The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The Yankees and the writers who followed them would travel in two, sometimes three Pullman cars attached to the end of a regularly scheduled train. They would rattle along, take their meals in the dining car with the rest of the travelers, look out the windows, talk, play cards, talk, sleep, talk some more for as much as an entire 24-hour day. The trip to St. Louis would start around five o’clock in the afternoon in New York, with dinner at sunset while crossing the Hudson River, and finish at five o’clock in the afternoon the next day on the banks of the Mississippi.

  There was time to get to know each other.

  Marshall Hunt, say, would be sitting in the dining car. Earle Combs would come along for lunch.

  “Anyone sitting here?”

  “No, sit down, Earle.”

  America would slide past the window. Hunt always would look at the men working in the fields, red necks bright in the sun, and feel comfortable and secure with his newspaper and his cup of coffee on the white linen tablecloth. Wouldn’t you rather be here than there? America would open up conversation.

  “Now, look at that,” Earle Combs might say. “There’s a very prosperous farm, and that farmer’s out there working with a mismatched team. He can do better than that. We do better than that in Kentucky.”

  More farms. More.

  “That’s good ground, though,” Earle Combs might say. “Much better than Kentucky. Too many hills in Kentucky. Can’t get enough bushels from an acre of land.”

  “Did you farm, Earle?”

  “Barefooted. I pushed one of those plows.”

  “I suppose you’re pretty lucky, Earle.”

  “Luck? I’d like to think I had something to do with it.”

  The hotels at the ends of the trips were filled with businessmen, with well-to-do families on vacation, with bellboys and room service and maids to make your bed with clean linens every day. The Buckminster in Boston. The Aldine in Philadelphia. The Raleigh in Washington. The Book Cadillac in Detroit. The Hollenden House in Cleveland. The Cooper-Carleton in Chicago. Now there was a place, the Cooper-Carleton over on Lake Shore Drive, because management didn’t want the players too close to the Loop and the after-dark temptations. The Cooper-Carlstein. That’s what the players called it. Filled with Jewish people. Kosher kitchen. Part of the education.

  In St. Louis, the hotel was the Chase, across from Forest Park. On hot nights, after that 24-hour trip, players would just sit out on the lawn. Talk baseball. Some other subjects might intrude, but baseball was 90 percent of a night’s conversation. If the heat was too much, some of the players and some of the writers would take their blankets to the lawn and sleep under the stars.

  With the 3:30 starting time and most games completed in two hours or less, both the nights and the mornings were open for exploration. A man could think, walk, read, watch a movie, name his poison. All choices were laid in front of him.

  “They had these black-and-tan clubs in Chicago,” Marshall Hunt said. “These great Negro tap dancers. Great singers. Great food. We were there one night, a guy pulled a gun and started shooting at another guy. Ford Frick was really amazed by it all. He was kind of a rube. He kept saying, ‘What if we got hit?’ I told him, ‘They weren’t shooting at you.’ I don’t think he ever got over it.”

  Magic.

  “Here’s one that might surprise you,” Hunt said. “I took Babe to an art gallery one time, some show that was going on. I remember he came out and said, ‘Goddamn it. How do those bastards do it?’ Something he saw had got to him, touched him. You wouldn’t think that.”

  The Babe traveled a bit differently from the rest of the players. He was the only one with a drawing room on the train. The rest of the players were in berths, uppers and lowers designated by seniority. The manager and the traveling secretary each had a drawing room. The two coaches shared one. The Babe had one to himself.

  It was a move of necessity more than privilege. Out in the cars, he was a lure for travelers seeking an autograph, a moment. He could play his portable Victrola in the drawing room. He could play his ukelele. (Mercifully, he left his saxophone home most times.) He could entertain in his satin smoking jacket and slippers.

  That didn’t mean he stayed away from the noise in the rest of the Yankees’ Pullman car. He would play cards, and he played a lot of bridge with Gehrig as his partner. They were predictable partners who played the way they lived, Gehrig reserved, Ruth flamboyant. He would nip into a quart of Seagram’s 7, become more flamboyant as the nips and the game progressed, bid on anything. Gehrig would become disgusted. Everett Scott, when he played with the Yankees, had made good money off the Babe in poker. Anyone who knew cards and had time would make good money off the Babe. He needed action and more action, pushing the bets. Money streamed from the Babe.

