The Glory of Our Friendship: Lawrence Ritter and Me

I was born in a small farming town in the southwest Minnesota prairie. In 1963, when I was 5 years old, our family moved to Milwaukee. Like all our friends and most of our neighbors, my brother and I loved all things baseball.

We played catch in the backyard and organized endless pickup games around the neighborhood. When our dad got home from work, he’d hit us grounders and pop flies until it got too dark to see. We played season after season of Little League ball, usually on teams our dad coached. We listened to Braves games on the radio and kept score on homemade scorecards. We tuned in to the NBC Game of the Week every Saturday and carefully examined the big-league batting and pitching leaders in the Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel. On special occasions we’d attend games at County Stadium, where we’d sit along the first-base line and cheer on our heroes Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Warren Spahn. We were more than just grade school kids who enjoyed the game. We were living baseball and loving every second.

In 1966 the Braves broke our hearts and moved away to Atlanta, and while the pain of losing our team slowly faded, at my dad’s urging we became Twins fans. We were, after all, natives of Minnesota, and we would quickly come to admire tremendous ballplayers like Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Mudcat Grant.

Something else took place that year. One day that summer, my dad brought home a copy of a brand-new book called The Glory of Their Times, by professor of economics and finance at NYU named Lawrence Ritter. The book was described as “The story of the early days of baseball as told by the men who played it.” Mr. Ritter had traveled the country between 1962 and 1966, searching out men who had played in the major leagues “in a high-spirited country a long time ago.” Glory was a collection of their baseball memories.

I read this wonderful book again and again, in my room, at the breakfast table, on the back porch. The stories of Rube Marquard, Fred Merkle, Chief Meyers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Goose Goslin, Paul Waner, Smoky Joe Wood, and many others captivated me and transported me to places and times I had never known. I read with amazement the stories of these legends, incredibly told in their own words. The fascinating reminisces of those baseball pioneers instilled in me a love of baseball and baseball history that remains to this day.

I built my own mini-library of baseball books, young-reader biographies of old-timers like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner, and of modern-day stars like Mickey Mantle and Roberto Clemente. Over the years, my collection came to include Glory-inspired books like Donald Honig’s Baseball When the Grass Was Real and Baseball Between the Lines. While all these books were treasures to me, Glory remained at the very top of my list. Lots of fans felt—and feel—the same way: Nearly 60 years since it appeared, Glory has never been out of print and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball book of all time.

In 1973, my family moved back to the small town of Slayton, Minnesota. Baseball, I happily discovered, was everyone’s favorite sport in my new home. Nobody played hockey on the prairie; that was a way of life up north, on the Iron Range and beyond. My friends and I played for Slayton High School in the spring, and for the local VFW and American Legion teams in the summer. A fortunate few of us played in college, as well. And as we got older, we experienced a very special part of Minnesota life: town ball. This was local and amateur baseball at its very best. The competition was keen and the rivalries were fierce, with hundreds of ballclubs vying for one thing: a berth in the state amateur tournament. Although I certainly didn’t fully realize it at the time, I was making my own ballpark memories.

Long after my ballplaying days were over, I remained a fan of the game. I continued to find great joy in reading about the lives and careers of ballplayers, particularly those of the Deadball Era. In 1993, my brother-in-law Bill Lamberty (himself a fine baseball historian) gave me a gift membership to SABR. Thumbing through the organization’s directory, I found the name of Lawrence Ritter. THE Lawrence Ritter! I figured he didn’t mind if people called him. Why else would he list his phone number? So I took a leap of faith and dialed…and in short order found myself talking with the famous author who had nurtured my love of baseball and baseball history.

Mr. Ritter was not the least bit pretentious about his celebrity. He was friendly, gracious, and good-humored. As luck would have it, I was scheduled to attend a seminar in New York City a few months later. Would he like to meet? Sure, he said. To make it easier for me, he agreed to come over to the lobby of my hotel, right downtown, and we could have lunch. It proved to be one of the most memorable meetings of my life, and the beginning of a fine friendship.

Not surprisingly, we talked about baseball, both the old game and the modern one. He was used to talking about the remarkable success of Glory, of course, and he patiently answered all my questions. He told me how he had managed to track down the various players—he traveled some 75,000 miles across the country in doing so. To a man, he said, they were happy to share their stores and reminisce about the most wonderful years of their lives. Mr. Ritter insisted that he had no favorites among those men. “It would be like choosing your favorite child,” he said. “Not possible.” But it was clear he was particularly fond of a select few of them. He enjoyed telling stories about Chief Meyers, for example. He loved the Chief’s sense of humor and his lighthearted view of the world. He admired how Fred Snodgrass battled the criticism that came with his infamous “muff” in the 1912 World Series. He appreciated gruff Sam Crawford and his willingness to discuss his controversial relationship with Ty Cobb (it was Cobb’s death, in 1961, that set Mr. Ritter on his quest to memorialize the players’ stories). And he got a kick out of Goose Goslin, who referred to himself as “Old Goose” and loved nothing more than poking fun at everyone, himself included.

