The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  A crowd of 48,000, the largest in Fenway history, appeared for the final doubleheader in the series. The overflow was allowed on the field, standing behind ropes from right to the center-field flagpole. It was a total Ruth crowd, cheering every move he made. He doubled and singled in the first game, walked twice in the second, and then, when he grounded to first in what everyone knew was his final Fenway at-bat, received a standing ovation. The Babe was as touched by the moment as the people were.

  “They all stood up,” the Babe said. “Do you know that some of them cried when I left the field?

  “And if you wanna know the truth, I cried too.”

  He clearly had become convinced that this was his last full loop around the circuit. He had signed to take a trip to Japan with an all-star team put together by Connie Mack after the season ended. Claire and Julia would come along, and they would take the long way back, traveling through the Suez Canal and then through Europe. A strange thing had happened when he looked up his birth certificate to obtain a passport for the trip—his birthday was given as February 6, 1895, not the February 7, 1894, he always thought it was. But that didn’t matter. Even if he really was 39, he felt like he was 40. He felt like he was 100.

  He would take a trip around the world and see where he landed at the end. He knew it would not be right field.

  “I am getting too old for the game and know it,” he told one interviewer. “There’s nothing sadder than to see a fellow trotting around the diamond and hear his legs creaking for want of oil. If I kept playing much longer, I’d be tripping over my whiskers or putting on a pair of specs to see the ball.”

  He was asked what he considered his greatest moment in baseball. His answer was surprisingly introspective for a man not prone to self-analysis. He chose the first professional game he ever played with Jack Dunn’s Baltimore Orioles. That was the open door that he never even had known existed.

  “I was in a daze,” Ruth said. “Here I was being paid for doing what I wanted to do. I was to get $600, and that seemed an awful lot of money to a kid who never had any and whose one ambition was to own a bicycle.”

  His final appearance at Yankee Stadium—and it never was announced as that, though writers mentioned the strong possibility that he never would play for the Yankees again—was curiously quiet. It was a Monday afternoon, and a crowd of only 2,000 appeared, and the Babe played only an inning. He let a single drop in front of him in the top half of the inning, a ball that any average outfielder would have caught easily. He walked in the bottom half of the inning and received polite applause as he was replaced by pinch runner Myril Hoag and went to the dugout. It was an anticlimax after a career of crescendos. The Babe was not happy.

  “You would be sore, too,” Paul Gallico wrote in the Daily News, “if you were the most popular man in the country at one time and came to your funeral, or sat up and peeked out of the wagon and saw no more than three carriages trailing.”

  The Yankees played three games in Washington to finish the season. The Senators put together a much better good-bye production. The band from good old St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys played music. A large scroll bearing the signatures of President Roosevelt and all of his cabinet members and thousands of citizens was presented. A crowd of 15,000 spectators watched as the Home Run King went 0-for-3 on his way out the door. The Senators won, 5–3. The Yankees finished seven games behind the Tigers, managed by catcher Mickey Cochrane, who took the job that could have belonged to the Babe.

  The big man finished with only 22 home runs, his lowest total since he stopped pitching. He batted .288.

  Marshall Hunt, who had witnessed most of the Babe’s moments and tracked him so well through these 16 years in New York, did not see his man’s final game in a Yankees uniform. Hunt’s sportswriting career, which had followed the same arc as the Babe’s, ended at exactly the same time.

  As Ruth played his final game as a Yankee, the Giants were locked into a winner-take-all final series against the Cardinals in St. Louis for the National League pennant, and the Daily News chose to send him to St. Louis. A plan was involved. If the Gashouse Gang Cardinals of Pepper Martin and company beat out the Giants—and they did—Hunt was supposed to stay in St. Louis and cover the opening games of the World Series between the Cards and the Tigers.

  This did not happen. He disappeared.

  “Marshall Hunt was a very peculiar fellow,” John Drebinger of the Times said. “When I first knew him, when he was coming up with the News, about the same time I came to the Times, he was a terrible alcoholic. He was a brilliant writer, but the alcohol had him.”

  Following the Babe down the buffet line of the perpetual free lunch in the twenties, diving deep into the glamorous Manhattan hum, had its perils. How much fun is too much fun? The Babe’s pace was a record pace. Who else could handle that? Kenesaw Mountain Landis, of all people, had interceded somewhere during the fun, putting up some money to send Hunt away for the cure. It seemed to take.

  “Funny thing, when he wasn’t drinking, he never thought of drinking a drink,” Drebinger said. “I used to drink in front of him, and it never bothered him. I was kind of leery of doing it, but he was fine.”

  Hunt had moved back to beer by 1934, but had it under control in the last Yankees season of the Babe. He drank beer with Drebinger after the Giants games in St. Louis. Then he started to drink hard liquor, and when the Series arrived, he didn’t show up at the ballpark. Paul Gallico, not only the columnist but also the sports editor, was at the games.

  “Jesus Christ, where is he?” Gallico said. “Now I’ve got to write the lead for him.”

  Hunt eventually appeared, but was fired. It was a bottom-out moment. He left New York, went back to the state of Washington, took the cure again, and later became the editor-in-chief of the Daily Olympian in Olympia, Washington, for 22 years. He had an entire second life.

