A couple months ago I did a post about Baseball Haiku as heard on the radio program Short (baseball) Stories at Symphony Space, linked to on Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf.

One of the other segments was a reading from The Glory of Their Times, a book by Lawrence S. Ritter, published in 1966. Inspired by both the death of Ty Cobb and his own father, Ritter sensed that the door was closing on early 20th century baseball (the Deadball Era), and set out to record the memories of as many of the ballplayers from that era as possible.

I don’t want to go overboard here, but I can’t help but saying this is essential listening for any baseball fan. And probably quite interesting for non-baseball fans. When when you hear someone start a story about their father serving in the Civil War (Sam Crawford), who played in the same outfield as Cobb, you realize you’re hearing something out of the ordinary, if not from another world entirely.

The original interviews from The Glory of Their Times were later released on audiobook and is floating around the Internet in a torrent of formats. Get your hands on this. All baseball fans (and players) need to hear this stuff. Teachers should use it as teaching material.

I’m including here an excerpt from the book, an interview with John Tortes “Chief” Meyers (July 29, 1880 - July 25, 1971), a Cahuilla Indian from California who played from 1909 to 1917 for the New York Giants, Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers. He was primarily a catcher, played for John McGraw, and caught Christy Mathewson.

During the first five minutes of this file Ritter introduces Meyers. Then Meyers comes on and talks about learning to play baseball on a reservation, the discrimination against American Indians both in the early and middle 1900s, the pitching of Walter Johnson, and, of course, some good old-fashioned bitching about the modern day ballplayer.

[audio:Ritter.mp3]

Following the Meyers interview you’re going to hear a segment of an interview with Davy Jones, the third outfielder alongside Crawford and Cobb (it’s clear these guys all despised Cobb) with the Detroit Tigers. Jones also played with the White Sox, one year prior to the infamous Black Sox scandal.

One interesting thing Jones talks about is the father of his childhood sweetheart who forbid his daughter to marry Jones because he was a baseball player, a “bum too lazy to work.” As Ritter explains in the introduction, the couple met as widowers in their 60s and were married.