A short life of the author
Lawrence S. Ritter (29 June 1922 – 15 February 2004) was an American economist and baseball historian whose book The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (1966) is widely considered the greatest baseball book ever written — a work of oral history so vivid, so warm, and so precisely executed that it has influenced every subsequent work of sports history and earned a permanent place not just in baseball literature but in the broader canon of American nonfiction.
Background
Ritter was born in New York City and served in the Army during the Second World War. He earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin and joined the faculty of New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he taught finance and monetary economics for over thirty years. His academic career was distinguished but conventional — he published the widely used textbook Principles of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (with William Silber), which went through numerous editions and was standard reading in university economics courses.
None of this prepared anyone for The Glory of Their Times.
The Quest
In the early 1960s, Ritter — a lifelong baseball fan — realised that the men who had played major league baseball in the first two decades of the twentieth century were dying. The dead-ball era, the Federal League war, the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, the early years of Babe Ruth — all of this lived only in the memories of aging men in their seventies and eighties, and when they died, their testimony would die with them.
Ritter began tracking these men down. He wrote letters, made phone calls, drove thousands of miles, and showed up on doorsteps across America with a tape recorder. Over several years, he conducted extensive interviews with twenty-two surviving players from baseball’s early decades — men like Rube Marquard, Sam Crawford, Goose Goslin, Chief Meyers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Fred Snodgrass, Smoky Joe Wood, and Edd Roush. He then transcribed and edited these interviews into narrative monologues that preserved each man’s distinctive voice while shaping their rambling recollections into coherent, compelling stories.
The Glory of Their Times (1966)
The result is one of the masterpieces of American oral history. Each chapter is a first-person narrative — a man telling the story of his life in baseball in his own words — and the cumulative effect is an intimate, detailed portrait of a world that no longer exists: the small-town America of the early twentieth century, the train rides, the dirt fields, the low salaries, the fierce competition, the practical jokes, the racial prejudice, the sheer joy of playing a game for a living.
What makes the book extraordinary is Ritter’s editorial skill. He made the interviews sound like natural speech — conversational, anecdotal, sometimes digressive — while in fact carefully structuring each narrative for maximum clarity and emotional impact. The speakers seem to be talking directly to the reader, sitting across a kitchen table, remembering the dead ball and the old parks and the teammates who are gone. The effect is both exhilarating and elegiac.
The most famous chapter is Fred Snodgrass’s account of his infamous muff in the 1912 World Series — a dropped fly ball that cost the New York Giants the championship and that Snodgrass lived with for the rest of his life. “Hardly a day in my life, hardly an hour, that in some way or another the subject doesn’t come up,” Snodgrass says. The chapter is a perfect short portrait of a man defined by a single moment of failure, and it is characteristic of Ritter’s method: he lets the speaker tell his own story, and the story is always more complex and more human than the legend.
Publication and Legacy
The Glory of Their Times was published by Macmillan in 1966 and was initially a modest seller. But the book found its audience through word of mouth and became, over the following decades, the standard against which all baseball literature is measured. It was expanded in a 1984 edition with additional interviews, and it has never gone out of print. It was voted the best baseball book of all time by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and is regularly included in lists of the best sports books and the best works of oral history in any field.
The book’s influence extends beyond baseball. It demonstrated that ordinary people — not generals, not presidents, not celebrities — could be the subjects of serious historical inquiry, and that the careful transcription and editing of spoken testimony could produce literature of the highest quality. In this respect, The Glory of Their Times belongs alongside Studs Terkel’s Working and Hard Times as a pioneering work of American oral history.
Other Baseball Books
Ritter also wrote The Babe: A Life in Pictures (1988, with Mark Rucker), a visual biography of Babe Ruth; The Story of Baseball (multiple editions), a children’s history of the sport; and Leagues Apart: The Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues (1995), a study of segregated baseball. None approached the quality or the impact of The Glory of Their Times, which remains his monument.
Collecting Ritter
The Glory of Their Times (1966, Macmillan) in first edition with dust jacket is a significant sports literature collectible, typically bringing $200–$600. The expanded 1984 edition is more common. Signed copies are available but not abundant.