The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  Another change had occurred with the baseball itself. Nobody knew the facts behind the change—that manufacturers now used a better grade of Australian wool and had developed new machines that wound the yarn tighter—but everyone knew that the ball seemed to fly better. Or said they knew. The “dead ball” era was done. Hit the new baseball, and it felt like solid against solid, bat against the kitchen table. Hit the old baseball and it felt like bat against living room sofa.

  Ruth made some on-field headlines in the third week of March when he hurried into the stands to confront a smallish spectator who kept calling him “a big piece of cheese,” then hurried out faster when the spectator pulled a knife, but mostly the stories of the spring relied heavily on invention and imagination. Some of the writers tried to promote an eating contest between Ruth, humorist Irwin S. Cobb, and outfielder Sam Vick, a noted trencherman, but that never took place. Runyon bought an alligator that he named Aloysius Dorgan and interviewed at length. Ping Bodie, whose real name was Francesco Pezzolo (he changed the name because it sounded too ethnic), jumped the team for a stretch in a salary dispute, then came back.

  At the end of camp, the club went south for a three-game series with the Cincinnati Reds. The first two games were in Miami, the third at the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach. The idea for that game was to put on a show for the rich and privileged guests, a little something to watch in the afternoon before another grand dinner. The makeshift field had been roped off on a cricket grounds normally used by Caribbean workers at the hotel. This caused certain irregularities, the most glaring of which was a palm tree situated in the middle of center field.

  The Yankees’ traveling party, freed from the dull perimeters of Jacksonville, had taken full advantage of Miami’s nightlife. Some members even had found time for a quick trip to Bimini. The Reds, more than welcome hosts, held a dinner the night before the Palm Beach game on one of the Florida Keys, a raucous affair that involved a boat for transportation. Two sportswriters fell off the boat on the way home. Ping Bodie was carried off. The Babe returned under his own power, but with a fine liquid evening under his belt.

  In the first inning of the game the next day, everyone squinting in the sunlight, the portable stands filled with high-society millionaires, a fly ball was hit to center field, where the Babe was playing. He went into a hungover gallop and ran directly into the palm tree, which won the collision by a knockout.

  This was the end of the game for the dazed Babe, who was fine except for the bells ringing in his head. The game was the end of spring training visits to Miami for the Yankees for the next 13 seasons. Col. Ruppert had seen enough of this kind of fun in the sun. He had insured the Babe for $135,000, but perhaps the policy did not cover bouts with palm trees in center field.

  On the trip north the Yankees played an annual series of games with the Dodgers. In Winston-Salem, Ruth hit another instantly legendary blast. There was no center-field fence, and though Ruth’s hit carried over a standing crowd—carried and carried—he was credited with only a ground-rule double. It might have been the longest double ever hit.

  “Babe Ruth today hit a baseball 850 feet…” Runyon wrote, not to be outdone by other estimates of grandeur. “Babe hit the ball across a half-mile racetrack. We might have said he hit it around the racetrack, but we want to be conservative…. It was longer than a peace treaty; it carried longer than Al Mamaux’ singing voice. If you don’t think this is far, ask the top-floor tenants when Al is singing in a hotel lobby.”

  Attention New York: the circus was coming.

  Ruth was 25 years old (thought he was 26) when he began his career in the biggest city in the land. He had little formal education, no parental advice. The lessons of St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, while useful in dealing with the necessities of daily life, had done nothing to prepare him for what he now faced in a cynical, high-voltage environment that chewed up dreamers every day and spit them back to Peoria.

  The 25-year-old man who thought he was 26 never blinked. He quickly installed Helen and himself in an eight-room apartment suite in the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway, a 17-floor mock chateau designed by architect Stanford White that took up the entire block between 73rd and 74th Streets. He had a shave every day in the basement barbershop of the dignified Fred B. Mockel at the Ansonia, a ceramic mug with the name “Babe Ruth” on the front soon inserted among the mugs of bankers and philanthropists. He had a regular manicure, fingernails always perfect.

