The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  This was a public confrontation of intriguing proportions. Ruth, the star of stars, had not been told no in a long time, not since his days with Brother Matthias and the Xaverians. Landis, like the Xaverians, was an expert in saying no.

  A federal judge, he had been plucked by baseball’s owners from the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois early in the year after the Black Sox scandal hit in Chicago. He was an odd, foul-mouthed little man, an ego-driven, tobacco-chewing puritan with electric white hair shooting out of his head, a hanging judge with the wrath of God carved across his face. The best description of him was that he looked “like Whistler’s Mother in slacks.” His favorite phrase when he sentenced some seditionist, some violator of the Volstead Act, some miscreant, to the stiffest penalty possible was “Take that man up to Mabel’s room.”

  His name itself had a touch of anger. Abraham Landis, his father, had been a surgeon in the Union Army attached to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s sweep through Georgia during the Civil War. Before reaching Atlanta, the army encountered resistance at Kennesaw Mountain. A Confederate bullet caught surgeon Landis in the leg, and he walked forever after with a pronounced limp. To commemorate the incident, he gave the name Kenesaw Mountain (misspelling it in the process) to his sixth child, even though the rest of the family objected.

  The owners of baseball had noticed Kenesaw Mountain when his inactivity on a suit by the renegade Federal League caused the league to flounder and die, which was very good news for the owners of baseball. When they needed a strong figure, a czar, to replace the three-man National Commission and give the sport a cleaner-than-clean, gosh-darn-honest image after the scandal, they remembered him. The wrath of God face probably earned Landis the job by itself.

  Taking on Ruth was not a bad strategy. The eight Black Sox players were still in court proceedings in Chicago. Landis already had banned them for life from organized baseball no matter what the outcome of the court case. (They were acquitted.) A move against Ruth was a consolidation of power. Nobody was “bigger than baseball.” Nobody—translation here—was bigger than Landis.

  The two Colonels were terrified about what he might do to Ruth. Would Landis ban him for an entire season? They tried to convince Ruth not to go. Huston even hurried to Grand Central Station for a final plea before the train left for Buffalo.

  Ruth still went. Ruth played. He hit a home run as the All-Stars beat the Polish Nationals, not to be confused with the Giants, 4–2. Mays and Schang, after meeting with Landis at the Commodore, had decided to drop out. Meusel and the two young pitchers also played. The next day they played in Elmira.

  “I see no reason why this rule should be invoked against us when [George] Sisler of St. Louis and others who shared in World Series money are playing exhibition games unmolested by Judge Landis,” Ruth said. “I see no reason not to play, no matter what Judge Landis’s views may be.”

  “What did Judge Landis say to you in your New York talk?” someone asked.

  “He hung up on me twice when I tried to telephone to him,” Ruth said. “I did not see him personally.”

  Huston, Ruth’s bigger backer in the partnership of Colonels, now traveled to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to try again to make him quit. This time the big man listened. He had been working with an idea that Landis was going to fine him, probably take his $3,362 check for the World Series. Who cared? He would make that much in one exhibition. Huston explained that the big worry was a suspension. What would the Yankees do without their fabled home run slugger? He would be letting his teammates down.

  Ruth said he hadn’t considered that problem. He agreed to call off the rest of the tour. The weather had been cold, the crowds smaller than expected as cities had to scramble for alternative fields since their minor league teams were afraid to rile Landis. Okay, fine. The tour was done.

  Huston also asked Ruth to go to Chicago to apologize to the commissioner. Ruth said he would. He then went hunting with Herb Pennock. He hadn’t said exactly when he would go to see Landis. He never did. On October 27, he returned to New York for a press conference at the Palace Theater to announce that he had signed a contract with the Keith Theaters to do a vaudeville act starting November 14 for 20 weeks at $3,000 per week.

  This was legal.

  Landis didn’t make his decision until December 5. He suspended Ruth, Meusel, and Piercy until May 20, 1922, approximately the first seven weeks of the season, and ruled they had to surrender all monies earned in the World Series. Sheehan, who was not on the World Series roster, was neither fined nor suspended.

