The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  It was while we were living in Ness City that I first really started to play ball. That was in 1906, when I was only sixteen. I pitched for the town team—it was only amateur ball, you know, but that was the big thing in those days. We’d play all the surrounding Kansas towns, like High Point, Ransom, Ellis, Bazine, Wa Keeney, Scott City—nearby places like that. The ball game between two rival towns was a big event back then, with parades before the game and everything The smaller the town the more important their ball club was. Boy, if you beat a bigger town they’d practically hand you the key to the city. And if you lost a game by making an error in the ninth inning or something like that—well, the best thing to do was just pack your grip and hit the road, ’cause they’d never let you forget it.

  Anyway, when I was only sixteen I was Ness City’s pitcher even though I was the youngest on the team by a good two or three years. Had a terrific fast ball with a hop on it even then. And I also played the infield when I didn’t pitch.

  A funny thing happened in September of 1906 that I’m not too keen about talking about, but I guess it wouldn’t be exactly right to act like it never happened. In a nutshell, that’s when I started my professional career, and I might as well just take a deep breath and come right out and put the matter bluntly: the team I started with was the Bloomer Girls.

  The Ness City team in 1906. Their star pitcher is little Joey Wood, sixteen years of age, in the dark shirt on the bottom right.

  Joe Wood in 1909

  Yeah, you heard right, the Bloomer Girls.

  One day in September this Bloomer Girls team came to Ness City. In those days there were several Bloomer Girls teams that barnstormed around the county, like the House of David did 20 or 30 years later. The girls were advertised on posters around Ness City for weeks before they arrived, you know, and they finally came to town and played us and we beat them.

  Well, after the game the fellow who managed them asked me if I’d like to join and finish the tour with them. There were only three weeks left of the trip, and he offered me $20 if I’d play the infield with them those last three weeks.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. I thought the guy must have been off his rocker.

  “Listen,” he said, “you know as well as I do that all those Bloomer Girls aren’t really girls. That third baseman’s real name is Bill Compton, not Dolly Madison. And that pitcher, Lady Waddell, sure isn’t Rube’s sister. If anything, he’s his brother!”

  “Well, I figured as much,” I said. “But those guys are wearing wigs. If you think I’m going to put a wig on, you’re crazy.”

  “No need to,” he says. ‘With your baby face you won’t need one anyway.”

  So I asked Dad if I could go. He thought it was sort of unusual, but he didn’t raise any objections. I guess it must have appealed to his sense of the absurd.

  Fact is, there were four boys on the team: me, Lady Waddell, Dolly Madison, and one other, the catcher. The other five were girls. In case you’re wondering how the situation was in the locker room, we didn’t have clubhouses or locker rooms in those days. We dressed in our uniforms at the hotel and rode out to the ball park from there. I think everybody except maybe some of the farmer boys must have known some of us weren’t actually girls, but the crowds turned out and had a lot of fun anyway. In case you’re interested, by the way, the first team Rogers Hornsby ever played on was a Bloomer Girls team, too. So I’m not in such bad company.

  It was the next year, 1907, that I really got started in organized ball, with Hutchinson in the Western Association. It all came about by accident. My brother Harley was going to the University of Kansas at the time, and he happened to tell a friend of his about me. This friend knew Belden Hill, who ran the Cedar Rapids club in the Three-I League, and as a result I was offered a contract with Cedar Rapids in January of 1907. Ninety dollars a month, that’s what it called for. Before it came time to report to Cedar Rapids, however, Mr. Hill decided he didn’t really need me after all, and he gave my contract to his friend Doc Andrews, who managed the Hutchinson club in the Western Association. He didn’t sell me, he just gave me away.

  So, in the spring of 1907 Dad and I got on the train for Hutchinson, Kansas. My father didn’t have any objections to me playing baseball, but I was only seventeen years old and he wanted to make sure this was a proper environment. So he came to Hutchinson with me to make sure everything was all right. Hutchinson’s only a little over a hundred miles from Ness City, so it wasn’t too far from home.

