Lawrence S. Ritter. The Glory of Their Times. Rev. ed. New York: Morrow, 1984. Print.

The Glory of Their Times was considered a baseball classic when it first came out in 1966. The author produced a revised edition in 1984 with four more chapters. Regardless of your age, The Glory of Their Times is worth reading. It is historical, personal, confessional, and simply fun.

Ritter explains what he tried to do in his introduction. He looked for old retired baseball players who played professionally in the first two or three decades of the Twentieth Century and interviewed them about their experiences. While baseball was a business back then, it was much more informal, and even the way it was played was different.

Many of the stories have a similar arc. They began playing for a hometown team when they were teenagers in the 1890s or the aughts. Either someone saw them play or someone knew them and got them to sign a professional contract. In most cases the parents were opposed because baseball players had the reputation of being riffraff. As they became successful players, even the most intransigent father expressed pride over his son. Two men listed all the college graduates on their respective teams to try to show that the reputation of baseball players was undeserved.

We learn that Rube Waddell and Smoky Joe Wood first played professionally as ringers in a supposedly all-girls baseball team. Both were young enough that facial hair was not a giveaway. Indeed, in those days many young men were working by age 14 or 16, and a number of men saw professional baseball as a way out of the usual factory or mining job that employed many of their peers.

A number of players spoke of encounters with Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. It truly does seem that these three were the top players other than pitchers of this era and deserved the attention and acclaim they got. Everyone spoke highly of Wagner and Ruth. We are even told that Cobb was a gentleman—off the playing field.

The name that appears the most in the twenty-six interviews is John McGraw. Many of the men played for him or had dealings with him at some point in their careers. Others played against the teams he managed. He was known for strong language and speaking his mind. It seems they either loved him or hated him. One player expresses his gratitude to all he learned from McGraw. Another expressed how happy he was when he was traded to another team. He apparently had a great baseball mind, but also was a tough contract negotiator.

A spot check notes that four of the twenty-six men interviewed made the Hall of Fame: Paul Waner, Hank Greenberg, Sam Crawford, and Harry Hooper. All the others were fairly solid players who had a good number of good seasons in the major leagues, men like Joe Wood, Chief Myers, Babe Herman, Goose Goslin. A few had just half a dozen years in the majors, but even they have stories to tell about the early years of the major leagues as we know them (1901-present). Fred Snodgrass stood out because he was blamed for losing a World Series; we hear his side of the story, and also a couple of teammates who stick up for him.

A few of these old-timers note that it is difficult to compare players in their era with those in the present. The gloves and balls have certainly changed. Collective bargaining and free agency have made a huge financial difference. One interviewee concedes that Willie Mays might have done well in the dead ball era. Still it is difficult comparing apples and oranges, as they say. I recall reading an interview with Hall of Famer Hugh Duffy, who had seen Ruth, Wagner, Cobb, Speaker, and other stars through the forties but was old enough to remember Mike “King” Kelly (fl. 1878-1893) as “in a class by himself.”¹ You never know.

My generation? My heart has always been with Roberto…

Many thanks to the friend who gave me this book.

¹ Jim Moore and Natalie Vermilyea, Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1994) 253.