The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  Speaking of Bob Feller, by the way, the first time I ever batted against him was in 1937, when he was only eighteen years old. He had such blinding speed and was so wild that everybody was afraid to go up to bat, including me. He had a very deceptive motion. You never knew where the ball was coming from or where it was going, and neither did he.

  I saw him throw a ball behind Billy Rogell when Rogell was batting left-handed. Rogell almost dropped his bat and started out to the mound. Gives you an idea of how wild Feller was, a right-handed pitcher throwing behind a left-handed batter. Later he developed a terrific curve and then he was just unhittable. You couldn’t hit the curve so you’d wait for the fastball, but that would be by you before you knew what happened!

  Bob Feller

  Talking about Bob Feller reminds me of Joe DiMaggio, probably because they both came up at the same time. Everybody remembers Willie Mays’s catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, but very few people remember an even greater catch Joe made off me in 1939. I hit a tremendous line drive one day in Yankee Stadium that went at least 450 feet to deepest center field. Joe turned and raced toward the bleachers with his back to the plate; still running full speed, without turning around or looking back, he stuck his glove up and the ball landed right in it. Mays had time to turn his head to see where the ball was coming down, but Joe never even had time to turn. If he had turned his head, he would have lost it. So he just stuck up his glove. Sheer instinct.

  There are great ballplayers nowadays, of course. But you know, I played in an era of super-great ballplayers, especially first basemen. Just think of the competition I had at first base in the American League: Hal Trosky, Zeke Bonura, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Rudy York.

  Most people have forgotten about Hal Trosky. A marvelous first baseman for Cleveland all through the thirties. The man batted in 162 runs one year! Zeke Bonura of the White Sox was another good hitter with power. Jimmie Foxx, maybe the greatest right-handed power hitter of all time. When I first came up, I used to talk about hitting with Jimmie whenever I had a chance. He was a friendly, warm person, always very helpful to everybody.

  And of course Lou Gehrig, the best of all. He wasn’t very friendly, though. I was in the league a year and a half before he said a word to me. I remember the first time he spoke to me, it was in the middle of the 1934 season just after we passed the Yankees and went into first place. I got a single and was standing on first base. He turned to me and said, sort of gruffly, “Aren’t you even gonna say hello?”

  “Hello, Lou,” I said. That’s all. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I think I was scared of him. From then on it was just “hello” and that was it. We never chatted.

  Rudy York was special ’cause he was on my own team and he was also a close friend. Rudy was a great human being. In a sense, you might say that he took my job away from me. Rudy joined the Tigers in 1937 and hit 35 home runs. The next year he hit 33 homers and drove in 127 runs, and then he had another great year in 1939. What a hitter! Rudy’s bat was too powerful to keep him out of the lineup, but the problem was where to play him. They tried him at third base, in the outfield, and as a catcher, but at each position he was losing as many games defensively as he was winning with his bat.

  Rudy York: “What a hitter!”

  Well, in January of 1940 Jack Zeller, who had recently been made general manager, asked me to take a $5,000 cut in salary. Mr. Navin had died in 1935 and Walter Briggs became the Tigers’ owner. He delegated a lot more authority than Mr. Navin had. Jack Zeller had the nerve to argue that I had a poor season in 1939 because I didn’t hit 58 home runs again. I’d made $40,000 in 1939 and he wanted to cut me to $35,000.

  “No way, Jack,” I said. “I’m not taking any salary cut. I had a pretty good year last year. You can’t expect me to hit 58 home runs every year. I should get at least $40,000 again, the same as last year.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you go out to the outfield and play left field, and let Rudy York play first base, then I’ll keep your salary at $40,000.”

  That $5,000 salary cut was just a ploy to get me to move to the outfield so they could put Rudy on first base. First base was probably his best position, and in fact he eventually developed into a fine defensive first baseman. But as far as I was concerned, it was no deal. “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not going to the outfield. If Rudy can beat me out of first base, then the job is his. No one gave me the job. Let him earn it, just like I did.”