  Cols. Ruppert and Huston were relieved. The punishment was harsh, considering the fact that players in the past had been fined no more than $100 for consistently breaking this rule, but the Colonels had feared that Ruth was going to be suspended for the entire year. Ruth refused to comment.

  “Lots of potatoes” was his most definitive remark, made to a waiter taking his order for steak à la Garusse when reporters found him sitting in a “delicate pink chaise lounge” in his Washington hotel room in the midst of his tour. He did say that he wasn’t worried and that he wouldn’t let the decision affect his vaudeville act.

  The act, Ruth paired with veteran comic Wellington Cross, was not Hamlet, but critics were mostly kind, except for the man from the New York World who said Ruth had “a grace of carriage somewhere between John Barrymoreish and Elephantish.” A one-armed aerialist, a roller-skating comedy duo, and Anita Diaz and her trained monkeys were some of the other acts. Ruth sang a couple of songs, one about feeling bad after striking out. He also did some routines with Cross, who acted as straight man. One involved a telegram from Kenesaw Mountain Landis himself.

  “Is it serious?” Cross asked.

  “I should say it is,” Ruth replied. “Seventy-five cents, collect.”

  And so it went, across the country, $3,000 per week.

  Ruth left the tour early in Milwaukee in February and went to Hot Springs for two weeks to soak in the tubs and the sun before heading to spring training. Under the suspension, he was allowed to train with the Yankees, play exhibitions, even practice before regular-season games. It was only the games themselves he had to miss for the seven weeks. He also was allowed to negotiate a new contract.

  His last negotiation, well, renegotiation, which had landed him $10,000 per season for three years, had been the loud and noisy deal with Harry Frazee, who finally sent him from Boston to New York. This negotiation was a bit easier. Col. Huston journeyed to Hot Springs to do the business. He met with Ruth at the Eastman Hotel at eight o’clock at night—maybe in the tubs, maybe not—and the two men soon reached the same salary range. Huston had come up to $50,000 per year for three years, plus a two-year option. Ruth had come down to $52,000 per year, same number of years. He said he wanted $52,000 so he could say he made $1,000 per week. Huston and Ruth went back and forth.

  “Let’s flip for it,” Ruth said.

  Huston was not averse to the idea. (Might there have been drinking during these negotiations?) He said he had to call Col. Ruppert in New York to make sure a flip of the coin was all right. Ruth went back to his hotel, long-distance telephone connections being what they were, and at eleven o’clock Huston told him to come back. Ruppert had agreed to the procedure.

  So somewhere around midnight the Colonel pulled out a half-dollar from his pocket and said, “Call it,” and the Babe called, “Tails,” and Huston flipped. The coin landed on the carpet and rolled underneath a rocking chair. Huston and the Babe went down on all fours. Tails it was. The Babe stood up as a man making $1,000 per week.

  The figure was extravagant for baseball perhaps, probably the biggest contract any player or manager ever had signed, but it wasn’t outrageous. Huston declared Ruth was getting “the salary of the president of a railroad.” It would have been a smaller railroad. He wasn’t close to joining the country’s 67 millionaires. He did much better than the 5 million people who filed tax returns for 1921 of $4,000 or lower, which was over 70 percent of the t
axpaying population, but he in no way approached the baseball stars of the future.

  A conversion system from the American Institute of Economic Research translates the Babe’s $52,000 into $564,737.43 in 2005 dollars. Only two members of the 2005 New York Yankees, outfielder Bubba Crosby at $322,950 and second baseman Andy Phillips at $317,000, made less than $564,737.43. Reserve second baseman Rey Sanchez made $600,000. The median salary for a member of the 2005 Yankees was $5,883,334; the highest-paid Yankee, third baseman Alex Rodriguez, made $26 million. To make the same amount in 1922 dollars as Alex Rodriguez, Ruth would have had to sign for $2,246,913.58. Baseball simply didn’t pay that kind of money. Home Run Baker, second on the salary list after Ruth, made $16,000, the equivalent of $185,142.86.

  Added to the contract was a clause, written just for Ruth, that he had to abstain from intoxicating liquors and not remain up later than one o’clock during the playing season. This mostly seemed to be an interesting technicality. Two weeks later he was with the team in New Orleans where a famous headline, “Yankees Training on Scotch,” was written. He always liked New Orleans.

