The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  That Brooklyn ball club in 1916 was full of ex-Giants. Myself and Marquard and Fred Merkle. And, of course, old Robbie was the manager. He didn’t have to do much managing, though, because it was a team of veterans. Nap Rucker, Jake Daubert, Colby Jack Coombs, Rube, Zack Wheat, Hi Myers—we’d all been around a long time. And, of course, Casey Stengel. He was one of the few younger ones on that team. We won the pennant that year by just outsmarting the whole National League, that’s all. It was an old crippled-up club, and you might say, figuratively, they had to wrap us up in bandages and carry us out to play the World Series. We were all through.

  I always maintained that Stengel won one more pennant than the record books show. That was in 1916, with Brooklyn. Of course, Robbie was the manager. But Robbie was just a good old soul and everything. It was Casey who kept us on our toes. He was the life of the party and kept us old-timers pepped up all season. And we knew so much baseball that we just outsmarted the rest of the league and walked off—or, you might say, limped off—with the pennant.

  But, of course, the years that stand out most in my memory are when I was with the Giants, from 1908 through 1915. So many unforgettable things happened during those years. Like the time Fred Merkle failed to touch second base and we lost the pennant, in 1908. It was a technicality. The New York club won that pennant, and it was taken away from us on a technicality. As the years went by, the smartest man on the club was the “bonehead,” Mr. Merkle. McGraw never consulted anybody except Merkle on a question of strategy or something of that sort. He never asked Matty, he never asked me. He’d say, “Fred, what do you think of this?” The bonehead! What a misnomer! One of the smartest men in baseball, Fred Merkle. Isn’t that something! It’s the truth. It shows what the newspapers can do to you.

  And the 1911 World Series, the Giants against Connie Mack’s Athletics. Chief Bender was there with the A’s. I knew Charlie quite well. He was a Chippewa from Minnesota, one of the nicest people you’d ever meet. He graduated from Carlisle and went to Dickinson College for a while, and from there he went straight to the Athletics in about 1902 or so. He didn’t go to the minors at all. Straight to the Big Leagues. He was still with the A’s, as a coach or a scout or something, when he died in 1954 at the age of about seventy.

  That was the Series that didn’t end until about the start of November. We had six straight days of rain in Philadelphia between the third and fourth games. We were behind two games to one at the time, and don’t think that wasn’t hard on the nerves! Superstitious McGraw, he had us dressed in black uniforms, because that’s the way the Giants had been dressed when they beat the A’s in the 1905 World Series.

  But it didn’t work this time. Matty beat Bender in the first game, 2–1, even though Charlie gave us only five hits and struck out 11. I scored the winning run myself in the seventh inning, after I got a double off Charlie. In the second game, though, Eddie Plank beat Rube Marquard when Frank Baker hit a home run to win the game. That’s the Series that gave Baker his name, “Home Run” Baker. He hit one off Rube in the second game and another off Matty the next day. And all the while there was a big rumpus because the newspapers were claiming that Snodgrass was trying to spike Baker to get him out of there. Which wasn’t so.

  Anyway, they beat us, four games to two. They were a great team, there’s no doubt about that. Especially that “$100,000 infield” of Stuffy McInnis at first, Eddie Collins at second, Jack Barry at short, and Frank Baker at third. But I still think we were the better club. They had our signs, or could read our pitchers, or something. They knew what Marquard was pitching. Matty, too.

  “They’re getting our signs from someplace,” I told McGraw. “That coach on third base, Harry Davis, is calling our pitches. When he yells ‘It’s all right,’ it’s a fast ball.”

  “He must be getting them off you,” McGraw said.

  But they weren’t getting them from me. I went to Rube and to Matty and said, “Pitch whatever you want to pitch. I’ll catch you without signals.” And still the guy was hollering “It’s all right” for the fast ball. He knew something. I never did find out how he did it.