  “Come on, Hank,” Zeller said, “you know that with Rudy on first and you in the outfield we’ll be a better team than last year.”

  I thought it over for a few days and then went back to him. “To begin with,” I said, “I want the same salary as last year, $40,000. But if you want me to go to the outfield, I’ll buy a fielder’s glove and go down to spring training and work my tail off and give you all spring to make up your mind what you want to do. I won’t even put on a first baseman’s mitt. I’ll practice in the outfield as hard as I can. Then on Opening Day, if you want me to stay in the outfield, you have to give me a $10,000 bonus. I’m taking all the risk in this experiment, I have the most to lose, so I deserve some compensation for it.”

  And that’s what happened. On Opening Day I was in left field, I walked up to the front office, and Jack Zeller gave me a check for $10,000. And I could have kissed him. Because playing the outfield was sheer joy. I loved it out there.

  It was a lot easier than playing first base, as far as I was concerned. For one thing, I didn’t have to take as much riding from the opposing players. In Detroit first base is next to the visiting team’s bench, so I was always fielding my position close to the opposition’s yelling. I didn’t have to take as much riding from the fans, either. I guess I had rabbit ears, because I often let what I heard bother me. In the outfield I was relaxed all the time. I was never tired. All I had to worry about was hitting. I think if I’d played in the outfield my whole career, I’d have hit 30 or 40 points higher.

  I thought I got to be a pretty good outfielder. I had a strong and accurate arm and I knew where to throw the ball. I also knew the characteristics of the hitters, having been in the league a long time. A lot of outfielding is knowing where to play the hitters. If you do that properly, pretty soon the ball is hit to you instead of you chasing after it.

  It all worked out just fine, because we won the American League pennant in 1940, the first time since 1935. I hit .340 with about 40 homers and drove in around 150 runs. Rudy York also hit well over .300 with about 30 homers and he drove in around 130 runs. And I was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player again, I think the only time someone has won the MVP award at two different positions.

  Del Baker was our manager that year. Cochrane had been let go in 1938. Baker, remember, had been my manager with Beaumont in the Texas League back in 1932. Del’s claim to fame was that he was an expert sign stealer. I mean he could stand on the third-base coaching lines and read a catcher’s signs or pick up on a pitcher’s mannerisms and let you know in advance what kind of pitch was coming: fastball or curve or what have you.

  I loved that. I was the greatest hitter in the world when I knew what kind of pitch was coming up. Baker chattered all the time while coaching at third base, and if he said “All right” when I was at bat it meant the next pitch was going to be a fastball. If he said “Come on,” it meant a curve. Like, “All right, Hank, you can do it” would tell me a fastball was on its way. “Come on, Hank, you can do it” meant a curve was coming.

  Some guys didn’t want to know the signs. They preferred to figure out the pitch by themselves. Gehringer would never take the signs, nor Goslin. But Rudy York and I, we thrived on them, which is one reason we murdered the ball in 1940.

  The only pitcher where I wouldn’t take the signs was Bob Feller. With his speed I was afraid of risking the chance of a mistake. If Baker told me a curve was coming up and he was wrong—if it was really a fastball—I could be in
big trouble. Feller had such a great curve that it would look like it was going to hit you, but then it would break over the plate at the last second. If I hung in there expecting it to break, but it was really a fastball and didn’t break, I could get killed.

  Rudy and I were having such a terrific year in 1940 that Del Baker started taking credit for our hitting. At one point it seemed as though if he called a pitch correctly and I hit a home run, he thought it was his home run. Baker was a real good sign stealer, no question about it, but there’s a big difference between knowing what’s coming and hitting it. Getting the signs doesn’t guarantee that you’ll hit the ball.

  In fact, we had the signs of the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series that year and we still lost it. Ernie Lombardi, the regular Cincinnati catcher, was hurt, so Jimmie Wilson did most of their catching. We could read his signs from our bench and we flashed them to our batters, but it didn’t help. Bobo Newsom pitched and won two games for us but then he lost the seventh game to Paul Derringer by a score of 2–1.

