The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  Best of all, though, I loved to play against the Yankees, especially in Yankee Stadium. Boy, did I get a kick out of beating those guys. They were so great, you know, it was a thrill to beat them. Babe Ruth was my hero. He was my idol. He was a picture up there at the plate. What a ballplayer. And such a sweet guy, too. I tried to copy everything he did. But I still loved to beat him.

  My last year was 1938. The Tigers released me in May, and Clark Griffith heard about it and called me up. He was a wonderful man, always helpful and kind. He wasn’t like a boss, more like a father. He was more than a father to me, that man. He called me up after Detroit released me.

  “You started with me 18 years ago,” he said, “why don’t you come back to Washington and finish up with me?”

  So I did. I went back to the Senators for the rest of that season. Didn’t play too much, though. Couldn’t gallop around in that pasture like I used to 20 years before. Fact is, I didn’t even complete my last time at bat. Lefty Grove was pitching against us—he wasn’t any spring chicken any more, either—and I swung at a low outside pitch and wrenched my back.

  Bucky Harris was back managing Washington again—Bucky had been my manager there from 1924 to 1928, the best manager I ever played for, and I played for quite a few. So Bucky had to send in a pinch hitter to finish out my turn at bat.

  “Come on out, Goose,” he said, “and rest up a bit.”

  That was the last time I ever picked up a bat in the Big Leagues. It was also the first and only time a pinch hitter was ever put in for the ol’ Goose.

  Note: Goose Goslin was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1968.

  23 Willie Kamm

  Now Mister Willie Kamm, you don’t know who I am,

  But that needn’t make a bit of diff to you,

  For I’m just a common fan, tho’ I do the best I can,

  And I always root for everything you do.

  I like to see you play, in that easy graceful way,

  Which doesn’t seem to bother you at all,

  If a batter pops a fly, way up high into the sky,

  It’s a cinch that batter’s out, and that is all.

  When you swing that ashen stick, very hard and very quick,

  And the ball lands in the bleachers for a tally,

  Or when it’s hit-and-run, right there begins the fun,

  For I know it’s gonna start a winning rally.

  Now it’s no make-believe that we hate to see you leave,

  For we’ll miss you, yes we’ll miss you every day,

  For we like you, Willie boy, and it takes away our joy,

  Just to think that we’ll no longer see you play.

  It’s hard to say good-bye, and I feel as tho I’ll cry,

  Notwithstanding that the best of friends must part,

  So wherever you do play, in that easy graceful way,

  You will always have a warm place in my heart.

  —JUST AN ORDINARY FAN (84 years old)*

  I PLAYED THIRD BASE for the White Sox for nine years. Led the league in fielding time after time, and hit a solid .280 or .290. Hardly ever missed a game. And then, bang! I was traded to Cleveland.

  You know, nobody from the White Sox ever notified me that I’d been traded. Nobody. After nine years with the club. I read it in the newspapers! Actually, a telephone operator was really the one who told me. She’d been listening in, I presume. About a week before the trade the phone rang one night and it’s this operator. I didn’t know her from the man in the moon.

  “You know something, you’re going to be traded to Cleveland,” she says.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “what’s the difference?” I thought she was just some nut.

  A couple of days later she calls again. “It’s getting closer and closer,” she says.

  And then on Saturday night the phone rings again. “The deal went through,” she says, “you’re traded to Cleveland.” And I got up the next morning and got the Sunday papers and read where, sure enough, I’d been traded to Cleveland for Lew Fonseca, my old buddy.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I wondered. “It has to be official. It’s in the papers.”

  There was still no word from the ball club. So instead of going to the ball park at the usual time, I waited until the game had started and then went out. Nobody was in the clubhouse then, see. I should have said good-bye to everyone, but somehow—I don’t know—I just didn’t want to see anybody. Nine years there and contented and all, doing a good job, I thought; I just couldn’t understand why I’d been traded.

  After I got all my baseball duds packed I went to the club office to see about transportation. All they could say to me was, “Yeah, you’ve been traded.” That’s all.

