The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The man who took the boy on the Wilkens Avenue trolley went to the grave at Louden Park Cemetery in Baltimore on August 28. The boy, now 23 years old, who thought he was 24, stood at the graveside. A relative said it was the first time he “ever had seen George cry.” What did the tears mean? Young George, Babe, the Colossus, the Home Run King never explained.

  On Friday he was back in the lineup in left field, batting fourth, in a doubleheader against the Tigers. On Saturday the Red Sox clinched the pennant. He was back on the public record.

  The 1918 World Series against the Chicago Cubs contained the same chaos that went through the regular season. The Red Sox were the winners, four games to two. The Babe won two of the games. He won the first as a surprise starter with a six-hit shutout, 1–0, and won the fourth game 3–2, backed by his own two-run triple and despite needing relief from Joe Bush in the ninth. Between the games, on the train back to Boston, he had injured the middle finger of his left hand sparring with teammate Walt Kinney. He pitched with a hand colored yellow from iodine and said later that the iodine, not the injured finger, hurt his grip on the baseball.

  “The Star-Spangled Banner,” not yet the national anthem, was played for the first time at a sporting event at the seventh inning in the first game in Chicago, then repeated at each game after that. Carrier pigeons were used for the first time at the sixth game at Fenway to transport inning-by-inning scores to the troops at Camp Devens. Attendance was lower than expected at all games, none of them a sellout.

  Before the fifth game, the players threatened to strike, knowing that the proposed winners’ share of $2,000 and the losers’ share of $1,400 were not going to be reached. In a comic opera sequence, with more than 20,000 fans already in the stands, American League president Ban Johnson hopelessly drunk, and the negotiations a mess, the players backed down. They said they would play for the sake of the public and for all the wounded soldiers and sailors who were in the stands. This decision was announced to the crowd through a megaphone by former Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who already had a grandson named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The winners’ shares after the sixth game were $1,102. The losers’ shares were $724.

  Ruth sat out the fifth game with his injured finger and played only the last two innings of the sixth game as a defensive replacement when left fielder George Whiteman was injured. He was not one of the leading strikers—Hooper was at the head of that. The Babe mostly followed his other, patterned pursuits. This was called “the Straw Hat Series” because it was held a month earlier than usual, closer to summer, but the unofficial fashion rule was that straw hats shouldn’t be worn after Labor Day. Ruth took great pleasure in enforcing the rule, especially on the train ride, by punching holes in offending straw hats. He also took great pleasure in his usual pleasures.

  One of the writers assigned to cover the Series was Gene Fowler, a talented young guy who had been called from Denver, the hometown of famed columnist Damon Runyon, to replace Runyon for the New YorkAmerican. Runyon was being sent to Europe to write about the war. Arriving in Chicago the day before the first game, weighed down with the pressure of trying to fill in for Runyon, Fowler set out that night to find a friend, Harry Hochstadter.

  After assorted misadventures, Fowler found his man in the hotel suite of a 300-pound wine agent named John “Doc” Krone. The room was filled with sportswriters and other freeloaders gathered around a galvanized steel tub filled with bottles of Doc Krone’s product. When Hochstadter, who had been in the suite for a while, passed out, none other than the Babe helped him to a chair with an advisory to switch to beer.

  The Babe also had been drinking. Fowler, who knew the big man was scheduled to pitch the Series opener, wondered if this activity would hurt a pitcher’s performance the next afternoon. He asked—an exchange he described years later in his newspaper memoir Skyline.

  “The hale young man gave me a bone-rattling slap on the back,” Fowler wrote.

  “I’ll pitch ’em all if they give me the word.” The Babe then announced he was leaving us to keep an appointment with someone who wore skirts. On his way out he urged that Mr. Hochstadter be given a Christian burial.

  The Babe was young and strong: he managed to stay up all that night, and then shut out the Cubs, 1 to 0, the next day. At the close of the Series, which the Red Sox won, four out of six games, Ruth had established a pitching record of twenty nine and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings for combined World Series play (against Brooklyn in 1916, and the Chicago Cubs in 1918).