  World War II came along the next year and that was the end of my baseball career for four and a half years. Hugh Mulcahy was the first and I was the second major-league ballplayer to go into the armed forces. I was drafted into the Army on May 7, 1941, and didn’t get back into baseball until July of 1945. I was 30 years old and at the peak of my career when I left, and 34 years old and a bit shopworn when I got back.

  I spent most of the war overseas in India and China with the Air Force. I hardly played any ball at all during that time. One game I do remember, though. When I was stationed at Fort Custer near Battle Creek, Michigan, shortly after I was inducted, a sergeant friend of mine told me he had a brother who was in the state prison at Jackson, about 50 miles away. He said that the prison warden was a great baseball fan, and it would do his brother a world of good if I could be talked into playing with the Fort Custer team when they played their annual game at the prison. I said OK, I’d do it, I’d play on the Fort Custer team for that one game only.

  Sergeant Hank Greenberg in 1942. Greenberg joined the Armed Forces as a Private in 1941 and was discharged in 1945 as an Army Air Force Captain.

  We traveled to the prison in an Army bus, and when we got there it turned out that the Army team didn’t have a baseball uniform that would fit me. The prison team did, though, so I put on the prison uniform. Then I said, “Well, as long as I’ve got this uniform on, I might as well play with you guys.” So I played on the prison team.

  I found out that it was customary for the prisoners to root for the visiting team and ride the hell out of their fellow prisoners. And ride the umpire, too, who was also a prisoner: “You crook, you thief,” they’d yell at him.

  But now I’m playing first base for the prison team, and suddenly they’re all rooting for me and for their own team. I hit a double, two singles, and a home run over the wall, the first time the ball had ever been hit out of the prison yard. And, of course, all the prisoners in the grandstand yelled, “I’ll get it, I’ll get it.”

  I rejoined the Tigers on July 1, 1945, and I had the two biggest thrills of my whole career that season. One was on my first day back, July 1st: 50,000 people came to the ball park to welcome me home and I hit a home run that day to help win the game. I was playing from memory. I’d hardly had a bat in my hands since I’d left in 1941, and after I hit that home run they gave me an unbelievable standing ovation.

  The second thrill was on the last day of the season, when I hit a home run with the bases loaded in the ninth inning to win the pennant. There were two men on base and one out, and the opposing pitcher, Nelson Potter, walked Doc Cramer to load the bases and get to me. I hit his second pitch on a line into the left-field bleachers. I guess that was my biggest thrill of all: what was going through my mind as I was rounding the bases is that only a few months before, I was in India, wondering if the war would ever end, and now the war was actually over and not only that but I’d just hit a pennant-winning grand-slam home run. I wasn’t sure whether I was awake or dreaming.

  I had a pretty good year the following year, 1946. I hit under .300 for the first time since I’d been with the Tigers, but I still led the league in both home runs and runs batted in.

  After the season ended, though, I got one of the biggest shocks of my whole life. In January of 1947, I heard on the radio that I’d been sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates. I wasn’t even sold, really. Given away would describe it better. I was waived out of the American League and picked up by Pittsburgh for practically nothing. Evidentally nobody else felt they could afford my $75,000 salary.

  I couldn’t believe it. Detroit was my team. I identified 100 percent with the Tigers. I’d been in the Detroit organization for seventeen years. Only a little over a year ago I’d hit that pennant-winning home run on the last day of the season. And here I was being dumped without even the courtesy of a phone call. I did get a telegram: YOUR CONTRACT HAS BEEN ASSIGNED TO PITTSBURGH IN THE NATIONAL LEAGUE. That’s all it said.

  I never understood it. Still don’t to this day. I’ve had a sour attitude toward Mr. Briggs ever since. He’s the man who must have been responsible. I still remember Mrs. Briggs kissing me good-bye when I went into the Army in 1941. But now the war was over. It’s an old story: what have you done for me lately? In my case it was just lead the league in home runs and runs batted in!