  He found a personal tailor who could shape expensive tweeds over an irregular body. His shoes were from England, his cigars from Cuba. He bought a succession of automobiles whose common characteristics were that they looked wonderful and traveled fast. He charged into the nightlife, the day life, life itself, intimidated by nothing. He was the bourgeois royalty he was supposed to be, big and loud and unafraid.

  He also hit home runs.

  The difficulty of that task—so different from the on-command performance of a singer, actor, or juggler who could memorize, rehearse, and then simply walk onto a stage and do an act—was shown in the first couple of weeks. In the opening game of the season at Philadelphia, Ruth collected only two singles and dropped a fly ball in the eighth to allow the winning runs to the lowly Athletics. In the opener at home, he pulled a muscle in his right side and strained his right knee in batting practice, struck out in the first inning, then went to the bench for several days. The big opening day crowd mostly watched Frank Gleich in right field for the afternoon.

  It wasn’t until May 1, 11 games later, that the fun began. Playing against the Red Sox, who had sprinted out to lead the league with a 10–2 record despite losing their most famous star, the famous star unloaded in the sixth inning, a towering shot that was the third ball he ever had hit out of the Polo Grounds. The Times, working a May Day theme, said he had “sneaked a bomb into the field without anyone knowing it and hid it in his bat.” The Yankees won, 6–0.

  Number two came the next day, also against the Red Sox, a low bullet that hit far back in the grandstand, close to the bleachers, one of those balls that looked as if it were still rising. Fans in the crowd of 25,000 came down to dance on top of the dugout to welcome their man back from his trip around the bases. The Yankees won, 7–1. And away he went.

  This was the advertised product. The adjectives rolled as the Sultan of Swat clocked 11 home runs for the month of May (a major league record for a month), then 13 for June (breaking his own record.) He hit balls off facades and over fences that never had been reached. He hit three home runs in a day against the Senators in a doubleheader. In Chicago he hit a home run that coincided with a loud thunderclap.

  One day he hit a towering fly ball that was speared by Oscar Vitt, an outfielder, who immediately showed the ball to the umpire. It had been knocked lopsided. On another day the man himself was knocked lopsided, hit in the forehead by Chicago’s Buck Weaver in the middle of an attempted double play. He came back the next day and kept hitting. He whacked his 29th at the Polo Grounds to tie his record on July 16, the ball hitting three feet from the top of the grandstand roof, no more than six feet from the end, where it would have gone onto the walkway to the subway, maybe purchased a token, and taken a ride all the way into Manhattan.

  There were still 61 games left when he broke the record with number 30 on July 20. How many homers could one man hit? Calculations and guesses were everywhere. Number 31 followed number 30 in the same July 20 doubleheader against the White Sox. He had 37 by the end of July.

  The effect of all this was exhilarating, breathtaking. He and the Yankees broke attendance records in six American League parks. He hit homers in all eight parks. The attendance record at the Polo Grounds was broken once, twice, three times and would be broken again and again before the season ended.

  Pitcher Allan Russell of the Red Sox suffered a slight stroke and returned home to Baltimore unable to talk or use his right side. His doctor decided that the stroke had been caused by anxieties from facing the Babe. The pi
tcher had “overtaxed his strength and brain in the battle against the greatest hitter the world ever has known.” A spectator at the Polo Grounds, Theodore Sturm of Bellrose, Long Island, died of a heart attack caused by the excitement. The fact was buried in the middle of another story about another home run, almost as if death by excitement was to be expected when confronted with the wonders of George Herman Ruth.

  The Babe’s Yankees teammates watched the barrage with the same sense of wonder as everyone else. They never had seen anything like it. The game they had learned was being changed in front of their faces. This was all revolutionary. A game was never finished. A home run could change the situation in a moment. Strikeouts, always a symbol of futility, didn’t mean as much. Bases on balls—and the other teams were issuing them now to the Babe intentionally and semi-intentionally on a regular basis—were a disappointment more than a strategic advantage. The swing of the bat was more important. Let it rip.

  How do you pitch to this guy? What do you do?

  “Keep your fastball away from him,” shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh suggested. “Make him hit slow stuff.”

  “Try to make him keep the ball in the ballpark,” catcher Truck Hannah said.