  I was young and strong, too, but the all-night escapade at Doc Krone’s left me somewhat less effective than the Babe the next afternoon.

  The Babe wound up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, on the books as an employee of Bethlehem Steel after the Series. He and Helen rented an apartment. Virtually every major league ballplayer made some kind of similar move. The prevailing wisdom now was that baseball was going to be shut down for a while, certainly for the 1919 season.

  He took the long route to his new job, playing a couple of exhibitions in New Haven and Hartford, then left Lebanon to play another one in Baltimore, where he wrenched his knee. Singeing his hand in a kitchen accident and catching the flu again limited him to one game for the steel plant against a barnstorming group of his Red Sox teammates. It was a succession of nuisances but could have been much worse: he could have stayed in Boston.

  The end of September and early October was when the Spanish influenza epidemic roared through the city. On October 2 alone, 202 people died in Boston from the disease. One of them was the wife of Edward F. Martin, the 34-year-old sportswriter who had covered the Babe’s entire season for the Boston Globe. Martin himself died the next day, less than a month after typing out the details of the Red Sox World Series win.

  Camp Devens was particularly hard hit. By October 20, about 14,000 men had been hospitalized at the camp with the Spanish influenza, and one out of 18 (773 men) had died. Dr. Victor Vaughan, Surgeon General of the Army, describing the soldiers in the hospital, said, “The faces wore a bluish cast, a cough brought up the blood-stained sputum. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked up like cordwood.”

  The Babe, recovered from his own flu, told friends that he expected to be called to the service soon. This did not happen. Draft limits had been expanded to include men from age 18 to 45, more troops leaving every day, but in the second week of November startling news started to arrive from France. The Germans were meeting with the Allies in Gen. Ferdinand Foch’s railway carriage headquarters in Compiègne. Terms of an armistice were being worked out, and, fast as that, amazing as that, on November 11 at 11 o’clock in the morning (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year), the fighting ceased.

  The war had claimed 7,996,888 men in uniform—civilian casualties were impossible to count. Over 21 million men had been wounded. The American death toll was 58,480 with 189,955 wounded. The end of hostilities brought people into the streets.

  “A 100-foot line of sailors, containing one woman, and led by a drum major wielding an old broom, marched in lockstep, forming the most eccentric figures, in and out of the crowd,” the Globe reported from what it called the largest celebration in Boston history. “A group of men wheeled a six-foot man in a child’s perambulator with a sign, ‘My Daddy’s Coming Home.’ A knot of marching sailors was led by a sign reading ‘No liquor sold. Everybody sober.’ A bunch of young Italians had pipes in their mouths and within the bowls burning candles, while they marched in the shelter of gay Japanese parasols.”

  Done.

  With no need to be at the steel plant anymore, with the draft not a worry, the Babe could return with Helen to the IHATETOQUITIT cottage in Sudbury. The war that had rearranged borders and affected so many lives had affected his too. It had put him in the outfield.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A BETTER NEW YEAR than 1919 never had arrived. There had been better celebrations—November 11, less than two months earlier, had been much wilder across the cou
ntry than anything that happened now in Times Square—but there never had been a year that began with as much promise, hope, expectation.

  This was the year to get down to business. The troops were coming home every day, blinking at the miracle of their own continued existence, roaring to get started on whatever they really wanted to do. The shelves were filling up again, no more meatless or wheatless days by decree. No more heatless Thursdays. The logic of optimism was obvious: if we can win such a ghastly war with our efforts, then what can we do in other, easier areas? The message everywhere was that all things were possible, all goals obtainable.

  “We must teach our feet again to trod on solid ground,” Gov. Samuel W. McCall of Massachusetts declared in his New Year’s address. That was the solemn approach.

