Telling It Himself

Ty Cobb died in August 1961 and an NYU economics professor read the obituary and understood something nobody else seemed to be acting on. The men who played this game at the turn of the century were nearly all still alive, and they were nearly all about to not be.

Lawrence Ritter spent five summers and 75,000 miles chasing them down. There was no directory. Teams had lost track of their own former players decades earlier, so it went by rumor and forwarding address and one old ballplayer telling him where another one might be living. He carried a reel-to-reel recorder into their living rooms, asked questions, and then edited himself out entirely so the book reads as the men speaking directly to you. He borrowed the whole method from John and Alan Lomax, who had done the same thing with American folk songs in the thirties.

John Tortes Meyers was one of them. Cahuilla, born in Riverside, raised near the Santa Rosa Reservation, educated at Dartmouth, and the catcher who caught Christy Mathewson through three straight Giants pennants while hitting .332, .358, and .312. He was better read than most men in the league. Sportswriters called him Chief for nine seasons anyway, and it followed him into the record books.

He died in 1971, four days before his ninety-first birthday. The American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame now leaves the nickname off his listing out of respect for the man. Because Ritter got there in time, we still have him telling it himself.