The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  “I’d have hit 80 home runs easily here,” he said.

  The Giants took a quick 2–1 Series lead on the home run heroics of well-traveled outfielder Casey Stengel (Casey was reprimanded by Judge Landis for thumbing his nose at the Yankees bench after homering in game one), but Ruth’s two home runs in the second game, part of a 4–2 win, gave the American Leaguers confidence. They came back to take not only game four but three in a row. The final win, 6–4, featured a third Ruth homer and at last brought home the club’s first World Championship.

  Col. Ruppert, now the sole owner of the Yankees after buying out Col. Huston in the middle of the season, called this the happiest day of his life. His manager, Huggins, who vindicated Ruppert’s faith in him, was presented with a diamond ring in appreciation for his services by none other than the Babe himself, who finished his brief speech with a request for “three cheers for Miller Huggins.” Ruth completed a season that couldn’t have been any better. He hit .368 in the Series with three home runs. Was this what Jimmy Walker wanted? Here it was.

  The Yankees finally had stepped free of the all-powerful Giants and become the number-one baseball attraction in New York, a situation that would last all the way until 1958, when the son of Charles Stoneham, Horace, packed up the Giants and took them to San Francisco. Ruth and the long ball finally had stepped free from McGraw and all that inside baseball talk. The long ball was king.

  “This World Series was generally recognized as a combat between the thinking power of John J. McGraw and the baseball agility of the Yankees,” Pegler wrote. “Now that it is over and the Yankees have won, it is rumored that McGraw strained a tendon in his medulla oblongata in winning the first game of the Series.”

  The games, split between Yankee Stadium and the expanded Polo Grounds, broke all attendance records, totaling over 300,000 spectators and amassing the first million-dollar World Series gate. The Yankees received $6,140.46 per man, another record. The Giants received $4,112.88. The players went every which way after the Series with their new cash. The Babe, surprisingly, gave a bit of it to Harry Heilmann, an insurance salesman and the American League batting champion from the Tigers (.401), in payment for a $50,000 life insurance policy, then headed out on an immediate barnstorming trip through New York and Pennsylvania.

  In Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the coal mine had to shut down work for the day because so many miners booked off to see the exhibition. In Scranton, the Babe was mobbed by kids, tripped in his escape, and the kids piled all over him. In Brooklyn, on the final stop of the tour at Dexter Park, he had to be rescued again. Kids mobbed him as a second game of a doubleheader with the Bushwicks was called due to darkness and a policeman on a horse had to intervene. The Babe grabbed the horse’s tail and was pulled to safety.

  He was a busy man.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Babe Ruth departed from Penn Station yesterday afternoon for Hot Springs, Ark. where he will boil out for three weeks before the regular training season. The Babe was accompanied only by Marshall Hunt, DAILY NEWS baseball scribe, who will give a humorous and interesting account of the doings of the Yankees’ slugger.

  “I guess I had a pretty good season last year,” said Babe as he left, “but I intend to have a better one in 1924. First we must win another pennant and set a new record of four in a row. Then I hope to hit sixty home runs and pile up a batting average of .400. See you in April.”

  New York Daily News,

  FEBRUARY 12, 1924

  T HE TRIP TO Hot Springs had become ritual. The Babe had been going there for ten years now, since his first training camp in 1915 with the Red Sox when he left most of his paycheck at the Oaklawn Park racetrack. The great pretense was conditioning, losing some weight to be ready for actual spring training, but there always was more fun than sweat.

  The big man worked in spurts. He would play 54 holes of golf, run three miles back to the Hotel Majestic, sweat through a hot mineral water bath, weigh himself, and announce to the nearby world that he had lost seven pounds. Then he would be stiff and sore for the next three days, eat well, and put the weight back onto his aching body. Maybe even add weight.

  Marshall Hunt loved watching the show.

  “The Babe would go to Hot Springs for two or three or four weeks depending on how he felt or if Ed Barrow looked at him and said, ‘My God, you slob. Off to Hot Springs,’” Hunt said. “Barrow would call me, and the Babe and I would take off and go down there and play a lot of golf and take a lot of hikes.