  “Discouraged boy, tired of waiting, ready to give up, with your heart down and the devil whispering to you, ‘What’s the use?’” Boston Globe columnist Frank Crane wrote in his New Year’s column. “Listen! Don’t you hear the clock? Up and at it once more! Slough off your disappointment as a dirty coat, roll up your sleeves—the world’s your hickory nut, full of meat, and you’re the boy to crack it.” That was the giddy heart of the matter.

  The Babe was as optimistic as everyone else. He was ready to get down to business too. Crack the hickory nut? Yes, indeed. He wanted more money.

  “I’m going to ask for a figure in my contract that may knock Mr. Frazee silly,” he announced. “But nevertheless I think I am deserving of everything I ask.”

  There was no doubt about his place in baseball now. He was the number-one attraction in the game. If there had been a Most Valuable Player Award in 1918, and there wasn’t, he would have won it in a breeze. He was the best player on the best team, and if you listened, you would hear good young players compared now to Babe Ruth, not Ty Cobb, not anyone else. The best player deserved the best money, Ty Cobb money.

  The Babe had made $7,500 in 1918. Now he wanted $15,000 a year.

  He had picked up a business manager, Johnny Igoe, maybe the first business manager ever hired by a ballplayer, and had learned the first, halting dance steps of negotiation. Pretend that you have options: that was the ticket. Tell ’em you’ll quit and be…a boxer. Tell ’em there are a lot of other things you can do. Tell ’em unless you get the $15,000, you won’t be playing baseball. The Babe followed the program—“I always have wanted to box,” he said quite seriously, discussing a $5,000 offer to fight Gunboat Smith—and more. He let it be known that he might be playing in the Delaware County League. He also suggested in a visit to New Bedford that he might invest in a franchise in a league that played roller polo, a sort of hockey on roller skates. He tried to sound resolute.

  The weakness in his argument, of course, was that he wouldn’t make anywhere near the same money in any of these other pursuits. He was a baseball player, and the reserve clause, the foundation of organized baseball’s power over its employees, bound him for life to the Red Sox or to whomever they sent his rights. (The clause would be tested during the summer in congressional antitrust hearings, but upheld once again.) If he wanted to play baseball, he pretty much would have to do it for Harry Frazee.

  Frazee knew the rules. He compared Ruth to the actors who always wanted big money from him.

  “They swear they are through with the show, they’ll leave it flat,” the owner said. “But it would take at least two squads of marines to keep them out of the theater and off the stage.”

  The weakness in Frazee’s argument was that he needed Ruth. He could threaten trades and say that he would refuse to pay exorbitant money, but Ruth was the centerpiece of his attraction. The preceding two years had been one worse than the other financially, and now, with the soldiers back and interest presumably returned to the game, he needed his star.

  The two men engaged in this time-honored foxtrot of commerce through the end of January, all through February, and well into March. They met twice in Boston but solved nothing. The Babe and Helen spent substantial time with friends in Meredith, New Hampshire, where newspapers reported that he frolicked in the snow, bought out all the candy at the local general store, and told a bunch of rowdies to sit down and shut up at a community dance.

  The lines hardened on March 18, when the Red Sox official party left Boston for spring training. Frazee had switched the site this year from Hot Springs to Tampa, Florida, so Ed Barrow, 11 players, and five sportswriters departed from South Station for New York, where they boarded a steamer, the Arapahoe, to sail to Jacksonville. They would then take another train to Tampa.

  The Babe stayed in Sudbury. The season already had been shortened to 140 games, owing to the postwar chaos, everything starting late, and now training would start later than late for him. Frazee had noticed his condition, which included more than a couple of added pounds, and knew this would not be a good thing. He made the first move, asking the Babe to come down to New York the next day.

  The Babe complied. The meeting in Frazee’s office went surprisingly well. The Babe hadn’t planned on signing, hadn’t even brought extra clothes, but very soon he was shaking hands with the owner and calling Helen to pack a bag and have a friend put it on a train to New York. The final figure was three years for a total of $30,000. (The announced figure was three years for $27,000.) The Babe was on the midnight train to Florida. He had a $2,500 raise from his 1918 salary of $7,500.

