The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  “This newspaper photographer came all the way from Providence to take your picture,” he says.

  “Is that so?” I said. “Well, he can go all the way back to Providence without it.”

  Oh, did that get him! He turned on his heel and stormed out, then turned around and came all the way back in again. I thought he was going to take a sock at me. He’d been known to do that on occasion, you know.

  “This will cost you $100,” he shouts. His face was so red he could hardly talk. And you should have seen those eyebrows!

  “Make it $200,” I said, still sitting there.

  “It’s $200, all right.”

  “Make it $300,” I said, “and then go straight to hell.”

  “It’s $300,” he roars, and slams the door.

  Finally, I went out on the field and the photographer posed me and Mr. Barrow together. Arms around each other’s shoulders, both smiling, best friends ever. But as soon as the shutter clicked we both walked real fast in opposite directions.

  Cocky young pitchers! Yeah, I was one, till I learned a little better. Doesn’t take many 9–5 losses to bring you back down.

  After that simmered down, Ed Barrow and I got along just fine. I’d pitch for him any time he wanted me to, and he’d do anything for me. One day he was stuck and needed a relief pitcher real bad. I’d just pitched the day before, but after looking up and down the bench he said, “Sam, would you warm up and go in for us next inning?”

  “Sure,” I said, and went down to the bullpen to get loose.

  When I was all warmed up I came back in. “I don’t think I have too much today,” I said, “but I’ll try.”

  “Good,” he said, “I know at least you’ll look like a pitcher.”

  And later on, when Mr. Barrow became general manager of the Yankees, he brought me over there. I guess I liked playing with the Yankees best of all. I was there for five years, 1922 through ’26. It was a good club to play for. They always had plenty of money, paid real well, and drew good crowds. And three of the five years I was there we won the pennant. What more could you ask for? The Yankees always did things in a big way. Why, when the season was over they’d even give each player three brand new baseballs. Just give them to us. No other club ever did that.

  Not to mention the fact that we had a pretty fair-to-middlin’ ball club—Lou Gehrig at first base, Tony Lazzeri at second, Everett Scott or Mark Koenig at shortstop, and Joe Dugan at third in the infield; Earl Combs, Bob Meusel, and a man named Ruth in the outfield; Wally Schang and Benny Bengough catching. Miller Huggins managing. Yes, a pretty fair ball club. And pitching! Herb Pennock, Urban Shocker, Bob Shawkey, Waite Hoyt, Joe Bush, Carl Mays, George Pipgras, myself—my goodness!

  People forget that the Yankes in the twenties were more than a great offensive club. They were the best defensive team in both leagues, as well. That outfield, terrific pitching, a great infield. It was a well-balanced ball club, in every way. Everybody played in the shadow of George Herman Ruth, of course, so a lot of people don’t even remember who else was on that team.

  Oh, they remember Lou Gehrig, I guess. One of the nicest fellows ever lived, Lou was. He never really got the publicity he deserved. A very serious-minded fellow, very modest and easy to get along with, always every inch a gentleman. Lou was the kind of boy if you had a son he’s the kind of person you’d like your son to be.

  And they remember Tony Lazzeri at second base, maybe. Tony was an epileptic, you know. They say that’s how he died a few years ago: had a seizure and fell down the cellar steps. He had one of those spells most every spring on the trip back north. But never during a game. Tony was a very witty guy, full of fun. Quiet, but always up to something. A real nice guy. And a great second baseman, too. How they can keep leaving him out of the Hall of Fame is beyond me.

  And that was some outfield on that team. Bob Meusel had a fantastic arm. He had an arm as long as this room, know what I mean? Once he got his hands on a ball it was as good as wherever he wanted to fire it. It was as good as there already. I’ve seen him throw flatfooted from deep in the outfield all the way to home plate. On a low line, and very accurate, too. Combs didn’t have that good an arm, but he could really go get ’em. He could cover the whole outfield all by himself. And Ruth: well, he was the champ, that’s all you can say.