There was one Glory ballplayer whose story had always particularly interested me, and I inquired. Rube Marquard tied the major-league record of 19 wins in a row to start the season for the 1912 New York Giants.1 He’d also had a vaudeville career during his marriage to the equally famous Blossom Seeley. Marquard had told Mr. Ritter that he’d run away from home at age 16, alienating his father, and eventually made good in spectacular rags to riches fashion. Carefully placed as the leadoff chapter in Glory, Marquard had ridden the great success of the book into the Hall of Fame. But my own research showed that Rube had exaggerated here and there, building up his achievements while downplaying the controversy. What did Mr. Ritter think about this? “I always knew that SOB wasn’t telling me the whole story,” he laughed. Armed with his encouragement, I took on the task of setting the record straight. In 1996, my article “Rube Marquard Revisited,” was published in The National Pastime.2 A couple of years later my first book, Rube Marquard: The Life and Times of a Baseball Hall of Famer, was published.3 To my great satisfaction and relief, Mr. Ritter liked the book. (All except the title, which he called “uninspiring.” His idea, Rube Marquard: Ballpark Days and Broadway Nights, although clearly much better, was rejected by the publisher.) And my newfound mentor was with me every step of the way, reviewing, advising, and offering much-needed guidance.

Mr. Ritter was treated like royalty in Cooperstown, and by association I received red-carpet treatment as well. We stayed at the luxurious Otesaga Hotel (although my lodging, unlike that of my famous friend, was not complimentary). Together we toured the Hall of Fame, and Mr. Ritter made sure to introduce me to every museum official we met. We spent a couple of hours examining each and every plaque in the gallery; he proudly pointed out all the Glory alumni enshrined there: Marquard, Goslin, Crawford, Hank Greenberg, Harry Hooper, Stan Coveleski, Edd Roush, and Paul Waner. We went into the archives and listened to some of the priceless original tape recordings that formed the basis of the book. We appeared together at the book signing; and make no mistake, most of the crowd was there to see Mr. Ritter. I loved every second of the entire trip.

More important than books and signing events, our friendship continued. Mr. Ritter was a consistent letter and postcard writer. We spoke on the telephone regularly. I visited him in New York City several more times. He was tickled when I said I wanted to visit Coogan’s Bluff, the famous site that overlooked the old Polo Grounds, where so much baseball history had been made.

Once, over lunch at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant on Central Park South, I told him (again) how much Glory had influenced me. “You played ball,” he said. “Why don’t you write your own story some day?”

Mr. Ritter and I remained good friends until his passing in 2004, at the age of 81. It was an honor to know him, and I never forgot what he said to me at the restaurant. Eventually, an idea began to percolate. Though light years away from major-league talent, I had played the game, from Little League through high school, college, and town ball. Baseball had forged unbreakable bonds of friendship that had lasted through the years, and it had provided a million memories. And so I started a new project, just for the joy of it. I connected again with a bunch of those old friends and teammates, asked a few questions, and let the tape machine roll.

The style and format of the resulting narratives was modeled after Mr. Ritter’s masterpiece. In 2023, I published Hometown: Growing Up and Playing Ball in Slayton, Minnesota.5 It is a collective memoir of amateur baseball on the northern prairie. It is my own small-town version of The Glory of Their Times.

The dedication reads, “In memory of Lawrence Ritter.”

LARRY MANSCH is an attorney who lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.

Notes

1 Marquard won his last decision of 1911, so the streak was actually 20, a record until Carl Hubbell broke it in 1937. Marquard’s record of 19 straight wins to start a season still stands. Under today’s scoring rules, it would have been 20 wins, because he would have been credited with a win in a relief appearance. Under 1912 scoring rules, who got the win was the official scorer’s decision, and usually went to the pitcher who pitched the most innings. See: Matt Kelly, “Pitchers with the longest win streaks,” MLB.com, August 26, 2020, https://www.mlb.com/news/the-longest-pitcher-win-streaks-in-mlb-history.

2 Larry Mansch, “The Real Rube Marquard,” The National Pastime 16 (1996), 16–20.

3 Larry Mansch, Rube Marquard: Life and Times of a Baseball Hall of Famer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998).

4 Lawrence Ritter, The Story of Baseball (New York: HarperTrophy, 1999).

5 Larry Mansch, Hometown: Growing Up and Playing Ball in Slayton, Minnesota (New York: Barnes & Noble Press, 2024).