  What the heck! It was all worth it, anyway. I was always nuts about baseball. I couldn’t play enough. It was always that way, far back as I can remember. There were three cemeteries near our house when I was a kid, and I remember throwing balls, or stones, up against the walls of those cemeteries for hour after hour. All by myself, hour after hour.

  When I got bigger I had a paper route, and as soon as I threw my last paper I’d hustle over to Golden Gate Park, where there were always lots of kids playing ball. Before long I got to playing semipro around San Francisco here. There was an old gentleman name of Spike Hennessy, he took a liking to me. Rough and ready man, very poor, he just barely existed, but he devoted his whole life to kids. He was a trainer, just one year, with the Sacramento club, and that year he talked them into signing me. That was 1918, and I’d just turned eighteen years old.

  The Sacramento club released me after a month and then Mr. Hennessy got me a job up in Oregon in the Shipyard League. Worked in the shipyards during the week and played ball on weekends. After that I came back home and worked at the Union Iron Works, where they had a company team called the Timekeepers. And from there the San Francisco Seals signed me up. Pacific Coast League. That was in 1919.

  Willie Kamm

  In the beginning I was a real shy, bashful kid. In fact, when the Seals first signed me, Charlie Graham, the manager, said to me, “You’re going to be our regular third baseman.”

  “Oh no,” I told him, “I’m not that good. I just hope that when we get to spring training I’ll be good enough so you’ll farm me out for a couple of years.”

  Charlie strung along with me, though. Jeez, was I ever lousy that first year. Must have made 40 million errors. Well, I was only a kid, nineteen years old, skinny, couldn’t have weighed over 140. Later on I had my tonsils out and then I started to put some weight on, but that first year I was just a gangling, awkward kid. Still, Charlie Graham stuck with me, and I’m thankful to him for it.

  Of course, Mom and Pop, they didn’t know what to make of all this. They were old-fashioned German people, and they didn’t know baseball from shmaseball. First game they ever saw they were dumbfounded. What’s going on?

  Mom got to be quite a rabid fan, though. She never really understood the game, but that didn’t stop her. Not one bit. She had lots of life and zip, and boy, she’d root like nobody’s business. Everything I did was sensational as far as she was concerned. Now my father, as far as he was concerned I never got a hit. If I got a single, my mother would scream, “Willie’s hit a triple.” And Pop would say “Ach, the guy should have caught it.”

  That’s just the way he was. All this didn’t make any difference to him. Or if it did, he wouldn’t let on. He was a little bitty fellow, less than five feet tall. An old-fashioned German father.

  If you had a turkey for Sunday dinner, you’d ask, “How’s the turkey, Pop?”

  “Ach, turkey’s turkey.”

  He was that way with everything. You know, turkey’s supposed to be what it’s supposed to be, that’s all. My mother, she was the enthusiastic one. She got a kick out of everything. Mom picked up the game pretty well, because she used to go fairly regular. But Pop, he only went about once a week or so.

  Mom went to the ball park so much she used to hear
a lot of stories about me. She’d listen to the folks around her, you know. When I first started with the Seals she went out one day and two guys were sitting in back of her.

  “See that skinny kid out there throwing the ball?” one of them says.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Willie Kamm.”

  Well, my mother’s all ears, because she’d never seen anything like a ball park this big before, with so many people in it, and here they’re talking about her son.

  So the guy continues, “Yeah, that’s Willie Kamm. They’re going to try to make a ballplayer out of him.”

  “Is that so?” the other guy says. “How come?”

  “Oh,” says the first guy, “his father’s a millionaire, owns half of Market Street. You know the Kamm Building there.” And on and on they went. Owns this and owns that.

  When I got home that night my mother looked at me and said, “Willie, I don’t think you should go to that place any more. The people there, they talk very peculiar.”

  I played third base with the San Francisco club for four years. After the second year was when I had my tonsils out, and that winter I put on a good 20 or 25 pounds. The next season I felt real strong and my batting average went up 50 points. That would be 1921. In 1922 it went up another 50 points, to about .340, and that’s when the White Sox bought me for $100,000.

