The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; Excerpt from “The Glory of Their Times”, by Lawrence S. Ritter

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Have any of you baseball fans read Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It? Published in 1966, it’s an oral history of baseball, as told by the old-time ball players dating back to the early years of the 20th century. I had a copy once, but have lost it along the way somewhere. Famous names from the dustiest earliest days of the national pastime, names that have passed into legend. Ty Cobb died in 1961, and it was felt as the end of an era. He connected us to those earliest days, right? Lawrence Ritter, an economist at New York University, thought so too. And many of those old guys were still out there, now in their 80s, 90s, living in obscurity many of them, their baseball days long long behind them. The stories they could tell, the memories they had – that could connect us to our past, the past that still LIVES. Ritter decided he needed to track down as many of them as he possibly could, and get them on tape. It took years. There was no telephone directory of ancient one-time ballplayers. One player would say to him, “Hey, you should probably talk to so-and-so. Last I heard he was living in a hunting cabin up near the Canadian border. Maybe I have his cousin’s address somewhere and you can track him down.” It took that level of detective work. All told, Ritter traveled 75,000 miles around America, finding these guys, sitting down with them, and turning the tape recorder on.

In 1966, he published the result of all this work: Glory of Their Times. The following excerpt alone makes me want to have a copy of the book again, at my disposal.

Ritter found Sam Crawford (aka “Wahoo Sam”), whose heyday in baseball was in the first 2 decades of the 20th century. He led the National League in home runs in 1901, and led the American League in 1908 and 1914. (However, he is quick to point out in his interview with Ritter that when he led the league in 1901, how many home runs did he hit? Sixteen. Very different game!) His career in professional baseball lasted 19 years. Some of the records may not be quite accurate, because it was all so long ago and tallying up stats was not a computerized science as it is now – but that fact alone suggests that some of Crawford’s extraordinary stats may be actually HIGHER than what is in the official record books. Over the course of his career, he is credited with 2,964 major-league hits, an extraordinary number as any baseball fan will recognize. It’s a short list of guys who have topped it, and most of those guys played in the modern era, with a ball MADE for power-hitters. Crawford hit a “dead-ball” the way the modern guys hit the speed-ball. To this day, Sam Crawford holds the record for most major-league triples, with Ty Cobb a close-ish second. Crawford also holds the record for inside-the-park home runs in a single season: 12. Twelve in one season!!

Crawford played in what’s known in the “dead ball era.” 1900 to 1919, roughly. The ball was different, heavier, and “dead”. Because of that the game itself was different. It wasn’t about home runs or power-hitting. It was about speed and strategy. Stealing bases, etc. Batting averages, in general, were lower during the “dead ball era,” which can be misleading in terms of modern perceptions of the skills of the players. When different skills are rewarded, then of course the stars of the game in that era will be masters at that particular skill. Then in 1909 came the new baseball with the cork center. Bye-bye “dead” ball. Batting averages went up, runs went up, the game changed. And with it came the stars like Ty Cobb whose name everybody knows. Or Babe Ruth, later. It became the game we recognize now. The game that values giant hits, runs scored, high batting averages.

Wahoo Sam’s career was during the same timeline as Ty Cobb – meaning it straddled the dead-ball era and the modern-ish era. All of this makes his batting averages even more extraordinary. Dead-ball or no dead-ball, Wahoo Sam was a power-hitter.

Wahoo Sam’s interview with Crawford (and since it’s an oral history, there are no editorial interjections from Ritter, part of why the book is so wonderful) is so amazing, you wish the guy would talk forever. Sam Crawford was born in 1880 and he died in 1968. So Ritter got to him just in time. Since it’s a transcription of a tape recording, you get the cadences of Crawford’s speech. He goes from one thing to another, he puts in asides, he shares memories of something that happened to him 60 years before and the DETAILS he remembers!! It’s as though they happened yesterday.

There are great portraits of well-known players, like Ty Cobb again, and Honus Wagner, Rube Waddell, Walter Johnson. Crawford is extremely intelligent, like most ball-players are, and it shows in his observations. In re: Ty Cobb: “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.” That’s the kind of observation that keeps me warm on cold winter evenings. Crawford is also funny, too, on people’s personalities. Again, in re: Cobb: “He came up from the South, you know, and he was still fighting the Civil War.”

At the time Ritter tracked down Crawford, Crawford was living with his wife, and spent most of his time reading. “My favorite writer is Balzac. A wonderful writer.” He had been ushered into the Hall of Fame in 1957, and he was living in some tiny town in the middle of the Mojave Desert and nobody in town even knew that he had been a famous baseball player. Everyone was shocked that that little old guy living in that cabin was elected to the Hall of Fame. Crawford doesn’t believe in living in the past, but sitting with Ritter opened up the past to him. Throughout, he constantly expresses surprise at how much he remembers, how quickly it comes. He says he rarely thinks about baseball, and almost never talks about it. Sometimes he watches a World Series game, but that’s about it.