  “One night in Cleveland I invited Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, and Mark Koenig to dinner,” Joe Dugan said. “We used to exchange dinners, you know. I was broke as usual, though, and needed to borrow some money. Ruth was standing in the lobby of the Hollenden House. I went by him—he had the big polo coat on—and I said, ‘Jidge, your pal is empty.’ He reached in, handed me a bill. Just handed it to me, you see.”

  The group had dinner. Dugan grabbed the check. He handed the waiter Ruth’s bill. The waiter asked Dugan if he was a wise guy. Dugan said he wasn’t, why ask? The waiter said a restaurant of this size never could cash a $500 bill. They had to wake up the owner to come down and cash the bill.

  “Anyway, payday, I went up to Ruth and counted out five hundred-dollar bills,” Dugan said. “‘What’s this for?’ Ruth says. I said, ‘Remember that night in Cleveland you gave me a bill?’ ‘Oh, I thought I lost it. Thanks, kid.’”

  Ruth had become the most experienced traveler on the team. Adding the barnstorming trips and the vaudeville trips and any number of other trips to the Yankees’ trips, he easily was on the road for more than half the year. He had connections everywhere. In every city, he would be met by a woman, by a man, by somebody. Who were these people? Even in the small cities in the South, places the Yankees never had visited, somebody would be waiting. How had it been arranged? He was not a planner, not someone to make a call. Did the people call him?

  Mark Roth, the traveling secretary, always thought that railroad telegraphers were involved, that Ruth had the best communications network in the country. He knew where to find a bootlegger. He knew where to find a woman, a bunch of women. The fact that he left large quantities of money behind him did not hurt. These people liked to play with him for the same reason the cardplayers liked to play with him.

  “Whenever we left St. Louis we left out of what they call Brandon Avenue, this suburban station,” Waite Hoyt said. “It wasn’t even a station, it was a crossing, really, and we’d wait there for the train to come from downtown. Ruth knew some people, and he always, when we left like that, he’d have a few gallons of home brew delivered to the train plus about 15 or 20 racks of spare ribs.

  “We’d get on the train, and since we had our own car and nobody used the ladies’ room, Ruth would take over the ladies’ room and set up shop and for 50 cents you could have all the beer and all the spare ribs you could eat.”

  The Babe would have the suite at the hotel, another difference, this one at his own expense, the bathtub filled with beer and the room filled with people. Or he would be gone, off by himself to see the local people, whoever they were. The House of Good Shepard! There were few contemplative moments. Maybe none. Except in the morning.

  “Ruth and Joe Dugan always were making bets,” Waite Hoyt said. “I roomed with Dugan, and Ruth would come down in the morning, and they’d call these two friends back in New York, handicappers, Claude Kyle and Maddie Glennin. It’s strange I remember those names. They’d call up these handicappers from the road, ask who they liked, and make their bets, and they were ahead of the game. Except when they went home, they’d forget to call Claude Kyle and Maddie Glennin. And then they wouldn’t do well.

  “I wasn’t a bettor,
and I used to hate when they made bets from the room.”

  The eating and drinking stories sometimes were overstated with the Babe—he’d usually have a normal breakfast, bacon and eggs, a large orange juice, and he wasn’t drinking alcohol every hour of every day—but he had his moments. John Drebinger, who traveled sometimes for the Times, once saw him chug a Coca-Cola bottle filled with whiskey in one gulp. Marshall Hunt saw him do some damage to some hot dogs.

  “We’d just gotten on the train, everybody had eaten,” Hunt said. “The Babe gave the porter $5 to buy as many hot dogs as he could. The porter came back with this basket filled with hot dogs. Babe offered them around, but nobody was hungry. He stacked the hotdogs on the windowsill of the train. He was just sitting there, watching a card game, eating hot dogs. Pretty soon they were all gone. I bet he ate 18 hot dogs. All by himself.”

  Richards Vidmer, another Times writer, returned pretty late to his room one night. He found a stack of messages from the Babe, asking him to come to room 436 as soon as possible. Vidmer was worried. He called room 436.

