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

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.

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.

They outlawed the spitter in December, 1920. Said only certain established spitballers could continue to throw it after that. Me and sixteen others was all. Maybe the great year I had in 1920 had something to do with it. I don’t know.

In addition, I got another 50 cents a week for helping a tenant in our building with her English and a quarter every Friday night for being what is called a Shabbes goy—turning the lights on and off in a nearby Jewish synagogue.