  I guess I saw my share of Mr. George Herman Ruth. Not much doubt about that. I broke into the American League the same year he did, 1914, and left one year after him. The Babe’s last year was ’34, and mine was ’35. I was his teammate on the Red Sox for four years, and on the Yankees for five. We won five pennants and three World Series together.

  And the rest of the years, I faced him from a distance of 60 feet 6 inches. I’ll tell you one thing, when Jidge was up at bat that pitching distance seemed to shrink somehow. Maybe it was still 60 feet, but it sure felt more like six.

  Babe Ruth could hit a ball so hard, and so far, that it was sometimes impossible to believe your eyes. We used to absolutely marvel at his hits. Tremendous wallops. You can’t imagine the balls he hit. And before that he was a great pitcher, too. Really great.

  In fact, he was strictly a pitcher when I first played with him, on the Red Sox in 1916, after I’d come over from Cleveland. Of course, for a while there he did both. Like in 1917, he won 24 games for us as a pitcher, and also batted about .325. It was hard to believe the natural ability that man had.

  Well, to give you an example: in 1920 he hit over 50 home runs all by himself, and everybody else in the whole rest of the league added together hit only about 300 homers. That’s a fact. Look it up if you don’t believe it. About one out of every seven home runs hit in the American League that year was hit by Babe Ruth.

  My God, if he was playing today! Nowadays they hit about 1,500 home runs a season in the American League. If Babe was as good relative to everybody else today, like he used to be, he’d hit over 200 homers a season. That’ll give you an idea of how the big fellow dominated baseball back then. Take Mantle, Mays, Killebrew, and anybody else you want to name today, and add them all up, and they still won’t match Ruth’s home runs relative to the rest of the league!

  I should say, of course, that when I pitched against him he never gave me much trouble. But it’s not so. I always figured the best way to pitch to Ruth, especially in a pinch, was to walk him. Maybe that’s why I stayed in the league so long. From 1914 through 1935—22 consecutive years of pitching in the American League. No one’s ever done that before or since.

  I was forty-three when I finally retired. Came back home to Woods-field, Ohio, where I was born. Bill McGeehan of the Herald Tribune used to call me “Sad Sam, the Sorrowful Sage from Woodsfield.” He said he used to watch me on the field and I always looked sort of downcast to him: so “Sad Sam.” Actually, what it was, I would always wear my cap down real low over my eyes. And the sportswriters were more used to fellows like Waite Hoyt, who’d always wear their caps way up so they wouldn’t miss seeing any pretty girls.

  Lou Gehrig: “Lou was the kind of boy if you had a son he’s the kind of person you’d like your son to be”

  Tony Lazzeri: “How they can keep leaving him out of the Hall of Fame is beyond me”

  “Babe Ruth could hit a ball so hard, and so far, that it was sometimes impossible to believe your eyes”

  Well, of course, I don’t know about being any “sage.” I would always ask for advice, and listen. Of course, you had to be a little careful about who you’d ask. My idea about getting a point of view is to feel your way along. I’d always sit there and observe everything that went on. Golly, I don’t know why, but whenever anything went wrong they’d blame me. Heck, I was just watching things. But if someone’s shoes were nailed down, or socks tied in knots, seemed like I’d always get the blame. Never could understand it.

  I guess in all those years of pitching my biggest thrill came when I pitched a no-hitter for the Yankees on September 4, 1923. It was against the Philadelphia Athletics. I realized it as I was
going along. Round about the fourth or fifth inning you begin to realize that nobody’s got a hit yet, and then you start to get a little tense. But when I’d come back to the bench between innings no one would say a word to me about a no-hitter, or anything like that. The scoreboards then, they only gave the score. They didn’t have things like hits and errors on the scoreboards in those days.

  Along near the end of the game I started to get real tired, way more than usual. Chick Galloway, the A’s shortstop, was the last man up in the bottom of the ninth. “I’m gonna break it up if I can,” he yelled at me, and he bunted down the third-base line. I fielded it and threw him out and there it was: a no-hitter.

  It was a terrific thrill as soon as it was over, the fans and all the players flocking down on the field to congratulate me. But I think the biggest kick of all came the next day, when I got telegrams from all over the country, from people all over the whole country who’d taken the time to send me a wire.