  “Babe, somehow he’d get invited to those fine old southern homes, mansions, really, and somehow I’d get invited with him and be treated to a long, long, real old southern meal,” one New York sportswriter said. “The host, coming from an old-time family down there, would put on an act. He’d have Negroes in hose, dressed just as they were at the end or before the Civil War. There would be a big show in the kitchen, waiters, all sorts of attendants, sometimes a small orchestra. So we’d sit there and get a sample of food that very, very few people really ever get a chance to eat.

  “The Babe was a good trencherman. So he enjoyed this. We had opportunities down there to see that life that very few outsiders ever saw.”

  Judge Landis appeared in New Orleans for an exhibition game, bought a ball for $250 signed by Ruth as part of an auction for the Salvation Army, and rejected Ruth’s plea for a commutation of sentence. The Babe was involved in an auto accident in New Orleans, was late for an exhibition with the Superbas, then pounded out a home run—the longest in the history of Heineman Park—in the sixth. All of the usual stuff.

  The Yankees had rearranged their roster again during the winter, going back to Mr. Frazee and his discount store in Boston. They picked up shortstop Everett Scott and pitchers Sam Jones and Joe Bush for Roger Peckinpaugh, Jack Quinn, Rip Collins, and Bill Piercy, that barnstorming pitcher. They also picked up solid center fielder Whitey Witt for cash as part of another fire sale by A’s owner Connie Mack. If anything, they looked stronger than they had a year earlier, only needing the return of Ruth and Meusel to fill out the lineup.

  Opening day was in Washington with President Warren G. Harding throwing out the first ball. Ruth sat in the grandstand next to Huston and American League president Ban Johnson for the game, a 5–2 loss to the Senators. The big man was described as restless. His stretch in the slammer had now begun.

  He broke up the waiting that followed with an occasional appearance in an exhibition—he clanged out a homer against Jack Dunn’s Orioles on April 16—and sometimes showed up for morning practices before games and more often didn’t. He also bought a house and had his tonsils removed.

  The house was back in Sudbury, back in Massachusetts, actually a farm, the old Sylvester Perry place, built in 1737. It had 12 rooms and sat on 155 acres of tillable land, woodland, and water, which was Pratt’s Pond. A barn, garage, and henhouse were in the back. The price, according to local rumor, was $12,000. Ruth appeared on April 29, driven from Boston by a chauffeur, to take charge. He named the estate “Home Plate Farm” and said it was going to be a working agricultural operation. He told a photographer to save the slides of the pictures he took so he could compare them to the place after all of the improvements were made. The move-in date, Ruth said, would be after the end of the season, although “the missus” would be up in a month to buy some new furniture.

  “I thought the place was furnished,” a reporter said.

  “Oh, we’ll buy some more,” Ruth said.

  The mention of “the missus” brought Helen back into the scene. The fog had descended heavy over her. No public mention had been made since she’d flown over the second game of the World Series in a blimp and dropped three good-luck baseballs down to the Polo Grounds in a fine Christy Walsh production. Did she go with the Babe on the barnstorming tour? The vaudeville tour? Fog. She was mentioned again when the Babe checked into St. Vincent’s Hospital to have his tonsils removed on May 4. Helen also checked in to have an operation, but “the nature of her ailment was not revealed.” This was one of a number of trips to the hospital for her, none of the ailments ever revealed.

  She once told another ballplayer’s wife that she had had four miscarriages. True? Not true? Not revealed. She also told the ballplayer’s wife she had graduated from Smith College. Not true.

  The Babe was discharged first and fully recovered in time for his big return on May 20, coming back as a man with more money, fewer tonsils, and a house that he didn’t have when he left. The condition of Helen, still in the hospital, was not revealed. She didn’t return home until the day before her husband returned to the field.

  He was at the races that day. Jack Dunn ran into him at Jamaica Race Track in New York. Dunn’s Orioles had been rained out of a game against the Newark Bears.

  “How are you doing?” Dunn asked.

  “Couldn’t be better,” the Babe said. “It’s been a long suspension for me; it seemed like a thousand years.”