  “People would think I was the Babe’s manager and ask me to introduce them to him, and I usually did just that. You got an awful lot of Midwest businessmen and industrialists down there to boil out too.”

  Hot Springs was a mixture of the bawdy and the elegant, stuffed into the scenic beauty of the Ozark Mountains. The tubs of Bathhouse Row attracted visitors from around the country, the healing waters bringing a relief for arthritis or rheumatism or other discomforts long before drugs had been concocted to do the job. The horse races, the illicit casinos, the women of leisure, the mixed cocktails gave the visitors something to do when they were feeling better from their treatments.

  This had been cowboy country, where Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and the Younger brothers walked the land and came into town to order up a little shot of something to take away the night chill. The last good gunfight, between the police department and the sheriff’s office, of all people, had occurred just before the turn of the century. The town now was on the way to becoming gangster country. Owney Madden, the owner of the Cotton Club and chief of New York crime, would retire to Hot Springs. Al Capone himself would spend some time there.

  Baseball long had been part of the action in the late winter. Cap Anson took his Chicago White Stockings to Hot Springs in 1886, one of the first attempts at spring training, and when his team won the National League pennant in 1887, other teams followed. In 1911 four teams trained in Hot Springs, and many players arrived on their own to lose weight and get in shape. Hot Springs was the hub of baseball training.

  That era, alas, had ended. The Pirates and the Red Sox, the last two teams in town, had severed their ties after 1923, joining the other clubs that had opted for warmer sites in Florida or elsewhere. The more than 50 ballplayers in Hot Springs this year had mostly been sent by their teams for added conditioning before the start of the actual training camps. The Babe was the first of a group of Yankees, all financed by Col. Ruppert, to stop on the way to camp in New Orleans.

  “We’d play golf every morning, then we’d get tired of the food in the hotel, and I’d hire a car, and then we’d go out in the country looking for farmhouses that said, ‘Chicken Dinners,’” Hunt said. “What Babe really wanted was a good chicken dinner–and-daughter combination, and it worked out that way more often than you would think.”

  Hunt mostly sent nonsense, anything, back to the readers of the Daily News. He tracked the fluctuations of the Babe’s weight as if it were a number on the New York Stock Exchange. He detailed golf matches, practical jokes, chicken dinners (without mentioning the daughter combination). It was movie star stuff, grease for all commercial wheels. It was what people wanted to read.

  February 13:

  Whereas one year ago the Massachusetts ball player, farmer, actor, author and versatile whatnot, talked with commendable candor on how he had squandered vast sums on thoroughbreds left at the barrier, on parasitic heels, as he terms a certain type of sponger, and how he had been bilked of various monies by the unscrupulous, this year Mr. Ruth pridefully tells an entirely different tale….

  “What,” we asked, “shall we tell the people of New York about you?”

  “You tell these people in plain language,” Bambino replied forcefully, “that I have been working like a trooper all winter on my farm, that I never felt better in my baseball career, that I’m almost down to my playing weight right now, that I’ll try very hard to be adjudged the most valuable player in the American League again this year and that if I don’t sock si
xty home runs, I’ll buy Judge Landis a new white hat.”

  Stop the presses. Maybe the Babe said something about Landis’s white hat in his actual quote. Maybe he didn’t, but he did in the News. Hunt detailed how the Babe rented horses for everyone one morning, then slapped the butt of catcher Fred Hofmann’s horse, sending the steed into excited motion and the backup catcher into a puddle on the street. Another tale told how the Babe spent $3.75 shooting mechanical squirrels at an arcade. No detail was too small to be detailed. Hunt spent an entire article describing a nest of corns being scraped from the great man’s feet. The writer was skeptical about the results.

  February 15:

  Mr. Ruth’s purpose in coming to Hot Springs is to reduce. It cannot be denied that the pruning of calloused growths will result in a certain dimunation [sic] of weight, but we suspect the process will prove too slow and irksome to meet with the approbation either of Mr. Ruth himself or manager Miller Huggins. Continued paring from now until the opening of baseball season would not result in any substantial reduction, we are positive.