  But baseball is a game where you feel great one day and down in the dumps the next. I pitched that no-hitter on September 4, and then only a few weeks later I lost a 1–0 World Series game to the Giants. That was the first World Series ever played in Yankee Stadium, 1923, and this game—the third of the Series—was played before the largest crowd ever to see a baseball game anywhere up to that time, about 65,000 people.

  Art Nehf and I both pitched shutouts through six innings, but then in the seventh Casey Stengel hit one of my fast balls into the right-field stands. That was the only run of the game, and Nehf beat me, 1–0. Oh, that really hurt! But you know, that Art Nehf, he was an awfully nice fellow—awfully nice. And a wonderful pitcher, too.

  Well, I managed to stay up there a good long time. Saw a lot of wonderful things. Twenty-two years in the American League—five World Series. You know something? In all that time I don’t remember ever being nervous before a game. A bit impatient maybe, but not really nervous. I was a bit like those horses pawing the ground in the stocks at the rodeo, sort of eager to get started. I couldn’t keep still before the game began, especially if it was my day to pitch. Didn’t know what to do with myself. Back and forth, one place to the other, going to the bathroom (thought you had to go, but really didn’t, you know), doing this and that. But I don’t call that really nervous, do you? More like just awaitin’ for to get in there.

  Bob O’Farrell

  19 Bob O’Farrell

  IN 1924 a foul tip came back, crashed through my mask, and fractured my skull.

  It was my own fault. It was an old mask and I knew I shouldn’t have worn it. You know, a lot of times a catcher’s mask gets so much banging around it gets dented here and there. If you try to bend it back the way it’s supposed to be, it weakens it. Well, I put on an old mask that day and asked the clubhouse boy to go get me my regular one. Before he could get back with it, the ball had spun off the bat, smashed through the mask, and knocked me unconscious.

  I had caught almost all the Cubs’ games the two previous seasons, and hit a solid .320 both years. Gabby Hartnett had come up to the Cubs in ’22, and he was sort of crowding me. But the catcher’s job was mine until I got my skull fractured. I didn’t play much the rest of that season, however, and the next year the Cubs traded me to the St. Louis Cardinals. A good break for me, I guess, now that I look back at it. At the time, though, I was brokenhearted. Still, it turned out for the best, because the Cardinals won the pennant in 1926, and I was even voted the league’s Most Valuable Player that year. We won the World Series, too.

  That was the World Series, the famous one against the Yankees, where old Grover Cleveland Alexander, at the tail end of his long career, came in late in the seventh game to strike out Tony Lazzeri and save the Series for the Cardinals. I guess that’s maybe the most famous strikeout in the whole history of baseball, wouldn’t you say?

  I had caught Alex for years on the Cubs before we were both traded to the Cardinals. I think he was as good as or better than any pitcher who ever lived. He had perfect control, and a great screwball. He used to call it a fadeaway, same as Mathewson.

  I don’t believe Alex was much of a drinker before he went into the army. After he got back from the war, though, he had a real problem. When he struck out Lazzeri he’d been out on a drunk the night before and was still feeling the effects. See, Alex had pitched for us the day before and won. He had beaten the Yankees in the second game of the World Series, and again in the sixth game, pitching the complete game both times. He was thirty-nine years old then, and naturally wasn’t expecting to see any more action.

  However, after the sixth game was over, Rogers Hornsby, our manager, told Alex that if Jesse Haines got in any trouble the next day he would be the relief man. So he should take care of himself. Well, Alex didn’t really intend to take a drink that night. But some of his “friends” got hold of him and thought they were doing him a favor by buying him a drink. Well, you weren’t doing Alex any favor by buying him a drink, because he just couldn’t stop.

  So in the seventh inning of the seventh game, Alex is tight asleep in the bullpen, sleeping off the night before, when trouble comes. We had each won three games in the Series and now all the chips are down. The score is 3–2 in our favor going into the bottom of the seventh inning of the seventh game, Jesse Haines pitching for us against Herb Pennock for the Yankees. Suddenly Haines starts to tire. The Yankees get the bases loaded with two out, and the next batter up is Tony Lazzeri.