  I was only twenty-two years old then, more than 40 years ago, but I still remember that day like it was yesterday. It was June of 1922. The San Francisco club had to make a trip to Los Angeles that week, but I had a bad charley horse so they decided to leave me home to rest up. I didn’t have anything in particular to do that evening, so I thought I might as well take a little walk and get some fresh air.

  I’m walking up Market Street, at Powell, when suddenly I hear the newsboys yelling, “Willie Kamm sold to White Sox for a hundred thousand dollars! Willie Kamm sold to White Sox for a hundred thousand dollars!”

  So I stop dead in my tracks. What are they saying? Can this be true? Me? I walk over to get one of the papers, and one of the kids looks at me and shouts, “Hey, there he is, it’s Willie Kamm. Hey, it’s Willie Kamm.”

  Well, I don’t know what got into me, but I panicked. Completely. I started running as fast as I could go up Market Street, charley horse and all, with that pack of newsboys at my heels. “Hey, it’s Willie Kamm. Hey, it’s Willie Kamm.”

  Willie Kamm’s mother and father, better known as “Babe” and the “Kid”

  Oh, Lord! I ran up two blocks and around a corner and quick ducked in a theater, and there I sat, panting and sweating. I must have sat there for hours. The longer I sat there and thought about it, the more frightened I got. It can’t be true. I’m not that good. But suppose it is true. It must be. What’ll I do? I won’t go, I’m no Big League player. I won’t go, that’s all! I don’t know how long I sat there. Finally I looked up at the movie. I’d seen the exact same picture the night before, and hadn’t even realized it.

  Well, then all the hullabaloo started. Record price for a ballplayer. Hundred Thousand Dollar Beauty. All that. And, of course, I went. I always forced myself to do things. Here’s the original check, by the way. The Chicago White Sox gave it to me years later. A hundred thousand dollars for me! What do you think of that?

  You know, I don’t ever remember a ball game where I wasn’t nervous before it began. But it seemed like once the first pitch went in, my mind would go completely on the game and I’d lose my nervousness. But it never left me before a game, not in all the years I played.

  Yes, you can hear the fans when they yell something to you. Or more likely at you. Especially if you’re playing third base, you hear them all the time. After all, the box seats are only a few feet away. At least they used to be in the ball parks we played in. But a ballplayer never lets it bother him. Never bothered me, anyway. Just rolls right off your back, like water off a duck.

  The worst day I ever had being razzed was one day in Chicago when we were playing the Yankees. It was in 1923 and there had just been all this publicity about the White Sox paying $100,000 for me. I was so terrible that day it was unbelievable. If there was a man on third I struck out, and if there was a man on first I hit into a double play. I did that, and worse, all day long.

  Finally, the last time I was up they walked the man ahead of me to get to me, and on the first ball pitched I hit into another double play. Well, there must have been about 25,000 people there that day, and I think about 24,999 of them stood up as I walked back to the dugout and told me what a bum I was and that I could go right back to California. Of course, you try to be nonchalant about it. You want to hurry up and get back inside that dugout in the worst way. But you don’t want to show them that—so you’ve got to take your time, yet still hurry, see. Oh, it’s a hell of a feeling.

  I remember another day, too. We were playing Cleveland a double-header at Chicago. Well, a guy in the third-base boxes started in on me early in the first game. He had a foghorn for a voice.

  Not all of the mementos of a baseball career consist of balls and gloves. Below: A rather utilitarian notification of being traded, softened somewhat by the letter on the facing page. Also, on the opposite page: The front and back of the record $100,000 check with which nine years earlier the White Sox had bought Willie Kamm from the San Francisco Seals.

  “You bum, why don’t you go back to California? You never could play ball and you’re getting worse. You’re all thumbs. You never hit in the clutch. How stupid can you get? What a fathead!”