  “Throw the ball and duck,” reserve outfielder Sam Vick advised. “The Babe could hit them high, low, fast or slow, good or bad, with both hands or one. I saw him go for a big swing on a left-hander, which turned out to be a curve low and outside. He reached across the plate with one hand, pulled the ball into the upper deck in right field. You can’t stop that kind of hitting.”

  The collisions sounded different when the balls hit his bat, a click, like two billiard balls, solid against solid. The balls traveled different: higher, deeper, farther. He was a picture of fury and rhythm, all in one, as natural and free as anyone ever had seen.

  “In pitching, some players like Walter Johnson throw a light ball, some a heavy one that nearly knocks your hand off,” Vick said. “Some throw a hard ball, but the ball won’t carry, others throw balls that carry. It’s the same with hitting. Babe’s ball had that carrying quality. He could cowtail that bat, which was a long one, put every ounce of his 220 pounds in back of it and still hit. So when he got one in the air, there wasn’t a park that would hold it.”

  By the middle of the season, people were sending him checks in the mail, just hoping that he would endorse them and his autograph would come back from the bank. The crowds outside the New York Times building in Times Square were larger and noisier watching the reports of the Yankees and A’s than the crowds watching the reports from the Democratic convention in San Francisco. A woman in Lynn, Massachusetts, a headline said, did “A Babe Ruth on Her Husband” when she hit him in the head with a baseball bat.

  The name was magic. Everything the big man did seemed important. Everything anyone else did seemed less important. The pennant race, even with the Yankees in the thick of it, seemed less important. The big man did his big things. Everyone else lived in his wake.

  “My greatest moment during the season came one day with the bases loaded, the score tied, and Babe’s turn to bat,” Sam Vick said. “The height of ambition of the fans was to see such a setup. They were almost taking the top off the stand. There was a lull in the game, and Babe did not climb out of the dugout. He had hurt his wrist and couldn’t go up to bat.”

  Vick and the rest of the players in the dugout looked at Huggins. The manager looked back, considering each possibility, staring at someone, then moving his eyes to the next player. Vick held his breath. Huggins looked at him, then looked away. Huggins looked again, looked away. This happened several times. The manager finally said, “Sam, get your bat.”

  “I began to breathe again, picked out my bat, and started to the plate,” Vick said. “The announcer said, ‘Vick, batting for Ruth.’ When it dawned on the crowd what was happening, you could hear a pin drop. It seemed like five miles to the plate. The stillness was frightening, but on the way, down inside me, there was the reaction, ‘That’s what you think!’

  “I then blacked out and don’t remember anything until I slid into third base with a triple.”

  On another day, a doubleheader in Washington, Vick struck out seven times. The background was bad for hitters in Washington, and Walter Johnson pitched one of the games and was impossible to hit, and…seven strikeouts in seven appearances. The Yankees were shut out in both games. Vick was mournful as he walked back to the clubhouse.

  He suddenly felt an arm around his shoulder.

  “Don’t mind that, boy,” second baseman Del Pratt said. “When the Babe strikes out five times [and he had], they don’t even see you.”

  On August 16, the Yankees played host to the Cleveland Indians at the Polo Grounds on a sticky, muggy day. It was an important series, the home team a half-game behind the visitors in the standings, both teams battling with the White Sox for the American League lead.

  Carl Mays was on the mound. Mays, the subject of so much consternation a year earlier when he went from Boston to New York, was having another good season. He was 29 years old now and still seen as a dark and odd character.

  The son of a Methodist minister in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, he didn’t smoke, drink, or chase women into the night, which made him something of an outsider in baseball culture. He was distant to most of his teammates, disdainful of baseball players as a rule. He was known as a hard case once he crossed onto the field, a no-nonsense competitor, a hard thrower who demanded that hitters stay back from the plate.

  As a boy, his arm was so strong and accurate that he hunted rabbits with rocks, although he admitted he once made a mistake and hit a calf in the forehead with one of his throws, killing the calf. A sore arm while pitching in the minor leagues in Portland, Oregon, had sent him to old-time legend Iron Man Joe McGinnity, who convinced him to throw with an underhanded, submarine motion. The switch was a success and had brought him to the big leagues.

