As baseball historian Lee Allen wrote in his The Cincinnati Reds: An Informal History (1948), "in the isolationist cocoon of the Midwest, breakfast wasn't ten minutes on a drugstore stool and a dash to punch the time clock. . . . Breakfast in Cincinnati was plump sausage and barnyard-fresh eggs, strong, fragrant coffee, and Jack Ryder's column." As a chronicler of the Cincinnati Reds for more than three decades, Allen wrote, Ryder "always spiced up his columns with gentle sarcasm, sly digs, and subtle quips about life in general."

Frederick Bushnell Ryder was born on 16 November 1871, in Oberlin, Ohio. Shortly after his birth the family moved to New England, where his father served as a Congregational minister and as a professor of theology at Andover Academy in Massachusetts. Ryder graduated in 1889 from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he learned Greek and Latin, and from Williams College in 1892. Ryder and...