In the following excerpt, Crawford follows the meandering path of his memory to a player named Dummy Hoy. Well, his name was William, but he was nicknamed “Dummy” because he was deaf. Oh, I can hear the Tumblr outrage now! “Dummy” obviously does not refer to his intelligence but “dumb” as in “can’t speak,” although the connotations were as negative then as they are now. Some kind of impairment = impaired intelligence. But Dummy loved the nickname, and corrected people who called him “William.” Dummy Hoy was the most successful deaf baseball player of all time.

Crawford insists that Dummy Hoy is the guy who invented the signal system for umpires, the signals for “ball” and “strike” that can be seen way out in the outfield. Crawford’s not the only one. Many people credit Dummy Hoy with that innovation. There are other stories, though, suggesting it didn’t quite go down that way. But whatever, I prefer the perhaps-apocryphal anecdote, that a major-league center-fielder/southpaw, who also happened to be deaf, figured out a way that he could know what was happening at home plate or any of the bases – or, come to think of it, when he was at bat. If the umpire just shouted “strike”, well, that wouldn’t help Dummy Hoy, now would it? But a signal, and Hoy could just look back and see it? It’s a far better story, and so I’m going with Crawford. That was Dummy Hoy’s innovation all the way.

Dummy Hoy was well-loved by his teammates (as the following excerpt shows), and set a bunch of records that lasted a couple of years (no small feat in such a competitive game). He was a base-stealer. He was King of the Walks. He would just stand there and let those balls go by. Tremendous patience and a tremendously good-eye for that ephemeral strike zone. Here’s a great site devoted to Dummy Hoy.

Dummy Hoy lived to the age of 99. Just a couple of months before his death in 1961 he threw out the first ball in Game 3 of the World Series, held at Crosley Field in Cincinnati – the same site of his old ball club back in the late 1800s. Incredible.

But now let’s walk down Memory Lane with Wahoo Sam and listen to some stories about Dummy Hoy. I mean, the ring with the hinge on it!! Wahoo Sam is talking about something from, I don’t know, 1899 and it’s now 1964. The stream-of-consciousness is damn near Proustian.

Wahoo Sam talking about Dummy Hoy. I mean, can you tell that this is baseball with names like that?

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. Excerpt from “The Glory of Their Times”, by Lawrence S. Ritter

You know, there were a lot of little guys in baseball then. McGraw was a fine ballplayer and he couldn’t have been over five feet six or seven. And Tommy Leach, with Pittsburgh – he was only five feet six and he couldn’t have weighed over 140. He was a beautiful ballplayer to watch. And Bobby Lowe, who was the first player to ever hit four home runs in one game. He did that in 1894. That was something, with that old dead ball. Bobby and I played together for three or four years in Detroit, around 1905 or so.

Dummy Hoy was even smaller, about five-five. You remember him, don’t you? He died in Cincinnati only a few years ago, at the age of ninety-nine. Quite a ballplayer. In my opinion Dummy Hoy and Tommy Leach should both be in the Hall of Fame.

Do you know how many bases Dummy Hoy stole in his major-league career? Over 600! That alone should be enough to put him in the Hall of Fame. We played alongside each other in the outfield with the Cincinnati club in 1902. He had started in the Big Leagues way back in the 1880’s, you know, so he was on his way out then, and I had been up just a few years, but even that late in his career he was a fine out fielder. A great one.

I’d be in right field and he’d be in center, and I’d have to listen real careful to know whether or not he’d take a fly ball. He couldn’t hear, you know, so there wasn’t any sense in me yelling for it. He couldn’t talk either, of course, but he’d make a kind of throaty noise, a little squawk, and when a fly ball came out and I heard this little noise I knew he was going to take it. We never had any trouble about who was to take the ball.

Did you know that he was the one responsible for the umpire giving hand signals for a ball or a strike? Raising his right hand for a strike, you know, and stuff like that. He’d be up at bat and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t talk, so he’d look around at the umpire to see what the pitch was, a ball or a strike. That’s where the hand signs for the umpires calling balls and strikes began. That’s a fact. Very few people know that.

Another interesting thing about Dummy Hoy was the unique doorbell arrangement he had in his house. He had a wife who was a deaf mute too, and they lived in Cincinnati. Instead of a bell on the door, they had a little knob. When you pulled this knob it released a lead ball which rolled down a wooden chute and then fell off onto the floor with a thud. When it hit the floor they felt the vibrations, through their feet, and they knew somebody was at the door. I thought that was quite odd and interesting, don’t you?

It’s funny how little things like that come back to you, after all these years. That was over 60 years ago when we played together. He was a little fellow, like I said, only five feet five. But he had real large, strong hands. He used to wear a diamond ring – we all did in those days – but his knuckles were so big that he had a ring with a hinge on it. A real hinge. He couldn’t get a ring that would go over his big knuckles and still fit right, so he had one made with a hinge so that he could put it on and then close it and it would lock in place. Did you know that he once threw three men out at home plate in one game? From the outfield, I mean. That was in 1889. And still they don’t give him a tumble for the Hall of Fame. It’s not right.