The Glory of Their Times

by Lawrence S. Ritter

  We never finished out of the first division the next five years, but we didn’t win again until 1909. That year we evened it up with the American League by beating the Tigers in the World Series. They had a good team, too: Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, Davy Jones, Donie Bush, George Moriarty, and all that bunch.

  That was a mighty rough World Series in 1909, you know. Almost as rough as that first one in 1903. There was a lot of bad blood between us and Detroit, especially with that George Moriarty, the Detroit third baseman. He was a tough character.

  It so happened that right about that time I started to get bald. Terrible feeling. I was only about thirty years old then. Well, somebody told me that I could stop my hair from falling out if I’d shave it off completely and rub this liniment on my head. I think it was some kind of horse liniment, to tell the truth. So that’s exactly what I did, just before the Series started. It was foolishness, but I did it anyway.

  Well, in one of the games of the Series—I forgot just which one—I got a single and went to third on a hit by Honus. I’m standing there on third base, not thinking about anything in particular, when this Moriarty suddenly comes over and kicks me in the shin. Just like that.

  I looked at him in surprise, and asked him what was the meaning of such a thing. He just walked away, didn’t say a word. I had to stay right where I was, of course. I didn’t dare get off the base, because if I did they’d tag me out.

  A few seconds later I had my back turned and he comes over again, and this time he grabs my cap right off my head. I was embarrassed and I started to laugh.

  “Well,” I said, “I got it all shaved off the other day.” I wanted to explain to him why there was no hair on my head, you know.

  But he didn’t wait for me to finish. He reached up and slapped me right on top of my bare head. With my own cap, too!

  Boy, that was too much. So I turned around and grabbed my cap, and at the same time gave him a good healthy kick in the shins. We were about to really go to it when the game started again, and I think the inning ended on the next pitch, so that was that. Anyway, as you can see, that horse liniment didn’t do a heck of a lot of good.

  A funny thing about that Series, playing second base for Detroit was Jimmy Delahanty. We had known each other since we were kids in Cleveland. In fact, it was because of his big brother, Ed, that I had gotten started in baseball in the first place.

  The first World Series, the Pirates versus the Red Sox, in 1903: “It was sort of hard to keep the game going sometimes, to say the least”

  I was born in French Creek, New York, but my folks moved to Cleveland in the early 1880’s, when I was five years old. We lived in an Irish neighborhood in Cleveland, and the Delahantys lived nearby. There were six brothers, Ed, Tommy, Joe, Jim, Frank, and Willie. All of them except Willie eventually made the Big Leagues.

  Of course, Ed was the best ballplayer of them all. He was a terrific hitter. Once he hit four home runs in one game, you know, and twice he got six hits in one game. I always admired Ed. As a matter of fact, I still do.

  Well, the Delahantys lived on a street where there was a firehouse, and all us kids used to gather around in front of it every evening to watch the horses come out for what they called the “Eight O’Clock Call.” The Delahanty kids used to hang around there a lot.

  One day a baseball man came around the neighborhood looking for Ed. We found out later he was the manager of the Mansfield club in the Ohio State League. Everybody knew Ed, so when this fellow asked where he could find him he was told to try down at the firehouse. And sure enough, that’s where Ed was.

  This fellow evidently asked Ed if he’d like to join the Mansfield club, and evidently Ed said yes, because that night Ed didn’t come home. He left word for his folks where he was going, and what he was going to do, and he just took off. Actually, Mansfield isn’t so far from Cleveland, maybe about 75 miles, and Ed was about nineteen years old at the time, so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

  As soon as his mother and father found out what had happened, the first thing they did was to come to my father, wanting to know what they should do. They were pretty shook up, and they thought they should go and bring Ed home right away. For some reason, what they really wanted was for my Dad to go and fetch him.

  “I want you to go get Ed,” Mrs. Delahanty told Dad. “He hasn’t any business in Mansfield, and he should be here working.”