  He was practically right on top of me in that small park, and with that bellow of his I heard every word loud and clear. He kept it up all during the first game and was still going strong well into the second. It wasn’t that he’d let loose a blast once in a while. This guy kept screaming without a stop. He’d hardly stop to take a breath. George Moriarty, the old Detroit infielder, was umpiring at third base, and about the middle of the second game he says, “Lord, how long can this guy keep it up?”

  Well, about the sixth inning of the second game he finally started losing steam. His voice got hoarser and hoarser, and pretty soon I almost had to strain to catch the words. I’m watching him out of the corner of my eye, see, and in the top of the eighth inning he finally gets up and makes his way through the stands toward the exit behind home plate. By this time he can hardly even whisper any more.

  “Thank God!” I say to myself.

  But just as he gets to the exit he turns around one last time and bellows, louder than he had all day long, “YOU PUNK, YOU!”

  He sure had lungs, that guy. But no, as far as I was concerned the fans never did bother me very much. Hardly heard them.

  24 Heinie Groh

  Strange, that some great sculptor has not seized upon little Heinie Groh as the inspiration for a wondrous modeling. There have been statues, some almost classic in their perfection, showing ballplayers in action. But the famous third baseman and captain of the Cincinnati Reds would give a matchless verve and breathless interest to the conception.

  A tiny man, yet faultless as the Pythian Apollo; a small figure, bent half forward like a crouching runner waiting for the starter’s gun; an eager face, with glowing eyes and parted lips; the hands swinging free, waiting for instantaneous demands.

  The bat crashes…a spurt of dust as the little man goes to the ground in one steel-muscled diving leap…up again, ball firm-gripped against the black and battered glove…the arm crooks…the shoulder swings forward…and the thud of the ball spatting into the first baseman’s glove. That is Heinie Groh!

  —Editorial in the Cinicinnati Times-Star, 1919

  THERE WAS A PERIOD of about 15 years there, where it seemed like if anything real big happened I was right on the spot. Like a guardian angel, you might say. Or a lead nickel, maybe. Take your choice.

  Like when Fred Snodgrass muffed that fly ball in the World Series in 1912, when Fred Toney and Jim Vaughn both pitched no-hitters in the same game in 1917, when the Black Sox threw the
World Series in 1919, when that ball hit a pebble and bounced over Freddy Lindstrom’s head in the World Series in 1924—you name it and I was there. Some writer once called me the ambiguous Mr. Groh, ’cause it seemed like regardless of what was going on, or where, I’d be somewhere around the premises. Or was it the ubiquitous Mr. Groh? I don’t remember. But you get the idea.

  Take that double no-hitter, for instance. It happened in Chicago in 1917. I was leading off and playing third base for Cincinnati that day. Both Fred Toney and Jim Vaughn pitched nine no-hit innings, and at the end of the ninth the score was 0–0. Not a single person on either team had gotten a hit. Amazing. Actually, Vaughn had walked me twice, so I was on first base a couple of times during the game, but each time the next man up hit into a double play.

  Do you know who won that game for us in the tenth inning? It was big Jim Thorpe, the great Indian athlete. He was playing right field for us that day. Larry Kopf, our shortstop, got the first hit of the game, a single to right field, in the tenth inning. Then he went to third when Hal Chase a hit a line drive that the center fielder dropped. Then, with two out, Jim Thorpe got the second hit of the game, a dinky infield single that the pitcher couldn’t handle, and Larry scored on it. Fred Toney kept the Cubs hitless in the last half of the tenth and so we won, 1–0.

  I don’t think that’s ever happened before or since, both pitchers in a game pitching no-hitters. So it’s a big thing when you look back at it. But that day, when it happened, most of us didn’t realize what was going on until it was all over. In a game where the score is 0–0 everybody gets so tense worrying about their own jobs that they don’t have time to keep checking on does the pitcher have a no-hitter going or not. We have our own problems to worry about. That was the way it was with me, anyway. I had enough to do at third base to keep me busy, so I didn’t realize what had happened until after the game had ended. And even then I thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” and that was that. Now, though, it’s a big thing.