  Rogers Hornsby and I gather around Haines at the pitching mound. Jesse’s fingers are a mass of blisters from throwing so many knuckle balls, and so Hornsby decides to call in old Alex, even though we know he’d just pitched the day before and had been up most of the night. So in he comes, shuffling in slowly from the bullpen to the pitching mound.

  “Can you do it?” asks Hornsby.

  “I can try,” says Alex.

  We agree that Alex should pitch Lazzeri low and away, nothing up high. Well, the first pitch is a perfect low curve for strike one. But the second one comes in high, and Tony smacks a vicious line drive that lands in the left-field stands but just foul. Oh, it’s foul by maybe ten feet. Actually, from home plate I can see it’s going to be foul all the way, because it’s curving from the time it got halfway out there. Of course, I’m giving it plenty of body english too, just to make sure.

  The pitch had been high, so I run out to Alex. “I thought we were going to pitch him low and outside?”

  “He’ll never get another one like that!” Alex says.

  And he didn’t. The next pitch was a low outside curve and Tony Lazzeri struck out. Fanned him with three pitches.

  Most people seem to remember that as happening in the ninth inning and ending the ball game. It didn’t. It was only the seventh inning and we had two innings still to go. In the eighth Alex set down the Yankees in order, and the first two men in the ninth. But then, with two out in the bottom of the ninth, he walked Babe Ruth. Bob Meusel was next up, but on the first pitch to him the Babe took off for second. Alex pitched, and I fired the ball to Hornsby and caught Babe stealing, and that was the last play of the game and the Series.

  You know, I wondered why Ruth tried to steal second then. A year or two later I went on a barnstorming trip with the Babe and I asked him. Ruth said he thought Alex had forgotten he was there. Also that the way Alex was pitching they’d never get two hits in a row off him, so he better get in position to score if they got one. Well, maybe that was good thinking and maybe not. In any case, I had him out a mile at second.

  Then the most fantastic thing of all happened. That winter the Cardinals up and trade Rogers Hornsby to the Giants for Frankie Frisch and Jimmy Ring! They trade away the manager of the World’s Champions, who also happens to be a guy who had hit over .400 in three of his last five seasons! Boy, that really shook us up. Traded away a national hero. And to top it all off, who do they make the new St. Louis manager? Me!

  What a position to be in, huh? Hornsby couldn’t get along with the owner, Sam Bre
adon, and in a way I wound up as the goat. I didn’t want to be the manager. I was in the prime of my career, only thirty years old, and managing always takes something away from your playing.

  Nevertheless, we almost won the pennant again in 1927. Lost out to the Pirates by only 1½ games. But we didn’t win it, so the following season I wasn’t the manager any more, and I found myself traded to the Giants early in 1928.

  Hornsby was a great manager as far as I’m concerned. That year in St. Louis he was tops. He never bothered any of us. Just let you play your own game. He was fine. Of course, they say later on he couldn’t get along with his players. Got a little bossy, they say. Seems like he changed. But as far as I’m concerned, he was great.

  Now McGraw, he was rough as a manager. Very hard to play for. I played for him from ’28 to ’32, when he retired, and I didn’t like it. You couldn’t seem to do anything right for him, ever. If something went wrong it was always your fault, not his. Maybe it was because he was getting old and was a sick man, but he was never any fun to play for. He was always so grouchy.

  Manager John J. McGraw: “He was always so grouchy”

  I remember one time Bill Terry was at bat with the count three balls and no strikes on him, and McGraw let him hit. Bill hit a home run. Right out of the park. As he came back to the dugout, McGraw said, “I’ll take half of that one!” Meaning he should get some credit for letting Bill hit away with the count three and nothing.

  “You can have it all!” Terry says.

  No, McGraw was never a very cheerful man to be around. At least that’s my opinion.

  The greatest player I ever saw? Oh, I don’t know, there were so many great ones. Guys like Paul Waner, Hornsby, Alex, Terry, Hubbell, Ruth, Vance, Mel Ott, Rixey, Roush. There were too many great ones to say any one is the greatest.