All these were honored in their generation, and were the glory of their times.

This is the glory of their times, the story of the early days of baseball told by the men who played it.

This is Larry Ritter.

I sometimes wonder what could have prompted me to embark on such a strange crusade,

searching the highways and byways of America for old ballplayers,

a quest that preoccupied me for the better part of six years.

For a long time, I thought my travels had been inspired by the death of Tai Cobb in 1961,

and that I was pursuing a social goal,

recording for posterity the remembrances of a sport

that had played such a significant role in American life

in the early years of the 20th century.

But now on reflection, almost four decades later, I don't think my journey had much to do with

social purposes at all. Deep down, it was a quest of a more personal nature. It so happens that my

own father died at about the same time as Ty Cobb. Still vivid in my memory is the day when I was nine years old that my father took me by the

hand to my first big league baseball game. It seems to me now that I was trying to recapture that

unforgettable ritual of childhood and draw closer to a father I would never see again, and I think that through the glory of their times I somehow succeeded.

This, then, is the way it was.

Listen.

Fred Snodgrass.

This was 1911.

The Giants were playing in St. louis in the old national league park there and in those days we didn't have a dugout we had a bench under an awning about half-way between the grandstand and the foul lines

we were having batting practice the The Giants were. And out of the grandstand

...