Lawrence S. Ritter, 81; NYU Professor Wrote on Baseball, Finance

Lawrence S. Ritter, whose book “The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It” was a luminous chronicle of early 20th century baseball and America, has died. He was 81.

Ritter died Sunday at his New York City apartment after a series of strokes.

Innumerable baseball buffs, writers and fans, including former Brooklyn Dodger and New York Yankee announcer Red Barber, have hailed the work as “the greatest baseball book ever written.”

With little background commentary, Ritter compiled the work from his early 1960s interviews with 22 elderly men who had played big league baseball from 1898 to 1947, including Smoky Joe Wood, Goose Goslin, “Wahoo” Sam Crawford, Chief Meyers, Lefty O’Doul and Tommy Leach.

Ritter’s idea was spurned by several publishers before Macmillan finally bought it for $3,000. But sales have topped 400,000 since the pioneering oral history was first published in 1966. A second edition, with four additional interviews, came out in 1985.

The taped interviews, stored permanently in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., were released on a long-playing record along with the original book. They were also fashioned into an audiobook in 1998 and reissued on tapes and CDs in 2000.

People magazine, reviewing the 1985 version, which added Hank Greenberg and Babe Herman among the old-time players chronicled, wrote: “This was the best baseball book published in 1966, it is the best baseball book of its kind now, and, if it is reissued in 10 years, it will be the best baseball book of 1995.”

Ritter himself described the work in its foreword as “chronicles of men who chased a dream and, at least for a time, caught up with it and lived it.”

“They were pioneers in every sense of the word,” he wrote, “engaged in a pursuit in which only the most skilled, the most determined and, above all, the most rugged survived. They entered a sport which lacked social respectability, and when they left it, baseball was America’s national game. They are proud of what they did, and they talk of it with enthusiasm in their voices and happiness in their eyes.”

Ritter split profits from the book with the elderly baseball players and their survivors for 20 years -- about $10,000 each.

The author was an unlikely creator of such a chronicle. At the time he embarked on the project, he was professor and chairman of the finance department at New York University’s graduate school of business administration. He was editor of the Journal of Finance and had earlier published the book “Money and Economic Activity.”

But he was also a New York baseball fan born and bred, who had gone with his schoolteacher father to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds to watch the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants and truly loved the game. He played only during his World War II years as a Navy lieutenant.

In 1961, Ritter wanted to honor his father, who had recently died, and baseball legend Ty Cobb, who had also died, and to capture the stories of Cobb’s colleagues before their own demise. A divorced father, Ritter also saw interviewing aging if obscure baseball players as a way to become closer to his teenage son, Stephen.

The professor and his son spent four summers, traveling 75,000 miles, to complete the interviews. Ritter said little but proved a canny listener as early Dodger Meyers, for example, told him truthfully, “I started playing ball when Dewey took Manila,” a reference to Adm. George Dewey in 1898 during the Spanish-American War.

Ritter listened to the players’ versions of well-known flubs, and asked quietly what they remembered of such controversial legends as the banned outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Ritter, who retired from NYU in 1991, wrote other books more in keeping with his training as an economist, including the multiple-edition “Money” in 1970 and the top-selling, oft-updated “Principles of Money, Banking and Financial Markets” in 1974, both with William L. Silber. In addition, he and Thomas J. Urich were co-authors of 1984’s “The Role of Gold in Consumer Investment Portfolios.”

The professor also wrote other books about sports -- “The Image of Their Greatness: An Illustrated History of Baseball From 1900 to the Present” in 1979 and “The Hundred Greatest Baseball Players of All Time” in 1981, both with Donald Honig; and later, on his own, “The Story of Baseball” in 1983, “East Side, West Side: Tales of the New York Sporting Life” in 1998 and “Leagues Apart: The Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues.”

Ritter also wrote the text for archivist Mark Rucker’s photos in the 1989 “Babe: A Life in Pictures,” about the genial Babe Ruth.

Pairing his expertise in economics with his love of baseball, Ritter was always a good contact for such sports quandaries as how Willie Mays’ hefty 1967 paycheck of $125,000 might compare with, say, the Babe’s take of $80,000 in 1931. In buying power, considering increased taxes and inflation, Ritter calculated easily in a 1968 article, Mays’ pay was worth only one-third of Ruth’s.

Ritter earned his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University and master’s and doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. He taught at Michigan State University for six years and was an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for five years before joining the NYU faculty. A research room and endowed chair are named for him on the New York campus.

In addition to his son, Ritter is survived by a brother, Kenneth, and one granddaughter.