  I had a pretty good year there, won about 20 games and struck out over 200 men, and after the 1907 season was over I was sold to Kansas City in the American Association. I pitched there until the middle of the 1908 season, when John I. Taylor bought me for the Boston Red Sox, and I reported to the Red Sox that August.

  Rube Marquard came up to the Giants from Indianapolis a month later. We’d pitched against each other many and many a time when he was with Indianapolis and I was with Kansas City, and we both went up to the Big Leagues at practically the same time. Neither one of us was nineteen years old yet: Rube turned nineteen on October 9 of that year, and me 16 days later. Four years later we faced each other again in the 1912 World Series, and then again eight years after that in the 1920 World Series. By then both of us had been around a long time, but neither one of us had reached our thirty-first birthday.

  Of course, that Red Sox team I joined in 1908 turned out to become one of the best teams of all time. Tris Speaker had been on the club earlier that year but had been farmed out to Little Rock, where he hit .350 and led the league. He came back up a few weeks after I got there and we started to room together, and we roomed together for 15 years, first with the Red Sox and later with Cleveland. All the years I was in the American League my roommate was Tris Speaker.

  There was nobody even close to that man as an outfielder, except maybe Harry Hooper. Speaker played a real shallow center field and he had that terrific instinct—at the crack of the bat he’d be off with his back to the infield, and then he’d turn and glance over his shoulder at the last minute and catch the ball so easy it looked like there was nothing to it, nothing at all. Nobody else was even in the same league with him.

  Harry Hooper joined the Red Sox the next year. He was the closest I ever saw to Speaker as a fielder. It’s a real shame Harry was on the same club as Spoke, having to play all those years in his shadow. Just like Gehrig with Ruth, or Crawford with Cobb.

  Won 11 games for the Red Sox in 1909, 12 in 1910, and then 23 (including a no-hitter) in 1911 and 34 in 1912. That was my greatest season, 1912: 34 wins, 16 in a row, 3 more in the World Series, and, of course, beating Walter Johnson 1–0 in that big game at Fenway Park on September 6, 1912.

  It was on a Friday. My regular pitching turn was scheduled to come on Saturday, and they moved it up a day so that Walter and I could face each other. Walter had already won 16 in a row and his streak had ended. I had won 13 in a row and they challenged our manager, Jake Stahl, to pitch me against Walter, so Walter could stop my streak himself. Jake agreed, and to match us against each other he moved me up in the rotation from Saturday to Friday.

  The newspapers publicized us like prizefighters: giving statistics comparing our height, weight, biceps, triceps, arm span, and whatnot. The Champion, Walter Johnson, versus the Challenger, Joe Wood. That was the only game I ever remember in Fenway Park, or anywhere else for that matter, where the fans were sitting practically along the first-base and third-base lines. Instead of sitting back where the bench usually is, we were sitting on chairs right up against the foul lines, and the fans were right behind us. The overflow had been packed between the grandstand and the foul lines, as well as out in the outfield behind ropes. Fenway Park must have contained twice as many people as its seating capacity that day. I never saw so many people in one place in my life. In fact, the fans were put on the field an hour before the game started, and it was so crowded down there I hardly had room to warm up.

  Well, I won, 1–0, but don’t le
t that fool you. In my opinion the greatest pitcher who ever lived was Walter Johnson. If he’d ever had a good ball club behind him what records he would have set!

  You know, I got an even bigger thrill out of winning three games in the World Series that fall. Especially the first game, when we beat the Giants, 4–3. In the last of the ninth they got Chief Meyers on second base and Buck Herzog on third with only one out, and I started to get a little nervous. Only one run ahead and two Giants in scoring position. A sacrifice fly would have tied it and a hit would have beaten us. But I struck out both Art Fletcher and Otis Crandall and we won it. They say that was the first time Crandall ever struck out at the Polo Grounds. I fanned him with a fast ball over the outside corner. I doubt if he ever saw it, even though he swung at it. The count was three and two and that pitch was one of the fastest balls I ever threw in my life.

