, and I tried to do everything just like he did. I even tried to walk like him. Wagner lived in Carnegie, which wasn’t far from where we lived, and lots of times I’d see him out there playing baseball with the kids after the Pirates’ game was over. A wonderful man, he was.

Connie Mack. There was a wonderful person. A truly religious man. I mean really religious. Not a hypocrite, like some are. He really respected his fellow man. If you made a mistake, Connie never bawled you out on the bench, or in front of anybody else. He’d get you alone a few days later, and then he’d say something like, “Don’t you think it would have been better if you’d made the play this way?”

I think Eddie Collins was the smartest ballplayer who ever lived, but Cobb was right next to him. Infielders didn’t know what the hell he’d do next, and neither did he until the last split second. 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. He roomed alone.

Ruth was great too, but he was different. Totally different—easygoing, friendly. There was only one Babe Ruth. He went on the ball field like he was playing in a cow pasture, with cows for an audience. He never knew

what fear or nervousness was. He played by instinct, sheer instinct. He wasn’t smart, he didn’t have any education, but he never made a wrong move on a baseball field.

I had caught Alex for years on the Cubs before we were both traded to the Cardinals. I think he was as good as or better than any pitcher who ever lived. He had perfect control, and a great screwball. He used to call it a fadeaway, same as Mathewson.

Now McGraw, he was rough as a manager. Very hard to play for. I played for him from ’28 to ’32, when he retired, and I didn’t like it. You couldn’t seem to do anything right for him, ever. If something went wrong it was always your fault, not his.