  “Any luck with the horses?”

  “Pretty good day yesterday,” the Babe said. “I cleaned up a little more than $18,000.”

  Dunn then watched the kid he pulled out of an orphanage proceed to bet $5,000 on the first race, $2,000 to win and $3,000 to place. He then bet $3,000 to win in the second.

  The return to glory on May 20 was glorious until the game began. A crowd of 38,000, easily the largest of the season, packed the Polo Grounds. Ruth received a silver loving cup filled with dirt collected from the diamond at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys by some fans from Baltimore, a floral horseshoe from the National Vaudeville Association, and a silver bat from Harry Weber, his vaudeville agent. He then, alas, also received a succession of dipping spitballs from Urban Shocker, one of the pitchers grandfathered into spitball legality, and went 0-for-4 in an 8–2 loss to the St. Louis Browns. Bob Meusel fared no better, also going hitless.

  The day was a disappointment in the end.

  “No scientist has ever figured out the purpose of tonsils in the human system,” Heywood Broun suggested. “Maybe they have something to do with home runs.”

  The odd, shortened season began. The Yankees had been doing fine without their exiled stars, shooting out to first place, 22 and 11, two games in front of the Browns. Whitey Witt had been a hitting machine, hitting better than he ever had in his life. Now, “the Albino must move over for the Bambino,” as one writer said. The great man was back, and he was making all this money, and the team was going well, and he had better do something spectacular.

  He didn’t.

  The pressure to perform, coupled with the layoff, had him flailing at pitches. He was booed by the big crowd on that first day back for failing to catch up with Shocker’s spitballs, and the boos increased as he struggled through his first five days with one home run and an .093 batting average. This was the first time in his career he had been booed daily, and it was obvious by his actions that he did not like it. He often tipped his cap in sarcasm to the booing fans.

  In his sixth game back, he whacked a single in the second inning that he tried to stretch into a double. He was called out by umpire George Hildebrand. Reacting to the call, Ruth jumped up and threw dirt in Hildebrand’s face. Reacting to the dirt, Hildebrand threw Ruth out of the game. The boos came from everywhere. Ruth gave the sarcastic tip of the cap, seemed to be in control, but when he reached the dugout, he could make out the words that were be
ing shouted. He particularly could make out the words being shouted by two Pullman car conductors.

  He leaped the fence and went into the stands to challenge one of them. The conductor bolted back a few rows and continued to shout. Ruth shouted back, restrained gently by a few fans. Someone shouted, “Hit the big stiff.” The conductor continued to move backward. Ruth finally went back on the roof of the dugout, where he challenged anyone in the crowd who wanted to come down and fight. With no challengers, minus his cap, he jumped back onto the field. He picked up the cap, along with his glove, and started to walk to the clubhouse, which at the Polo Grounds was located beyond center field. The boos and the jeers followed him all the way.

  “They can boo and hoot me all they want,” he said when reporters found him back at the Ansonia. “That doesn’t matter to me. But when a fan calls me insulting names from the grandstand and becomes abusive, I don’t intend to stand for it. This fellow today, whoever he was, called me ‘a low-down bum’ and other names that got me mad, and when I went after him he ran.”

  The tone for the season somehow had been established. Luckily for Ruth, Landis was not part of this judicial process and Babe was fined only $200 and given a warning by American League president Johnson, but he was off in a different, contentious situation that no one had predicted. The picture of the hero, hanging so well in the living rooms of America during the past two or three years, had been knocked askew during his seven weeks on the sidelines. Everything seemed off-kilter.

  The missing seven weeks, 33 games, left Ruth with no chance to reach the standards that had made him famous. He was 11 home runs behind surprising outfielder Ken Williams of the surprising Browns in the home run chase before the chase even started. He had little chance to catch Williams and, more importantly, no chance to catch himself.

  He had blustered during the seven weeks that he thought he still might hit 60 home runs, but two weeks of reality and opposition pitching convinced him that was impossible. He admitted the fact in Chicago on June 7. He said he still thought he had a chance to pass Williams and National League leader Rogers Hornsby, but this was hope more than certainty. He was caught in a hole, and people were yelling at him and didn’t seem to understand.