  The next year we lost the World Series again, this time to the Boston Red Sox. That’s the Series they blame on Fred Snodgrass because he dropped that fly ball. The newspapers blamed him, that is. But we didn’t. That was just a simple error. It could happen to anybody. Neither Mr. McGraw nor anybody on the club ever censured Fred Snodgrass. He was another gentleman, a very fine fellow, proven so throughout his life. We always held him in high esteem, and still do today.

  Chief Meyers of the Giants and Chief Bender of the Athletics before the 1911 World Series: “Superstitious McGraw, he had us dressed in black uniforms”

  Jim Thorpe, at the start of his triumphant parade up Fifth Avenue after returning from the 1912 Olympics

  Heck, right after that muff he made the greatest catch you ever saw on a line drive hit by Harry Hooper. After that, Tris Speaker hit a foul pop-up that should have been the second out. It fell practically in the first-base coach’s box, and Fred Merkle or Matty could have taken it easily. But nobody did, and then Speaker singled and drove in the tying run. I gave that pop-up the old college try, but it was too far away for me to get. Matty came over, too, but waited for Merkle to take it, and it fell right between all of us. I think the Red Sox dugout coached Merkle off it. The Boston bench called for Matty to take it, and called for me to take it, and I think that confused Fred. He was afraid of a collision. You see, the Red Sox bench was right there, near where the ball fell, and they just coached him off of it. Well, that’s all right. It’s all part of the game.

  The year after that was the year Jim Thorpe joined us. Jim was a Sac and Fox, from Oklahoma originally. I roomed with him. Gee, he was an Adonis! Built like a Greek god. The greatest all-around athlete who ever lived. Agreed by all the experts as one of the greatest and most wonderful athletes the world has ever known. They may top his records. You always get topped, you know. But in his day he had no equal. All-American football player at Carlisle, and winner of everything in sight at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. He wasn’t as good in baseball as he was in football and track, where he was in a class all by himself. However, he was good enough to stay in the Big Leagues almost ten years.

  Boy, could that guy ever eat! For breakfast he’d order a beefsteak smothered in pork chops. And corned beef and cabbage, that was his favorite. He could down four servings in one sitting. Jim was very proud of the great things he’d done. A very proud man. Not conceited, he never was that. But proud.

  When King Gustav of Sweden pinned the last Olympic gold medal on Jim, he looked at that American Indian, and shook his hand, and said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

  Jim never forgot that. And he never got over what happened after the Olympics were finished. When they took all his medals and trophies away from him. They claimed he had violated his amateur status by playing semipro ball during summers, when he was going to Carlisle. They made him return every one of his Olympic medals and trophies, and that broke his heart. It really did.

  I remember, very late one night, Jim came in and woke me up. I remember it like it was only last night. He was crying, and tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  “You know, Chief,” he said, “the King of Sweden gave me those trophies, he gave them to me. But they took them away from me, even though the guy who finished second refused to take them. They’re mine, Chief, I won them fair and square.” It broke his heart, and he never really recovered.

  In those days, you know, the Indian was in the position of a minority group. Still is, for that matter. Nowadays, you can’t ridicule an Irishman on the television, you can’t ridicule a Jew, and you can’t ridicule a Negro. But they can kill us all the time—make everything out of us they want. Every night you see them on the television—killing us Indians. That’s all they do.

  That’s one reason I don’t look at anything but a ball game or the news on the television. I li
ke the ball games and the news, but after the news, then comes the killing. Those things I don’t like to talk about. I see them…I know them…but I don’t like to talk about them.

  The world seems to be turned all upside down today. Progress, they call it. The radio and the television and all, brainwashing the children and teaching them to cheat and steal and kill. Always violence and killing. I think it’s an awful bad example for the youngsters. Why can’t they teach people about the good things of life, instead?

  In the old days, you know, a shake of your hand was your word and your honor. In those days, if anything was honest and upright, we’d say it was “on the square.” Nowadays, they’ve even turned that word around: now it means you don’t belong, you’re nothing. “Square deal” is no more. You’re a “square.” Where do they get that stuff, anyhow? It just doesn’t make sense—at least not to me, it doesn’t.