  Dad started to laugh. He said, “Listen, you’ve got a boy who only wants to play baseball. He tells you he’s working, and what’s he doing? He’s always out playing ball somewhere. Give him a break. Who knows, maybe he can make the grade.” And he wouldn’t go after Ed.

  Well, of course, Ed made good in a big way. One year later he was up there with the Philadelphia Phillies, and from then on that’s all us kids around the neighborhood thought of. He was everybody’s hero. It got so that’s all Dad could talk about: Ed Delahanty, Ed Delahanty, Ed Delahanty. That’s all we heard.

  I was supposed to be learning the printer’s trade. Dad had a job printing shop. He was the outside man soliciting business and then he had a printer, and I was the printer’s devil. But I loved to play ball, little as I was, and Dad would always encourage me. “If Ed can do it, so can you,” he’d say.

  Finally, when I got a chance to go with Hanover in the Cumberland Valley League—that was in 1896, when I was eighteen—my father got all excited. I think they offered me $35 a month and board. “You get out of here and go,” he said. “Look where Ed Delahanty is.”

  So I went. Not that I had any objections, you understand. And a few years later there I was, playing against Ed, who always had been my idol, and later against Tommy, Joe, Jim, and Frank, as well.

  When I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, Ed Delahanty was the one everybody in my neighborhood looked up to. Later, after Ed died in that tragic way at Niagara Falls, the big hero of all the kids in Cleveland became Napoleon Lajoie, the Cleveland second baseman. What a ballplayer that man was! Every play he made was executed so gracefully that it looked like it was the easiest thing in the world. He was a pleasure to play against, too, always laughing and joking. Even when the son of a gun was blocking you off the base, he was smiling and kidding with you. You just had to like the guy.

  Tommy Leach in 1902

  Ed Delahanty, the pride of the Phillies (and of Cleveland)

  You might think this is all a lot of malarkey, but I really believe baseball was a more exciting game back in those days. It was more rugged, first of all. Take the equipment. We had little gloves that would just fit over your hand. Now they have those big nets, and they catch the ball in the webbing. But we had to catch the ball with our hands.

  And the fields. Now the lowest minor leagues have better fields to play on than we had in the major leagues. You never knew how a ball was going to bounce in those days. Lots of times we’d get a rake and go out and rake the ground around our own positions.

  The style of play is very different now, too. We used to play a running game, a lot of bunting and base stealing. I stole almost 400 bases in my Big League career, and that wasn’t considered much at all. Heck, Fred Clarke stole over 500, and Honus over 700. All of us on one team, mind you. Even the fellows who were considered the power hitters in those days used to run the bases a lot. Like Sam Crawford, the strong boy—he stole about 400 bases, and so did other big guys, like Jake Beckley and Dan Brouthers.

  Today they seem to think that the most exciting play in baseball is the home run. But in my book the most exciting play in baseball is a three-bagger, or an inside-the-park home run. You used to see a fair number of them in the old days, but now they’re the rarest plays in baseball. For sheer excitement, I don’t think anything can beat when you see that guy go tearing around the bases and come sliding into third or into the plate, with the ball coming in on a line from the outfield at the same time. Now that’s something to write home about.

  3 Davy Jones

  Two or three years ago Base Ball critics in
the East and West began to agitate the question of signaling by the umpires to announce their decisions.

  At first the judges of play did not want to signal. They thought it detracted from their dignity to go through a dumb show resembling the waving of the arms of a semaphore.

  That did not deter the Base Ball critics from their stand. With good-natured persistence they urged upon the umpires the necessity of the new idea, and by and by the officials of the league took up the subject and suggested that it would be worth a trial.

  It was finally experimented with and has been one of the very best moves in Base Ball as a medium of rendering decisions intelligible, and now there is not an umpire but uses his arms to signal. If he did not, two-thirds of the spectators at the immense crowds, which have been patronizing Base Ball for the last two years, would be wholly at sea as to what was transpiring on the field, except as they might guess successfully.

