Booktalk: The Glory of Their Times

This book, The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter,  offers first-person accounts of the lives of about a dozen baseball players as they began their careers in the early years of 1900.

Their memories are passionate, unpretentious, and at-peace with the past. As much as it provides a window into the game and players of that generation, it brings to life the social climate and regionalism of the times, the serendipity of opportunity, and the value these people placed on friendship, fellowship, and the absolute love of the game.

It is curious, almost dream-like, how the various independent recollections circle back through some pivotal, benchmark intersections in their lives; a device that nicely ties together their stories. The meat of their memories, however, are the particulars of the game and its endless inventions, situations, and outcomes.

But it is their beginnings, as boys of twelve and seventeen and twenty, aware of their innocence, ready for ambition, confident of their ability and ability to learn more that is the enduring story. Baseball then, as baseball now, was an avenue of opportunity in the face of, well, hear what Stanley Coveleski had to say:

I was born in 1890 in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. That's anthracite country, about halfway between Scranton and Harrisburg. When I was twelve years old I was working in the mines from seven in the morning to seven at night, six days a week. Which means a 72-hour week, if you care to figure it up. For those 72 hours I got $3.75. About 5 cents an hour. There is nothing strange in those days about a twelve-year-old Polish kid in the mines for 72 hours a week at a nickel an hour.

What was strange was that I ever got out of there. Like I said, I never played much baseball in those days. I couldn't. Never saw the sunlight. Most of the year I went to work in the dark and came home in the dark. I would have been a natural for night baseball. Never knew the sun came up any day but Sunday.