  I was so shocked and hurt I quit baseball. Simply quit. I told the press I was retiring and that was that.

  John Galbreath, Frank McKinney, and Bing Crosby had just bought the Pittsburgh Pirates. They announced that they had acquired Hank Greenberg—the American League’s home-run and runs-batted-in leader—and in a week their advance sale picked up $200,000. So they were very eager for me to play. When I said I was retiring, they were quite unhappy.

  Mr. Galbreath came to New York and phoned me to have lunch with him. I said, “Mr. Galbreath, I’m not going to play anymore. I’ve announced my retirement and I mean it.”

  “I don’t want to talk you into playing,” he said. “I just want to have lunch with you.”

  So we had lunch and while we were eating, he said, “Tell me what your objections are to playing in Pittsburgh.”

  “I don’t have my heart in it,” I said. “I’ve played all my career with Detroit and that’s home to me. Not to mention things like the fences in your ball park. Pittsburgh has a big ball park. I’m used to a park that’s 340 feet down the left-field line. Yours is 380 feet. I don’t want to disappoint everybody.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “How far is it in Detroit? 340? Well, we’ll make Pittsburgh 340, too. We’ll bring the fences in so it’ll be 340.”

  “That’s not so important,” I said. “There are a lot of things. For instance, I can’t ride those trains anymore. The berths are too small. Every time I go in them I get a crick in my back.”

  “You don’t have to go by train,” he said. “You can go by plane.”

  “I can’t stand a roommate anymore,” I said. “At my age, I don’t want to have to deal with roommates.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about roommates. We’ll give you a suite by yourself on the road.”

  “Well,” I said, “if I ever did play for anybody, they’d have to give me my outright release at the end of the season. I never want to hear on the radio again that I’ve been traded or sold.”

  “OK,” he said, “we’ll give you your outright release at the end of the season.”

  Everything I mentioned, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. We’ll work it out.”

  So finally I said, “Well, you wouldn’t pay me enough, anyhow.”

  “We’ll pay you whatever you want. What did you get last year?”

  “$75,000.”

  “What do you want for this year?”

  “I’d say $100,000.”

  “Fine,” he said, “you got it.”

  When he got through offering me all this, what could I do? He talked me into playing, so I we
nt and played one more year.

  I doubt if I really earned my salary on the field that year, even though I hit 25 home runs and drove in about 75 runs. I brought in a lot of money at the gate, however, and I think I earned my pay by training my own successor, so to speak. I worked a lot with Ralph Kiner, who was still a baby then, and helped him become the great home-run hitter he eventually became. I still feel as close to Ralph as if he were my own son.

  Ralph had a natural home-run swing. All he needed was somebody to teach him the value of hard work and self-discipline. Early in the morning, on off-days, every chance we got, we worked on hitting.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said to him. “In a 150-game season, let’s say you go to bat four times a game. That’s 600 times at bat. Let’s say you get two decent swings each time at bat. That’s 1,200 swings. If you stand here at home plate and you make the pitcher throw strikes, don’t you think that with 1,200 swings you’ll hit 35 balls out of the park?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s all there is to it. You know you’re going to get 1,200 swings. Now the secret is to make the pitcher throw strikes. If you learn the strike zone, you’re automatically going to have 35 home runs a season. It’s as simple as that.”

  He learned the strike zone and instead of hitting 35 home runs, he hit over 50 twice and led the league seven straight years. Except for Babe Ruth, no one has ever hit as many home runs per time at bat as Ralph Kiner.

  At the end of the ’47 season, the Pirates kept their word and gave me my release, and then I really did quit playing. The passage of time and changes in the game have pushed me way down in terms of number of home runs hit, but when I retired in 1947, my 331 lifetime home runs were fifth on the all-time list; the only ones who had hit more home runs than me were Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, and Lou Gehrig, in that order.