  The Babe in the baths was the best scene. He would arrive in a robe “the dimensions of an ordinary circus tent,” accompanied by an attendant. The attendant would draw a bath as hot as Ruth could stand. The Babe would swelter for a while, then be given a rubdown, then put in a steam contraption behind what looked like a shower curtain. The steam would continue until his face was bright red—“I still don’t think he’s done,” someone like pitcher Joe Bush would say, calling for “more steam”—and then he would be hurried to a room like a sauna, where his body was wrapped in white cloth and he would lie for half an hour to sweat all liquid from his body. The process would be finished by a cold shower.

  Except when he didn’t take the shower.

  Which was often.

  Ready for the chicken dinners and the daughters, he would skip the shower, hurry into his clothes, and go out the door, still sweaty, into the cold. He invariably caught the flu. He caught it this year on February 29, Leap Year Day, and came down with a 103-degree temperature. The doctor at first feared pneumonia, but soon backed away from that diagnosis. Rest and fluids for the next seven to ten days did the job. A fat cigar in the Bam’s fever-blistered lips was the first sign of a return to health. Solid food came next. The arrival of a new bat for the coming season indicated it was time to leave the Majestic, the less-than-sumptuous lodgings the Colonel favored for his men. The convalescent clearly had finished convalescing when he demonstrated the proper use of the bat.

  March 7:

  Mr. Ruth assumed a stance as though he had a count of three and two on him when the bases were full with two out in the bottom of the ninth with the Yankees three runs behind. He gripped the bludgeon firmly and swung it far back. The muscles of his arms and shoulders were tense. He swung viciously, his lips tightly compressed, his features distorted. The heavy piece cut downward, severed from a bedpost a large brass ball and propelled it devastatingly against the bureau mirror, which collapsed into a thousand flashing daggers. The brass ball ricocheted among the globes of the chandelier. A twinkle of cascading glass climaxed the Bambino’s superb act.

  “Well,” he shouted gleefully, “it works.”

  Two days later, he left for New Orleans. The flu had brought him down to 220, his desired weight.

  For Ruth, the 1924 season unfurled as a pleasant continuation of the previous year. He received his certificate—“his diploma,” he called it—as the 1923 MVP on May 14, Babe Ruth Day at the Stadium, and went from there, leading the American League in both home runs (46) and batting average (.378). For the Yankees, the day was a step down. They hoisted their first World Championship flag in center field on Ruth Day, then lost, 11–1, to the St. Louis Browns.

  They were trying to become the first team in AL history to win four consecutive pennants, but as the season progressed they never caught the right fire to move away from the pack. There always was the feeling, “We’ll turn it on when we need it.” The light switch, alas, never was pulled. The Washington Senators, already known as “first in peace, first in war, last in the American League,” were the surprise winners under youthful manager Bucky Harris with a big month of September. The Yankees finished two and a half games back in second.

  “We just sort of loafed and lazied along when we should have been doing our stuff,” Ruth admitted. “I’m sure we were a better team than Washington, but Harris’s Senators got playing together and his pitchers could be counted on nearly every time they went to the rubber and so they beat us.”

  The most interesting afternoon of the season came on June 13, Friday the 13th, in Detroit. The two clubs were on edge from a built-up pile of incidents, most recently a fight between Mike McNally and Tigers first baseman Lu Blue at the Stadium. All business was conducted at the far edges of baseball etiquette. The game was now in the top of the ninth at Navin Field, the Yanks with a 10–6 lead.

  Ruth had been brushed back twice by Tigers pitcher Bert Cole during the day, once in the ninth, and was not happy about the fact. Watching from the dugout, he now thought he saw his nemesis, player-manager Ty Cobb, give a signal from center field for Cole to drill Bob Meusel with the next pitch. He shouted out that information to Meusel, and when the next pitch hit Meusel in the back, the Yankees outfielder threw his bat toward Cole and immediately followed it.