  Even the older umpires, who were more loath to give their consent to the new system on the field, are now frank enough to admit that it has been of invaluable assistance to them in making their decisions understood when the size of the crowd is such that it is impossible to make the human voice carry distinctly to all parts of the field.

  —Spalding’s Base Ball Guide, 1909

  OH, THE GAME WAS VERY DIFFERENT in my day from what it’s like today. I don’t mean just that the fences were further back and the ball was deader and things like that. I mean it was more fun to play ball then. The players were more colorful, you know, drawn from every walk of life, and the whole thing was sort of chaotic most of the time, not highly organized in every detail like it is nowadays.

  I was playing in the Big Leagues in 1901, when Mr. William McKinley was President, and baseball attracted all sorts of people in those days. We had stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country. And back then a country kid was likely to really be a country kid. We’d call them hayseeds or rubes. Nowadays I don’t think there’s much difference between city kids and country kids. Anyway, nothing like there used to be.

  Back at the turn of the century, you know, we didn’t have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays. We didn’t have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other. Now people are all more or less alike, company men, security minded, conformity—that sort of stuff. In everything, not just baseball.

  Talk about colorful guys, take Rube Waddell or Germany Schaefer. I doubt if fellows like that could exist in baseball today. Too rambunctious, you know. They’d upset the applecart.

  I played with Germany Schaefer on the Chicago Cubs in 1902, and again on the Detroit Tigers later on. What a man! What stunts he could pull! I used to laugh at that guy till I cried. Far and away the funniest man I ever saw. He beat Charlie Chaplin any day in the week.

  One day when I was on the Tigers—I think it was 1906, my first year with Detroit—we were in Chicago, playing the White Sox. Red Donahue was pitching for us and Doc White, that great little left-hander, was pitching for the White Sox. We were behind, 2–1, going into the ninth inning. Then in the ninth we got a man on first base with two out, and the next man up was Donahue, who was easily one of the worst hitters in the league. So Bill Armour, who was managing Detroit then, looked up and down the bench and spotted Germany Schaefer sitting there—talking, as usual, to whoever would listen.

  “How would you like to go up there and pinch-hit?” Bill asked him.

  “Sure,” he says, “I’d love to. I always could hit Doc White.”

  Meanwhile, Red Donahue is already getting all set in the batter’s box. Red was an awful hitter, but there was nothing in the whole world he loved more than digging in at that plate and taking his cuts.

  “Hey, Red,” yells Schaefer, “the manager wants me to hit for you.”

  “What?” Red roars. “Who the hell are you to hit for me?” And he slams his bat down and comes back and sits way down at the end of the bench, with his arms folded across his chest. Madder than a wet hen.

  Well, Schaefer walked out there and just as he was about to step into the batter’s box he stopped, took off his cap, and faced the grandstand.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “you are now looking at Herman Schaefer, better known as Herman the Great, acknowledged by one and all to be the greatest pinch hitter in the world. I am now going to hit the ball into the left field bleachers. Thank you.”

  Then he turned around and stepped into the batter’s box. Of course, everybody’s giving him the old raspberry, because he never hit over two or three home runs in his life. But by golly, on the second ball Doc White pitched he did just exactly what he said he would: he hit it right smack into the left-field bleachers.

  Boy oh boy, you should have seen him. He stood at that plate until the ball cleared the fence, and then he jumped straight up in the air, tore down to first base as fast as his legs would carry him, and proceeded to slide headfirst into the bag. After that he jumped up, yelled “Schaefer leads at the Quarter!” and started for second.

  He slid into second—yelled “Schaefer leads at the Half!”—and continued the same way into third and then home. After he slid into home he stood up and announced: “Schaefer wins by a nose!” Then he brushed himself off, took off his cap, and walked over to the grandstand again.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I thank you for your kind attention.”

  Back on the bench everybody was laughing so hard they were falling all over themselves. Everybody except Red Donahue. He’s still sitting there at the end of the bench with his arms folded, like a stone image, without the slightest expression of any kind on his face.