  Joe Wood and friend: “All the years I was in the American League my roommate was Tris Speaker”

  Joe Wood getting ready for the big game against Walter Johnson. “The fans were put on the field an hour before the game started, and it was so crowded down there I hardly had room to warm up”

  The victory parade through Boston after the 1912 World Series. In the head car are Mayor Fitzgerald (standing in front, with hand on windshield) and Joe Wood (perched on the rear seat, with bow tie).

  That was the Series we won in the tenth inning of the last game. In that last game you always hear about Snodgrass dropping that fly ball, but you never hear about the incredible catch that Harry Hooper made in the fifth inning that saved the game for us. That was the thing that really took the heart out of the Giants. Larry Doyle hit a terrific drive to deep right center, and Harry ran back at full speed and dove over the railing and into the crowd and in some way, I’ll never figure out quite how, he caught the ball—I think with his bare hand. It was almost impossible to believe even when you saw it.

  Boy, if there was any one characteristic of Harry Hooper’s, it was that he was a clutch player. When the chips were down that guy played like wildfire. In the 1915 World Series, you know, he got two home runs in the last game of the Series, and the second one won the game and the Series for us. Just to give you an idea of how Harry played in the clutch: those two homers in that one Series game matched the total number he’d hit all season long!

  So there I was after the 1912 season—including the World Series I’d won 37 games and lost only 6, struck out 279 men in days when the boys didn’t strike out much, and I’d beaten Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson one after the other. And do you know how old I was? Well, I was twenty-two years old, that’s all. The brightest future ahead of me that anybody could imagine in their wildest dreams.

  And do you know something else? That was it That was it, right then and there. My arm went bad the next year and all my dreams came tumbling down around my ears like a damn house of cards. The next five years, seems like it was nothing but one long terrible nightmare.

  I was fine that winter of 1912. After the Series we went back to Boston and got a reception that would make your head spin. I rode through the city in the same car with manager Jake Stahl and Mayor John F. Fitzgerald. That was Honey Fitz, President Kennedy’s grandfather. He was the mayor of Boston then.

  Honey Fitz had gone back and forth on the train with us between Boston and New York so as not to miss a single game of the World Series. The Red Sox had a contingent of fans called the Royal Rooters, and their theme song was something called Tessie. Old Honey Fitz used to sing Tessie louder than anybody. Then I went down to Texas with Tris Speaker for a few days, and after that he came home with me for a few days around here.

  Then it happened. In the spring of 1913 I went to field a ground ball on wet grass and I slipped and fell on my thumb. Broke it. The thumb on my pitching hand. It was in a cast for two or three weeks. I don’t know whether I tried to pitch too soon after that, or whether maybe something happened to my shoulder at the same time. But whatever it was, I never pitched again without a terrific amount of pain in my right shoulder. Never again.

  I expected to have such a great year in 1913. Well, I did manage to win 11 games, with only 5 losses, and I struck out an average of 10 men a game. But it wasn’t the same. The old zip was gone from that fast ball. It didn’t hop any more, like it used to. The season after that I won 9 and lost 3, and in 1915 I won 14 and lost 5. But my arm was getting worse and worse. The pain was getting almost unbearable. After each game I pitched I’d have to lay off for a couple of weeks before I could even lift my arm up. Still, in 1915 I led the league with an earned run average of 1.49.

  In the winter of 1915 I was desperate. I must have gone to hundreds of doctors over the previous three years, and nobody seemed able to help me. Nowadays a shot of cortisone would probably do the job in a flash, but that was over 50 years ago, you know. Hell, they didn’t even know about insulin back then, not to mention cortisone.

  Finally, somebody told me about a chiropractor in New York, so every week that winter of 1915–16 I took the train in to New York and this fellow worked on my back and my arm. All very hush-hush—an unmarked office behind locked doors—because in those days it wasn’t legal for a chiropractor to practice.

