East Hanover Baseball Writer's 'Labor of Love'

For writer Ronald A. Mayer of East Hanover–author of shelf’s worth of baseball history books, including his most recent book of poems, Baseball Memories–baseball is more than a game; it is his single-most consistent companion of his 88 years of life. The process of going from amateur player to scholar to baseball historian has been a life’s work, a process he says he would joyously repeat. 

 

 Mayer’s father, an avid Yankee fan, taught him the game as a young boy, filling his childhood with stories of baseball’s golden days during the early 20th century. He grew to regard the game as more than just men in pajama-looking uniforms playing on a dirt patch. Baseball, for Mayer, was its own mythology, and like any rich mythological tradition, it was filled with powerful gods: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earl Combs, Bill Dickey. These are only a few of the names that for Mayer represented different versions of the player he hoped to one day become: part speedster, part power hitter, part graceful outfielder, part contact hitter. Needless to say, he sought, at a very early age, to play professionally.    

He spent his high school days playing in the northern and southern divisions of Hudson County, scootering around Union City and Jersey City and leading his league in hitting during his senior year.

“Every ball I hit that year had eyes,” he recalls, referring to the fair share of good luck a hitter has to have to lead any league in batting average in a given year. 

A friend of his father’s who had familial connections to Major League Baseball umpiring talked to him about furthering his play and increasing his skill set. At that stage of his life, Mayer had no room in his future plans for anything other than becoming a professional ball player. He recalls this gentleman advising him to proceed to the college level, to do his absolute best, to leave it all on the field, and that if he had anything that would take him on to the majors, to rest assured that it would certainly come out. 

Not too long into his college career, while playing center field for Montclair State University, Mayer immediately noticed key differences between college play and high school play. The movement on breaking pitches was sharper than anything he had seen until that point, and the velocity on the pitches was a few miles per hour above what he had faced at the high school level. The one time high school batting title holder saw his average sink to levels he had never before seen, and the harder he tried to correct his mistakes and maintain sound mechanics in the batter’s box, the more he struggled. 

“I couldn’t hit, so that was the end of my career,” he laughs over the phone. “But I certainly tried. And after all of that, I never, ever, lost a shred of love for the game itself. In fact that’s when a new chapter opened up for me, shall we say.” 

Indeed, it was at about this time where Mayer went from aspiring major leaguer to budding scholar on the game he loved. He began to supplement his already impressive knowledge of the game and its history with a voracious reading habit, one he sustained for the rest of his life. 

Today, in his home in East Hanover, the writer basks in the glory of a 3,000-plus book baseball library, one he has ransacked over and over again over the years for research on whatever baseball-related subjects he happens to be writing about at any given time. 

He has written historical biographies on pitchers Carl Hubbel and Christy Mathewson, histories of the 1923 and 1932 New York Yankees, a history of the 1937 Newark Bears, and most recently, he has tried his hand at a volume of poetry. 

“All of this is a labor of love for me, obviously,” Mayer says. “I don’t have a big-name reputation among writers, and I’ve never made a living off of my book sales. I simply go to smaller book publishers with completed manuscripts of books I write, and I do so–the whole process–out of the joy of writing and researching them.” 

Mayer’s most recent book of poems is called Baseball Memories: A Collection of 101 Poems Celebrating Immortal Players, Classic Games, and Whacky Events of the National Pastime. 

For more information on Ronald A. Mayer, please visit Sunbury Press’s author page on him at www.sunburypress.com/collections/ronald-a-mayer. His books are also available on Amazon.