  “I don’t expect that manager Barrow will ask me to play two or three positions this year, for I would rather play in one position,” he said before leaving. “I enjoy being in the game every day, and there is nothing I like better than to get in there and take a hard swing at the ball when some of the boys are on the bases.”

  This was the second part of business that had to be handled. He knew where the meat of the hickory nut was located.

  The Red Sox trained at Plant Field, which was built in the infield of a racetrack. The field, unused for three years, had been whipped back into shape to impress the new tenants. Next door was the Tampa Bay Hotel, where the team stayed, a sprawling resort with Moorish architecture. A large tent had been erected next to the hotel.

  The Red Sox weren’t the only attraction in the months of March and April. Evangelist Billy Sunday also was in town. The tent was his canvas cathedral.

  “The hour is come for plain speech…” his loud and lively voice would suggest to the wayward souls of Hillsborough County, packed together in front of him every night for a month. “Everything the devil’s in favor of, I’m against.”

  Fifty-six years old, the Rev. Sunday was a charismatic contortionist with both words and body, flipping around the stage, sliding up to the podium as if it were second base, shouting about how the devil threw spitballs at everyone in this wicked world. He was a dynamic speaker, now at the height of his popularity, and one of the major forces in the damnation of demon alcohol and the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, slightly more than a month earlier. It was estimated that he traveled over a mile, back and forth, as he delivered each sermon.

  The beginnings of his success story sounded much like the Babe’s story. He had been placed in an orphanage in Ames, Iowa, but escaped at age 14 and went to work on his own in an assortment of odd jobs across the Midwest. He also played baseball. Noticed by future Hall of Famer Cap Anson in Marshallton, Iowa, he was brought straight to the Chicago Cubs, never a day in the minor leagues. He was known as the fastest man in the National League. Flush with his success at a young age, he fell into a life of drinking, carousing, and following perfumed ladies into the night.

  This was where the story changed. After eight years in the big leagues, he stumbled into the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago one night and heard a preacher boom out the gospel of Jesus Christ. He claimed that his life changed in an instant. He quit baseball, turning down good money again and again, and evolved into this evangelist who shouted, “Whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is hell.”

  Now he was not only in the s
ame neighborhood but on the same ball field with the Babe. The Red Sox gave Sunday his own uniform, let him take batting practice and fielding practice with the team, let him umpire scrimmage games between “the Regulars” and “the Battering Babes.” They even moved the starting times of their series of exhibition games with the New York Giants to 4:15 to accommodate Sunday, his staff, and the 6,000-plus worshipers who were arriving every night. The good folk could have baseball and salvation, all in the same trip.

  The Babe and Sunday posed for assorted pictures together, young hedonist and old evangelist caught in the same moment, laughing at the same time. Did they talk? What did they say? They even shared the same physical condition at the outset, the Babe unable to go more than 100 yards when he tried to run a half mile on his first day in Tampa. The batting cage was a bit different. The evangelist was rusty, long away from the game. The Babe, despite breaking one of his two favorite bats, pounded the ball early.

  In the dugout, Barrow still pondered the decision between pitching and hitting for his star. An off-season poll of managers in 1918 indicated that most of them thought the Babe should be a pitcher. The Babe, in the second half of his business plan, kept repeating that he wanted to hit. He said it in the most definitive way possible in the first exhibition on April 4 against the Giants.

  The pitcher for the Giants was “Columbia George” Smith, the nickname handed to him because he had attended Columbia University. In the second inning, Columbia George served up a pitch that resulted in a home run that defied any lesson he ever learned in any physics class he ever took. The Babe swung his one unbroken bat, and the ball flew and flew and flew some more, over the fence in right and onto and across the racetrack. This was the longest home run he or anyone else ever had seen.