  “Where the hell have you been?” the Babe asked.

  “I’ve been out,” Vidmer replied.

  “Come on up. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Vidmer went to room 436. The Babe poured him a drink. Vidmer asked what the heck this was all about. He was tired.

  “Well, Goddamn it, last night we killed a bottle of scotch between us and I had two home runs today,” the Babe said. “I don’t want to break the spell.”

  There were no clocks for the Home Run King on the road. The rules for everyone else simply did not apply. He was part of the Yankees’ traveling show—nailing Lazzeri’s shoes to the locker-room floor, making impossible bids to drive Gehrig crazy, selling spare ribs from the ladies’ room—but he also had his own traveling show, fueled by a different level of money and fame.

  “I must have that thing that Elinor Glyn calls ‘it’ out in Hollywood,” the Babe said one day.

  The description of “it,” as written by Ms. Glyn, author of steamy contemporary love stories, was a strong, overriding sexuality, visible to anyone who watches the owner pass. Ms. Glyn said actress Clara Bow, “the ‘it’ girl,” was the only one who had “it” in all of Hollywood. Maybe the Babe was the only one who had “it” in baseball. Maybe not. He certainly wanted to find out.

  “Nobody with the Yankee club seems to know much about the Babe’s unofficial activities,” Westbrook Pegler wrote. “He runs alone and where he runs or what he does are matters of no interest whatsoever so long as he shows up at the yard no later than 1:30 P.M.—and hits home runs.”

  For the first four months of the 1928 season, the road trips of the Yankees were a time of joy and wonder. As the first of what would be many teams compared to the 1927 Yankees, this team looked even better. It had opened up an eleven-and-a-half-game lead on the second-place Philadelphia Athletics by July 24 and appeared to be a cinch for another runaway pennant. The Babe, as the first of many hitters to be compared to the Home Run King of 1927, also looked better. On July 24, he hit a rocket to a previously unexplored section of the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park for his 40th home run of the season. He was 28 games and 10 home runs ahead of his pace to 60 in 1927. The Times predicted he would break his record “barring sickness, injury and the other misfortunes to which human flesh is heir.”

  Question: is a slump a misfortune to which human flesh is heir? That was what happened next.

  The Babe slumped. The Yankees slumped. The A’s, a mixture of young talent added to Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, who were playing out their last seasons, started rolling. The Yanks started falling. The two teams continued in their opposite directions until they collided at the Stadium on September 9 in a doubleheader. The A’s, one day earlier, finally had taken a half-game lead for first.

  Interest in the games was overwhelming. The Yankees had renovated the park prior to the season, expanding capacity to 72,000, and the doubleheader brought a further expansion. The largest crowd in baseball history, 85,265, stuffed the Stadium, people sitting, standing, crawling everywhere. Policemen worked two blocks away to force crowds off fire escapes on apartment houses for fear the walls would collapse. Traffic jams and parking were problems, the interest was so great.

  In the midst of all this attention, the old 1927-style Yankees returned. They won the first game, 5–0, on a shutout by stellar rookie George Pipgras. They won the second, 7–3, on an eighth-inning grand slam by Bob Meusel. They now led by a game and a half, all work done in one day.

  “We broke their hearts today,” the Babe said. “And we gave that greatest crowd in baseball history some real baseball.”

  His 49th homer the next day capped a 5–3 win that put the Yanks ahead by two and a half, a lead the A’s never could overcome. The pennant wasn’t clinched until two and a half weeks later in Detroit. Two tales about Ruth grew out of that series. Maybe one or even both were true.

  The first was that coming into the series he still was in his slump. He had tried everything to start hitting again, even abstinence from liquor as a final resort. Nothing had worked. Finally, first night in Detroit, he decided the opposite of abstinence was necessary. He chased the night, came out the next day in the sunshine at Navin Field, and hit two home runs in a doubleheader sweep of the Tigers that put the Yankees on the verge of clinching.

  The next day, as they clinched with an 11–6 win, the second tale evolved. Ruth rented four or five adjoining rooms in the Book Cadillac, bought a piano because there was none available at the hotel, and threw a victory party. He was said to have stood on a chair sometime in the proceedings and announced, “Any girl who doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.” True? Not true?

