The Glory of Their Times

"It is a time machine. You start reading and you are hearing these ballplayers who played in the major leagues between 1890 and 1920. These are men who played alongside Ty Cobb in the outfield, men who were present when Babe Ruth came up to the Red Sox, men who played a key roll in the World Series of 1912. They are speaking to you. You feel as if they were in your living room with you. Hearing from these foundational figures is like listening to an interview with George Washington at Valley Forge. Larry scoured the country in the age before the internet and ancestry.com to find these players. This was a true labour of love for him. In fact, he gave away the lion’s share of his royalties to the 22 men in the original book and their estates. Larry was an inspiration to me before I knew him. I grew to be his friend, his editor and his collaborator on a number of projects. His transcriptions of his interviews were more than transcriptions. If he was talking to, say Sam Crawford, and Crawford said something in the third hour of an interview that really belonged in the first hour, Larry stitched it together properly for our enduring reading pleasure. So, while using only the words of the players he interviewed, he transformed sometimes rambling, incoherent audio into brilliant literature. I prefer print, but the audio will blow your hair back. You’ll feel like you are at a seance. These people, long dead, whose moments on the field occurred a century ago, speak to you."

"What Lawrence Ritter did is he went back and talked to a bunch of players about their era. Again, it’s wonderful because there is this humanity to it. He’s talking to these athletes long after their successes are over. The stories get to be somewhat exaggerated, and somewhat more fully realised in a lot of ways. I don’t know if I would rely on every single thing in the book if I was writing a doctoral thesis or a paper, but it’s just wonderful, fun reading about a time when baseball was really just becoming the American pastime. There are so many characters that they talk about, and so many stories. It makes for great baseball reading. It does have some of that in there. But it’s a big book and it has a lot of great reading in it. It’ll touch on that, then it’ll have some of the best Babe Ruth stories. There are some great stories about the players. This was back in the day when they were essentially coming right out of the coal mines, or right out of the factories, to try to bang out a bit of a living playing baseball. It was a very, very different time than it has been, even in the last 50 years or so. It touches on a lot of the scandals of the game back then, the challenges of the game, the fun of the game. It gives a great feel for that time. You come away from it feeling like you really understand that era a lot better – not just that era in baseball, but that era of American history. There is definitely a nostalgic feel to the book. One of the great things about baseball -– probably more than any other sport, and perhaps because of its history – is that people in the 1920s longed for the days of the teens, people in the 30s longed for the days of the 20s, and people in the 40s longed for the days of the 30s. Baseball is really a sport where people tend to look back more than they look forward. In some ways I am. I’ve been writing about baseball for 25 years or so and there have been some wonderful books that have come out in the last 25 years about baseball now. But to me, as a reader, I almost need the passage of time to fully enjoy those books, to feel about them the way I do about players from a little bit more in the past."