  The benches emptied, Cobb ran straight in from center field, and Ruth, out of the dugout, ran straight for him. It was a confrontation straight from the fan imagination. What if the two best players in the game ever fought? Could the nastiness of Cobb overcome the size and strength of Ruth? Or vice versa? More words had been written about these two men than about any other baseball players who ever lived. Cobb was the personification of the wily, all-around player, the strategist and hustler, the schemer. Ruth was the slugger who had made all of that obsolete, taking away the headlines. The two men had never reached even a veneer of civility. Cobb hated everyone. Now they came straight at each other, both of them filled with anger and purpose.

  “They were like two football linemen, charging at each other,” Fred Lieb said. “They sort of collided. I can’t remember if they got any punches in. They both bounced back.”

  They now were separated by chaos. Meusel had missed his punch at Cole, and players had pulled them apart. Fred Haney of the Tigers was looking to fight anyone with a New York hat. The umpires were involved. Ruth, yelling at Cobb about beanballs, was dragged away by Huggins and one of the umpires and a couple of teammates. The business appeared done until Meusel and Haney started arguing near the Tigers dugout and the players came back together, and now the 18,000 fans joined the fray.

  Maybe 1,000 fans jumped onto the field. The police and security men tried to keep them back, and fans and police soon were fighting. Fans in the stands started ripping out the seats and throwing them onto the field. The Yankees were hastened back to their clubhouse.

  “The whole field now, viewed from the lofty press box, was a surging mass of bobbing straw hats and swinging fists,” the New York Times reported. “The bluecoats were getting the worst of it from some of the ringleaders of the rioting and they had to make menacing gestures with their clubs and threaten to pull their guns to hold onto a half dozen or so who they had put under arrest. As this scene of disorder was going on, Umpire Evans shouldered as near home plate as he could get and motioned that the game was called off.”

  The Yankees were declared 9–0 winners by forfeit. The next day, a crowd of 40,000 was so large—and Navin Field was missing so many seats—that people were allowed to stand on the field to watch. Policemen on horseback patrolled to make sure trouble did not erupt again. It did not. The Yankees won, 6–2. Ruth announced a $50 reward for anyone who would return his glove.

  The remembered off-field moment for Ruth came in Philadelphia. Actually it started in Delaware. The Du Ponts had invited Herb Pennock to a high-society lawn party and asked him to bring some ballplayers with him, especially that Babe Ruth chara
cter. The Yankees had an off-day in Philadelphia, and Pennock received permission and Ruth agreed to go.

  It was a pleasant affair, Ruth demonstrating how to hit with a stalk of celery, very nice, until the drinks began to add up and he spotted a waitress he greatly admired. As his admiration grew and his overtures grew louder, the whisper began that “we’ve got to get him outta here.” He didn’t want to go.

  A Philadelphia fight promoter came to the rescue. He convinced Ruth that there was a much better party with many more women at an establishment he knew on Broad Street back in town. Ruth argued to stay, but finally he and a number of Yankees went with the promoter. They arrived at the establishment at 1:00 A.M.

  At 5:00 A.M., the other Yankees decided it was time to head back to the hotel for at least a little sleep before meeting the A’s that afternoon. They found the Sultan of Swat in a big chair, a girl sitting on each knee. The girls were pouring champagne on his head and giving him a shampoo. Everybody was singing.

  “Anybody who doesn’t like this life is crazy,” Ruth said.

  That afternoon Fred Merkle of the A’s asked him before the game how he felt. Ruth said he felt fine. Merkle said, “You don’t look fine.” Ruth hit two home runs in a Yankees win. He felt fine.

  The public reformation started by the Jimmy Walker speech of 1922 obviously was long gone, but who noticed? The great man had discovered the virtues of bicarbonate of soda—“Give me a bi, kid,” he shouted to the clubhouse attendant a couple of times each day—and chewed the stuff, drank the stuff, coated his stomach, and kept moving. Third baseman Jumpin’ Joe Dugan, picked up in another deal with the Frazee Red Sox House of Discount during the 1923 season, was another good late-night runner. Whitey Witt was a runner. The Yankees were filled with runners.

  They called him “Bam,” or “the Big Fellow,” or “Jidge,” a contraction of George. They never called him “Babe.” That was the outside world’s name for him. This was the inside. This was the core of the fun.