  Circumstantial evidence would suggest that something happened. The next day the defending world champions lost, 19–10, to the Tigers. Ruth, Gehrig, and Meusel were the only regulars in the lineup. Hangovers perhaps filled the bench.

  The St. Louis Cardinals somehow were five-to-three favorites over this merry band of travelers in the World Series. The leagues, remember, were virtually autonomous universes, one man’s Poland against another man’s Lithuania, and the only time teams seriously played against each other was in the World Series. The last time the Yankees had seen the Cards was in 1926, and remember, the Cards had prevailed in that final game when the Babe tried to steal second. The prognosticators fixed on that picture.

  The Yankees also had some injury problems. Herb Pennock’s arm was hurt, and he could not pitch. Earle Combs had injured a wrist in batting practice and would not play. Tony Lazzeri had a shoulder that needed an operation, and every throw pained him. Mark Koenig had an injured foot. Lou Gehrig had been beaned in the final game of the season, and there was doubt about his condition. Even the Babe had been moving slowly on a gimpy knee for the last four weeks of the season.

  The injuries were a final factor.

  “To me, the St. Louis Cardinals should make short work of the New York Yankees,” Walter Johnson, the now-retired pitching great, predicted through his ghost. “The Yankees don’t look good. They haven’t looked good for a while.”

  (Ghost note of the Series: Eddie Bennett, the Yankees’ hunchbacked batboy-mascot, had a ghost. Eddie and his ghost picked the Yankees.)

  The Series opened at the Stadium. The Colonel and Ed Barrow were hoping for some more mammoth crowds like the one for the doubleheader against the A’s, but that didn’t materialize. Interest in these games was mild at the box office, perhaps because this was the third Series in a row at the Stadium. Neither of the first two games drew more than 65,000.

  In the first one, Waite Hoyt tidily shut down the visitors, 3–1, on a three-hitter. In the second game, Alexander the Great, the nemesis of 1926, finally received the full Murderers’ Row treatment as the Murderers pounded out a 9–3 win. Gehrig hit a giant home run, and Ruth was all over the place, and young rookie George Pipgras pitched well enough to keep the Cardinals quiet.

  The games now
shifted to St. Louis. In 1926 one of the features of the Series had been a race between the trains carrying the two teams from site to site. The Cardinals’ Special, riding the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 1,051 miles, covered the distance in 21 hours and 20 minutes, the fastest time ever recorded. The train was two hours and 40 minutes faster than a normal St. Louis–to–New York run. The Yankees, handicapped by taking a longer route on the New York Central, finished second. Alas, there was no rematch here. The two teams whisked across the country in the normal 24 hours.

  In the third game, at Sportsman’s Park, Gehrig hit two homers, and Tom Zachary, the man who surrendered number 60, now a Yankee, pitched a 7–3 win. Ruth broke the game open with a thumping slide into home in the sixth inning, causing catcher Jimmy Wilson to drop the ball. Huggins cautioned his players against “making whoopee” with a 3–0 series lead, and they had an extra rainout day to follow his advice. Then, in the fourth game, fill in your own cliché for excellence, the Prince of Pounders took control. He had the best World Series game of his career.

  “If there is any lingering doubt, if anywhere in this broad land there were misguided souls who believed that Babe Ruth was not the greatest living ballplayer, they should have seen him today,” James Harrison said in the Times. “They should have seen him, hooted and hissed, come to the plate three times, twice against Wee Willie Sherdel and once against the great Pete Alexander, and send three mighty drives whistling over that right field pavilion.”

  Three home runs were only the beginning. This was one of those games in which he was a protagonist in some hearty drama, involved in whatever happened. He was in left field, Meusel in the sun in right field, and was involved in a constant dialogue with the fans behind him. They kept telling him how useless he was; he kept telling them he was going to hit two home runs, just for spite. He lost a ball in the sun for an error, which gave the fans some ammunition, then hit the two home runs for his own ammunition. Then he hit the third home run, to match his feat in 1926 as the only man ever to hit three homers in one Series game.