One of my favorite reads from last year was  more of a listen: The Glory of their Times, featuring audio of old-time ballplayers telling stories from the early days of baseball.   Baseball When the Grass was Real is a pseudo-sequel to that,  featuring oral histories from the 1930s & 1940s. albeit with a different author. Donald Honig floated the idea to Lawrence Ritter, but  the Glory author  wasn’t up for another project of such ambition. Although this audio book doesn’t have the actual recordings of these men talking,   its narrator Stephen McLaughlin has a good range of accents, voices, cadences, etc and delivers an enjoyable experience.   Honig’s selection of players offers more range than Ritter’s original,  including stories from players in the Negro Leagues as well as the perspective of scouts and umpires. While none of the subjects are household names the way Gehrig or Williams might be,  larger-than-life players often appear in the stories.  We experience Branch Rickey’s first meeting with Jackie Robinson, and the subsequent  partnership they worked out to break the color wall in pro ball, through the eyes of one of Rickey’s scouts who had been told to investigate Robinson’s prospect and was caught completely by surprise when he heard Rickey’s pitch.  (He thought Rickey was planning to create his own Negro League team and wanted a pivotal shortstop!)  Ernest Hemingway also makes a splash, getting drunk with a few ballplayers,  challenging one to a besotted boxing match that destroys his living room, and then challenges the man to a duel at dawn. Swords or pistols,  his pick!   (Hemingway recanted the idea in the morning….)  There’s a lot of like in this collection, assuming you enjoy listening to ball players talk about their youth – and as one wryly commented, “The older you get, the better you ‘were’”.   One thing that leapt out to me was that the Cardinals have evidently always had a strong farm system, and  they used it sneaky, too:  one player revealed that not only had the Cards been watching him since elementary school, when he  attended public tryouts where they were present, they immediately cut him on day one so that no other scouts could eyeball him and realize his strengths. Instead, they approached him at home with a deal.   Quite enjoyable collection of memoirs!