This Month
Michael Street Reviews Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times
Friday July 6, 2007 11:30am
It's relatively rare for a book to stay in print for over forty years, especially one about baseball players whom most fans today wouldn't even recognize. Larry Ritter's The Glory of Their Times has stayed in print in spite of that fact (though most moderately knowledgeable baseball historians would know most of the players in it). The book's simple, unadorned approach makes it a unique document of a vanished age, one of the last oral records of the dead ball era. The Glory of Their Times is required reading for anyone interested in old-school baseball, or who longs for the stories of old-timers about a game much closer to the heart of the "real" game than the dollar-bill-chasers who so often fill baseball uniforms today. You'll find it at the top of many top-ten baseball books, and it's near the top of my own.
Soon after the death of the immortal (and despicable) Ty Cobb, a young Larry Ritter set out to tape record the recollections of Cobb's contemporaries, to scrape the last memories out of the minds of men who would, like Cobb, soon be gone, their stories along with them. These are the players who bridged the old, loose, get-away-with-what-you-can, hit-em-where-they-ain't game with the modern, streamlined, knock-em-out-of-the-park form we know today. Like the reminiscences of the last veterans of World War I or the only survivor of the Jazz Age, these were stories that would have been lost forever once their tellers died, if Ritter hadn't taken the time and care to record them all.
The result is a book, first published in 1966 (and updated in 1984) that is both inescapably of its time and wonderfully vivid, even today. Ritter strove to record the players' words with as little editing as possible, and their voices are as much a document of their times as the stories they tell. Vanished baseball expressions and dated idioms never seemed so fresh, as they tell stories of heroes great and small, spinning tales like old men in retirement homes-which, after all, most of them are.
A portion of the players in the volume is like a Hall of Fame roll call: Sam Crawford, Rube Marquard, Hank Greenberg, Paul Waner, Stan Coveleski, Goose Goslin. Others are good players-Davy Jones, Smoky Joe Wood, Chief Meyers-who never made the Hall, and a handful are names practically forgotten today. But all of them have tales to tell about their times and their teammates, making all of them vital to the record of baseball's nearly forgotten past.
Some of the stories are surely apocryphal, others have been told many times before, but what brings them to life is the voices of their tellers. Reading this book is like having a ringside seat at the greatest convention of old baseball players ever, and even if you have to endure the occasional cantankerous rant on how "the game ain't what it used to be," it's well worth it. You can crack open the book at any point and learn something or hear a funny story.
Here's a classic from Babe Herman, literally right where I just now opened the book. A little background: Gabby Street had just caught a baseball dropped from the Washington Monument as a publicity stunt, so the Brooklyn Dodgers decide to outdo him. In a Florida spring training game, they hire a plane to drop a baseball where Wilbert Robinson ("Uncle Robbie"), former catcher for McGraw's immortal Baltimore Orioles and current Dodgers manager, would catch it.
Uncle Robbie dons the tools of ignorance, and Dan Comerford brings two baseballs up to the plane, but completely misses the field with both of them. Spotting a sack of grapefruit in the plane, and reluctant to return to the ground to fetch another ball, Comerford gets a brilliant idea. Here's how Babe finishes the story:
So the pilot circled around and made another approach, only this time Dan dropped a grapefruit instead of a baseball! Well, down in the ball park, out near second base, Robbie is also circling around, getting a bead on this thing as it falls. As far as he knows-as far as anybody besides Dan knows-it's a baseball that's falling, not a grapefruit, and Robbie is determined to catch it.
"Get away, get away," Robbie yells. "I got it, I got it." And then squash, it smacks right into Robbie's mitt and literally explodes, juice and pulp splashing into Robbie's face and all over him. The force of the thing was so great that it knocked Robbie down, and all he knew was that he had all this liquid and stuff all over him.
"Help, help," he shouted. "I'm bleeding to death. Help me!"
Some players called him "Grapefruit" forever after.
Did this happen? Did it happen this way? Does it really matter? Yes, probably not, and no. This is one of those hoary tales passed on from player to player the way we all swap family stories at Thanksgiving. Everyone's got their own version of the tale, but what's important is the thread of the story, with embellishments and lies added on to suit the personality of each teller. Sure, some might squabble as to who actually dropped the grapefruit (history will say the famous aviatrix Ruth Law did so, flying solo, and simply forgot the baseballs altogether), but that's why they called Wilbert Robinson "Grapefruit"-and that's what's important.
This book is stuffed with moments like these, moments both grand and mundane. Read about Smoky Joe Wood's classic 1912 confrontation against the immortal Walter Johnson, from the mouth of Wood himself. Or Bob O'Farrell explaining why Babe Ruth said he tried to steal second base in the 1926 World Series-and was thrown out by O'Farrell for the last out of Game 7. This is the real stuff, right from the mouths of the guys who saw and heard the immortals of the game.
The Glory of Their Times is absolutely vital reading for anyone who needs an unforgettable lesson in baseball history, or for the die-hard fans longing for a first-person view of a bygone era. It'll also show you why you should always respect your elders and listen to what they have to say. Just like stories from any old person, some stories are lies, some have been told (and heard) many times before, and a small bit of it might bore you a bit. But you can't read about this stuff in the papers, won't read it in a box score or a dry history of the game. Every word is pure gold, and this book belongs on the shelf of anybody who considers him- or herself to be a fan. You'll find yourself reading it, and rereading it, any time you need a break from the show-me-the-money guys on the field today.
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