SUNDAY BALL by ZANE GREY

1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales

Jon Hagadorn

Fiction, Arts

4.5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Sunday Ball" by author Zane Grey gives us a rare look at the early days of baseball in middle America, what it meant to small towns, what people thought of it, and in this case, what moral dilemmas were caused when certain teams and towns started playing baseball on Sundays. Zane Grey's story is a window into time, and a true one, because we know that he played minor league ball for years, earning a scholarship to The University of Pennsylvania, where he played ball and studied to become a dentist, following in the footsteps of his father. But his real passion wasn't dentistry-it was writing, and he found every opportunity he could during his professional career as a dentist to write. His first success came at age 37, with the book "The Shortstop", from which we have taken Chapter 13, "Sunday Ball", at the recommendation of one of our listeners, Dr. Gerald G Gelle, DDS, who is a dentist who also enjoys baseball as well as 1001 Classic Short Stories Podcast and Zane Grey. Zane Grey, by the way, went on to write 88 great stories, mostly westerns, of which 111 movies were made, and he also became an avid outdoorsman and fisherman. Born in Zanesville, Ohio, he knew and played small town baseball, and used Findlay Ohio as the locale for this story. #ZaneGrey #Baseball

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Welcome to another episode from 1001 classic short stories and tales.
0:36.6	This one from a writer named Zane Gray,
0:39.4	who was best known for his Western fiction,
0:41.9	written at a time when the Old American West was a quickly fading memory,
0:46.3	but one that many people still appreciated and enjoyed.
0:50.6	Enough so that his 88 books, mostly westerns, spawned 111 movies and have sold over 100 million copies to date.
1:00.1	Zane Gray wrote quite a bit about the outdoors as well, and became known as an expert on fishing, camping, and his favorite pastime, baseball, which he played in the minor leagues,
1:10.2	and his skill at which got him into the
1:12.8	University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship where he studied to become a dentist.
1:18.1	Gray had to earn his scholarship and was a good ball player, who was a solid hitter and an excellent
1:23.3	pitcher who relied on a sharply dropping curve ball.
1:27.1	When the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate was lengthened by 10 feet in
1:31.2	1894, primarily to reduce the dominance of Cy Young's pitching, the effectiveness of Gray's
1:37.3	pitching suffered.
1:38.7	It was repositioned to the outfield, but the short Wiery Gray remained a campus hero
1:43.4	on the strength of his timely hitting.
1:46.0	During the summers, Gray played minor league baseball with several teams, including the Newark, New Jersey Colts in 1898,
1:52.6	and also with the Orange Athletic Club for several years, one of the best clubs in the country at that time.
1:58.4	After graduating in 1896, Gray set up a dental business in New York City,
2:03.2	but also stayed with baseball to break the tedium of his business. He also began to write stories.
2:09.6	He self-published his first book, seeing very little return on that, but persevered and tried
2:15.2	three more until he finally had a small success now at age 37 with
	...

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