  After each treatment this chiropractor wanted me to throw as long and as hard as I possibly could. He said it would hurt, but that’s what he wanted me to do. So after he was through working on me I’d go up to Columbia University, where Andy Coakley was the baseball coach, and I’d go into a corner of the gym and throw a baseball as hard as I could. I’d do that until I just wasn’t able to stand the pain anymore. And I do mean pain. After about an hour I couldn’t lift my arm as high as my belt. Had to use my left hand to put my right into my coat pocket. And if I’d go to a movie in the evening I couldn’t get my right arm up high enough to put it on the arm rest.

  So in 1916 I didn’t play at all. I retired. I stayed on the farm here, fed the chickens, and just thought and thought about the whole situation. Only twenty-six years old and all washed up. A has-been. I put up a trapeze in the attic and I’d hang on that for hours to stretch my arm out. Maybe that would help—who could say? But it didn’t.

  I stayed on the farm all through the 1916 season. That fall, though, I began to get restless. Well, that’s putting it mildly. What it was, I was starting to gnaw on the woodwork I was getting so frustrated. Maybe I could come back. So what if I couldn’t pitch anymore. Damn it, in 1912 I’d hit .290 in addition to winning 34 games. I could hit and I could run and I could field, and if I couldn’t pitch why couldn’t I do something else? Doggone it, I was a ballplayer, not just a pitcher.

  I phoned my best friend, Tris Speaker, and told him I wanted to try again. Spoke had been traded from the Red Sox to Cleveland just before the 1916 season started. Tris said he’d see what he could do. Meanwhile, the Red Sox had given me permission to make any deal for myself I wanted, provided it was satisfactory with them. So on February 24, 1917, I was sold to the Indians for $15,000, and once again I went to spring training, this time with the Cleveland Indians, all of twenty-seven years old and a relic from the distant past.

  Manager Jake Stahl and Smoky Joe Wood in 1912

  I’d hear fathers tell their kids, “See that guy over there? That’s Smoky Joe Wood, used to be a great pitcher long ago.”

  Lee Fohl was managing Cleveland at the time, and he encouraged me every way he could. And for my part I tried to show him that I could do more than pitch. I played in the infield during fielding practice, I shagged flies in the outfield, I was ready to pinch-run, to pinch-hit—I’d have carried the water bucket if they had water boys in baseball. The hell with my pride. I wasn’t the Invincible Joe Wood anymore. I was just another ballplayer who wanted a job and wanted it bad.

  And it paid off. My arm never did come back, but the next year, 1918, they got short of players because of the war and I was given a shot at an outfield job. Well, I made it. I hit .296 that season, and for five years I played in the outfield for Cleveland. In
1921 I hit .366. Could have played there longer, too, but I was satisfied. I figured I’d proved something to myself. So in 1923 when Yale offered me a position as baseball coach at the same salary as I was getting from Cleveland, I took it. Coached there at Yale for 20 years, from 1923 to 1942.

  My biggest thrill came one day in 1918, shortly after they gave me a chance in the outfield. That day we beat the Yankees, 3–2, in a game that lasted 19 innings. It was at the Polo Grounds, the same ball park where six years before I’d won three World Series games as a pitcher for Boston. But now, as an outfielder for Cleveland, I hit two home runs and the second one came in the 19th inning and broke up the ball game.

  What a wonderful day that was! That game is still the longest game ever played at the Polo Grounds, and even today only five games in the history of the American League have lasted longer. Stanley Coveleski pitched the whole game for us, all 19 innings of it. In the top of the seventh I slammed one into the left-field bleachers, in the 9th inning I saved the game with a catch I didn’t think I could make myself, in the 12th I threw a man out at second, and then in the top of the 19th I cracked another one into the left-field seats. Covey set the Yankees down one-two-three in the bottom of the nineteenth and we’d won it, 3–2.

  That was one of the biggest days of my life. May 24, 1918. The season was pretty young yet and I hadn’t been in the outfield very long. It was up to me to show Lee Fohl I could do the job. But from that day on he knew I could do it, and so did I. And the worst was finally over.