  The next day we went back to Detroit to play against Cleveland, and Bill Armour promptly put Germany right into the lineup, at second base. And, of course, everybody at the game had read about what Schaefer had done the day before. So in the first inning, when Schaefer comes up to bat for the first time, the crowd naturally gives him a terrific ovation. “Hurray, Schaefer!” And the stands are buzz, buzz, buzzing about what he’d done the day before.

  Unfortunately, the Cleveland pitcher that day was Addie Joss, who Schaefer couldn’t hit with a paddle. A corking good pitcher. Three swings, and Schaefer strikes out. Never came close to the ball.

  The second time at bat it’s still “Hurray, Schaefer!” but not quite as loud as the first time. Well, he strikes out again, just as badly as before. Third time up, no commotion at all. Silence. This time he popped up.

  The fourth time it’s Schaefer’s turn to bat it’s the ninth inning, I’m on first, and we’re two runs behind. And as he approaches the plate for the last time that day the crowd starts to make just as much noise as they did the first time. Only this time they’re all yelling, “Take him out. Take the bum out!”

  Ha! That’s baseball. A hero one day and a bum the next. But always lots of laughs. I saw all the great ones, you know, in both leagues. I was in the American League in 1901 and again from 1906 through 1913 and in the National League from 1902 through 1904. Actually, I played in three major leagues, because I jumped to the Federal League in 1914 and spent two years there. And, of course, I was in three World Series with the Detroit Tigers—1907, ’08, and ’09. So, all in all, there weren’t very many topflight players between 1900 and 1915 who I didn’t play either with or against at one time or another.

  Germany Schaefer, little Danny Callahan, and Sam Crawford

  Funny thing, I never expected to be a ballplayer in the first place. I wanted to be a lawyer. Well, as a matter of fact I became a lawyer. I went to law school at Dixon College in Illinois and graduated in 1901, but I got to playing ball and never did go back to the law.

  I received an athletic scholarship at Dixon, one that included both baseball and track. Actually, track was my real specialty back then. I was always very fast, fast enough to beat Archie Hahn several times before h
e won the Olympics in 1904. You probably don’t remember Archie Hahn, but he was the fastest man in the world at the turn of the century. Won the 60-meter dash, the 100-meter dash, and the 200-meter dash in the 1904 Olympics. Ranks right up there with Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens as one of the greatest runners who ever lived. Odd, isn’t it, that Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens are still very familiar names, but hardly anybody seems to remember Archie Hahn any more.

  I also played baseball at Dixon College, and that led, accidentally, to my becoming a professional. In 1901, in my senior year, the Dixon team went up to Rockford, Illinois, to play an exhibition game with the Rockford Club in the Three-I League. I had a great day both at bat and in the field, and they offered me a contract: $85 a month. Well, I was a very poor boy, and the prospect of $85 a month right away, compared to years as a law clerk before I could start my own practice, made it hard to turn down. So I signed up and joined the Rockford Club right after graduation.

  You realize, of course, that baseball wasn’t a very respectable occupation back then. I figured I’d stay in it just a few years, and then go back to the law once I got on my feet financially. To give you an idea about its respectability, I was going with a girl at the time and after I became a professional ballplayer her parents refused to let her see me any more. Wouldn’t let her have anything more to do with me. In those days a lot of people looked upon ballplayers as bums, too lazy to work for a living. So Margaret—that was her name—and I had to break up.

  Later on I met another girl, a rare and lovely woman, and we got married. Married for 52 years before she passed away. I heard that Margaret married a doctor, a man who later became a famous heart specialist at the Mayo Clinic, and that they lived in Rochester, Minnesota.

  Well, a few years ago, believe it or not, I ran into Margaret once again, for the first time in nearly 50 years. Turned out that both of us had been very happily married, but were now both widowed. To make a long story short, we found out we still enjoyed each other’s company and decided to get married, over half a century since we’d been high-school sweethearts. That was she who opened the door for you when you first got here.