  I guess I’m like the venerable old warrior Chief of the Great Six Nations, who announced his retirement by saying, “I am like an old hemlock. My head is still high, but the winds of close to a hundred winters have whistled through my branches, and I have been witness to many wondrous and many tragic things. My eyes perceive the present, but my roots are imbedded deeply in the grandeur of the past.”

  13 Hans Lobert

  NO KIDDING, are you sure that’s right? That except for Connie Mack I’ve been in baseball longer than anybody else in the whole history of the game? That’s really hard to believe.

  Let’s see, I started with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1903. They sent me to Des Moines in the Western League in 1904, in 1905 I jumped to Johnstown in the Tri-State League, and came up with the Chicago Cubs in the fall of that same year. In 1906 the Cubs traded me to Cincinnati for Harry Steinfeldt, which rounded out that great infield they had for so many years after—Chance, Evers, Tinker, and Steinfeldt. If that trade hadn’t been made it would have been Chance, Evers, Tinker, and Lobert, I guess. I played third for Cincinnati from 1906 through 1910, for the Phillies from 1911 through ’14, and then finished up with three years under McGraw on the Giants.

  After my playing days were over I coached at West Point from 1918 to 1925—four of those years were under MacArthur—and then went back to the Giants as a coach for four years. The Giants sent me to manage their farm club at Bridgeport in the Eastern League in 1929, ’30, and ’31, then I managed Jersey City for a while, and from 1934 to 1941 I was a coach with the Phillies. I managed them in 1942, and that was enough to end a beautiful friendship, so in ’43 and ’44 I coached for Cincinnati. Since ’45 I’ve been a scout for New York and San Francisco.

  So that’s it. Sounds more like a travelogue than a life history, doesn’t it? It really isn’t as much traveling as it sounds, though—it’s mostly the Giants, the Phillies, and the Reds, once you stop to think about it. But it does add up. Over 60 years in baseball. That’s almost impossible for me to believe.

  I still remember back in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, there was a team called the Demarest Sewing Machines that played only a few blocks from where we lived, and I used to sneak into the games all the time. I used to crawl under the fence, so I wouldn’t have to pay my ten cents. I must have been about ten years old, which means it was around 1890 or so.

  Well, the day I’m thinking of is the day the ticket-taker caught me. He’d seen me crawling under the fence before, but he’d never been fast enough to catch me. But this time I must have been careless. He grabbed me and dragged me up in front to the ticket office, where they had a great big ugly bulldog chained to a post. He chained me to another post, right next to the bulldog, but just beyond his reach. Just barely. That was to teach me a lesson, so I wouldn’t do it again, I guess.

  He kept me there for about four innings, and all the while I’m getting more and more scared. I could see myself in jail, with my father coming down to get me out, and a whole lot worse. Although at the age of ten I’m not sure what could possibly be worse than that. Finally he unchained me, and he says, “Well, what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to watch the game,” I said, and I ran like the devil. But the next day I was right back, crawling under the fence again.

  A few years later we moved to a little town right outside of Pittsburgh. My father was a cabinetmaker, but we had about 10 cows too, and every morning brother and I would get up at four in the morning and milk the cows and deliver the milk and take the cows to pasture before we went to school. We had the cows, but we didn’t really live on a farm. We’d take them to pasture on a big farm nearby.

  There’s where I got my first baseball uniform. I was about fifteen, I guess. I was playing on some little amateur team and they got us uniforms. Boy, I’ll never forget it. I slept in it that night. They couldn’t get that thing off my back.

  But I still didn’t have a pair of baseball shoes. That same year my Dad gave me $3.50 for Christmas.

  “What are you going to do with all that money?” he asked me.

  “I’m going to buy a pair of the best baseball shoes I can find,” I told him.