  Matched against Indians ace Stanley Coveleski on this day, Mays and Ruth and the Yanks had fallen behind, 3–0, after four innings. The first Indians batter in the fifth was 29-year-old Ray Chapman, a nimble shortstop who was the opposite of Mays in personality: a well-liked, gregarious character whose tenor voice could sing the songs of Irishman John McCormick to perfection. Chapman, off a Kentucky farm, had married well, his wife Katy the daughter of millionaire Cleveland businessman Martin Daly, one of the founders of Standard Oil. An office already had been established for the shortstop in Daly’s company, his future assured.

  In two previous appearances at the plate against Mays this day, Chapman had bunted twice, once for a sacrifice, once for an out. He was an aggravating hitter with a stance that made him sort of hang over the plate, a challenge. Mays threw him a ball, then a strike. On the third pitch, coming from that submarine delivery, the only underhanded delivery in the league, Mays hit Ray Chapman square in the head.

  The sound, crack, was as loud as if bat had hit ball. The ball rolled toward third base, and Mays in fact thought it was another bunt. He fielded the ball and threw to first. When he turned around, he saw Chapman trying unsuccessfully to climb off the dirt. Some blood was coming from Chapman’s ear.

  After almost seven minutes, the Indians trainer and his teammates tried to walk Chapman to the clubhouse in center field, but he collapsed again on the way. His skull had been crushed. He was taken to nearby St. Lawrence Hospital in the Bronx, where doctors operated that night to take the pressure off his brain, but he died at 4:40 the next morning. He was the first and only major league player to die from being hit by a thrown baseball.

  Mays, the loner, was now more alone than ever. The players on both the Red Sox and Tigers teams announced that they wouldn’t play against him and wanted him banned for life. He protested that the pitch wasn’t even a fastball, that it was a curve, that the ball was scuffed and took off. He also noted that Joe Bush of the Red Sox (ten) and Howard Ehmke of the Tigers (nine) had hit more batters than he (six) had. The league office quickly exonerated him, ca
lling the death an accident (Chapman, it was thought, had lost sight of the ball because he never moved), but the controversy remained. When Mays made his first start, a 10–0 shutout of the Tigers a week later, every time he released a curveball that didn’t seem as if it were going to break he shouted, “Watch out,” from the mound.

  The game back at the Polo Grounds had continued after Chapman left. The Babe was the first man up in the ninth, the Indians ahead, 4–0. He was 0-for-3 on the day against Coveleski, but singled sharply. The Yankees scored three times in the inning, but still lost, 4–3.

  The game the next day was postponed.

  The Babe became a movie star in the following weeks. Or at least he made a movie. He had signed in July to appear in Headin’ Home, the story of a village simpleton’s rise to baseball glory and the capture of the hand of the local fair maiden. (No typecasting here.) The deal was not unusual—sports stars were increasingly being brought into the growing movie business—but the timing was peculiar. The Babe made the movie almost immediately, in the middle of the season.

  The studio was in Haverstraw, New York, 30 miles outside the city and on the other side of the Hudson River. For a succession of August days—often nights—Ruth took the ferry to New Jersey, drove to Haverstraw, played his role, and returned back on the ferry to the pennant race. He was supposed to receive $50,000 for his efforts. The producers, Kessel & Baumann, paid him $15,000 up front and gave him a second check for $35,000 to hold for a few weeks until they could put enough money in the bank. He folded the check and put it in his wallet and carried it everywhere. He was not averse to showing it in the locker room.

  “Hey, I need some money,” he would say, big joke, pulling out the check, which soon became worn-looking. “Could you cash this for me?”

  During the production, there were days when he arrived at the ballpark and didn’t even have time to wash off the makeup. He would make monster faces in the clubhouse, then go out to be the first man in baseball history to play right field with eyeliner and mascara. On the morning of August 22, he filmed all the live baseball scenes before a crowd of 2,000 at a local field in Haverstraw also known as the Polo Grounds. With a bat he supposedly had whittled from a tree trunk, he sent shots over the fence off constable Peter Reilly’s house and into Frank Smith’s front yard and onto a shed and into someone’s kitchen. He then left the filming and played against the Detroit Tigers in the afternoon in the real Polo Grounds.