  And I went downtown to Pittsburgh and got a pair of Spalding Featherweights, which were just $3.50 at that time. When I got back home it was snowing out, but I couldn’t wait to try them on. I put the whole uniform on, and the new shoes, and ran outside as quick as I could. I can still see my Mom and Dad watching me out the front window—I could hardly see them it was snowing so hard—with me out there dancing in the snow in those beautiful shoes.

  I played every chance I could get, and late in my teens I started to play third base with a semipro club in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh AC’s. Naturally, living near Pittsburgh and all, my idol was Honus Wagner, and I tried to do everything just like he did. I even tried to walk like him. Wagner lived in Carnegie, which wasn’t far from where we lived, and lots of times I’d see him out there playing baseball with the kids after the Pirates’ game was over. A wonderful man, he was.

  One day in September of 1903, after I’d been playing with the Pittsburgh AC’s for a few seasons, we took a trip to Atlantic City to play a game there. It so happened that Barney Dreyfuss, who was president of the Pittsburgh Pirates, happened to be in Atlantic City at the time, and he watched the game from the stands. After it was over, he buttonholed me.

  “Where do you live, young man?” he says to me.

  “In Pittsburgh, sir,” I said.

  “Is that so?” he says. “How would you like to come out to Exposition Park and have a trial with the Pirates?”

  What could I say? I gulped and stammered something, and I guess he got the idea, because next week there I was, at Exposition Park over in Allegheny, which was where the Pirates used to play in those days. This was in September of 1903. I remember the year because that was the year the Pirates won their third pennant in a row, and they had the first World Series ever, the Pirates and the Red Sox. I sat on the Pittsburgh bench during that World Series.

  So I went over to Exposition Park, like Mr. Dreyfuss asked me to, and started to go into the clubhouse. There was a big fellow at the door who turned out to be the trainer.

  “What do you want here?” he says, real gruff and tough. Scared the tar out of me. I told him why I was there, and he finally let me in.

  Honus Wagner: “From then on he always called me Hans Number Two”

  When I got inside I didn’t know what to do, so I began to look for Fred Clarke, the manager. All the players were there, you know, getting dressed and everything, and I felt like a real big shot and a nobody both at the same time. While I’m looking for Mr. Clarke I’m mostly looking out of the corner of my eye at the players to see who I recognize and what they really look like—like Honus Wagner and Tommy Leach and Ginger Beaumont and the rest. I guess I must have looked sort of lost, because all of a sudden Wagner, of all people, yells out to me, “Hey, kid, come on over here and use my locker!”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Wagner,” I says, “I have to find Mr. Clarke.”

  “He won’t be here for
twenty minutes yet,” Wagner said. “Meanwhile come on over and get dressed here.”

  So I did, and I really felt like a big shot then. Wagner asked me where I was from, and when he found out I lived near him and my name was John, or Johannus, the same as his, he started calling me Hans Number Two. Actually, we did look a little bit alike. Especially our noses! From then on he always called me Hans Number Two, for all the fifty years we knew each other. I’ve always been proud of that.

  I stayed with Pittsburgh the rest of the season and got in about five games. The first one was against the Giants and Joe McGinnity was the pitcher. Boy, he was at his peak then. He won over 30 games in 1903 and 1904 both, and that’s when he was pitching double headers and all. I think he pitched at least three doubleheaders that year, 1903, and won both of the games each time.

  Well, in that first game I didn’t get any hits until about the eighth inning. I came up for the fourth time and McGinnity got two quick strikes on me, both curve balls. That’s all he threw, underhand curve balls, one after the other. But with two strikes on me I bunted down the first-base line and beat it out. When I went out to my position the next inning, Giant manager John McGraw was coaching at third base, which was where I was playing.

  “Say, young man,” he said, “who ever taught you to bunt with two strikes on you?”

  “Nobody did,” I said, “but I like to bunt and nobody was looking for a busher to do that.”

  “Well, you keep it up,” he said. “That’s the way to keep them on their toes.”