  The timing was oddly perfect. Babe Ruth was gone from the Yankees. Marshall Hunt was gone from the Daily News. The first life was done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  T HE 666-FOOT Empress of Japan departed Vancouver, Canada, on October, 20, 1934, for Yokohama, Japan. The Babe, Claire, and Julia were among the 1,137 passengers who waved good-bye from the decks of the four-year-old ocean liner as the twin turbine engines kicked into action and the first smoke appeared from the three funnels that were painted in the trademark yellow of the Canadian-Pacific Line.

  The beauty of ocean travel, appropriated forever by mystery novelists and then screenwriters, was that stories lurked behind each cabin door, plot lines to be spun across the high seas. The somewhat portly passenger from New York, New York, the one in the camel’s hair coat and the trademark cap, a member of the All-American All-Stars baseball team, was as interesting as any of the characters listed on the ship’s manifest.

  What next for the Babe? That was plot number one.

  He had left New York angry after finally stopping at Ruppert’s office at the brewery for a showdown with the Colonel and Ed Barrow. The meeting did not go well. He pushed the two men about replacing Joe McCarthy as manager of the Yankees. Could they say they were happy with McCarthy after two years out of first place? They said they could. Would Joe McCarthy manage the team again in 1935? Yes, he would.

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” the Babe said.

  He stomped from there to the World Series between the Cardinals and Tigers and, while “covering” the games for the Christy Walsh syndicate, he blurted out his dissatisfaction to sportswriter Joe Williams while waiting for a train in Detroit. Williams hurried the words into print. The Babe was done with the Yankees. He would not, under any circumstance, be back for 1935 as a player. He would be a manager or nothing. He would not sit on the Yankees’ bench, or anybody’s bench for that matter, only to pinch-hit. That was the story.

  The Babe was now a man without a country, available to anyone or no one, let other people decide. While the newspapers hummed with speculation about what would happen, he w
as off on this trip of a lifetime. The All-American All-Stars would stop in Honolulu for a game, then proceed to Japan, arriving on November 4 to play 17 games in a month in different cities around the country. A game in Shanghai and two games in Manila on December 9 and 10 would complete the schedule.

  The team would then sail back to the United States, but the Babe and Claire and Julia would head for Europe. This second half of the trip pretty much would be the first vacation of his life, a time to travel only for fun. Julia was included, the Babe said, because this was her present for graduating from high school. Dorothy was left at home in public school, not happy.

  “If that’s her graduation present,” Dorothy said, living with Claire’s mother and two brothers in the New York apartment, “then it was about her 15th graduation present in five years.”

  The status of Dorothy was given as a reason for another plot line on the ship: the Babe and Lou Gehrig, also a member of the All-American All-Stars, no longer talked to each other. Publicly cast for years as home run–hitting Bobbsey Twins, the two men never had been that close, but had shared a solid, friendly workplace relationship. They had traveled together, celebrated great moments together. Ruth had been a visitor many times at the home of Gehrig’s parents and was a favorite of Gehrig’s mom, to whom he once gave a Chihuahua pup which she immediately named Jidge in his honor. Now the men were quiet, hurt enemies.

  Claire always claimed that the problem came from idle conversation sometime in 1933 at one of those visits to Gehrig’s parents. Mom Gehrig supposedly looked at Dorothy, who was wearing shopworn hand-me-downs, and asked aloud why Julia, Claire’s natural daughter, always was dressed in the latest fashions. Why was Dorothy treated differently? The remark reached Claire, and she said she reacted badly. The feud stretched to the men.

  The truth of the split ran deeper. Gehrig finally had gotten married at the end of the 1933 season. His wife, Eleanor, was from Chicago. Like Claire, she was a worldly-wise, ambitious woman. Before she had known Gehrig, she had known the Babe. She met Gehrig, in fact, at one of those free-flowing sessions at the Babe’s suite in Chicago. To have known the Babe at that time was, well, to have known the Babe. He didn’t suffer many platonic relationships with women.

  “I’m not knocking Eleanor, but very few women went into Ruth’s room for sightseeing,” sportswriter Fred Lieb said, telling why Gehrig’s mother, whom he took to the wedding, did not like Eleanor. “And I don’t think Babe welcomed very many that he didn’t want to get in bed with. So that’s in the back of Mom’s mind all the time.”

  It also had to be in the back of Gehrig’s mind. When he found his bride, half drunk, talking with Ruth in Ruth’s stateroom on the Empress of Japan, the barrier between the two Yankees stars grew nearly insurmountable. He would not talk with Ruth. He also did not talk much with Eleanor for the rest of the way to Japan.

  “The Babe and Lou, after they took part in that Japanese trip, were never together anymore,” Fred Lieb said. “I think it started over the two ladies, Claire and Eleanor, and it was about five years before they spoke again to each other.”

  Another situation was whirring aboard the ship, a situation that the Babe did not know existed. He was being studied. This was his audition as a manager. Owner-manager Connie Mack, now almost 72 years old, was thinking about retiring as manager of the A’s. The effects of the Depression had landed heavily on baseball by now, and most of all upon the A’s. Forced as an owner to dismantle his once-great lineup to remain solvent, Mack needed a change of fortune at the box office. He still hung on to slugger Jimmie Foxx, and the possible crowd appeal of Ruth as manager (and as another bat in the lineup with Foxx) was enticing. Maybe owner Mack should fire manager Mack for the good of the operation.

  The old baseball man had made Ruth the manager of the All-American All-Stars for the trip. He wanted to see what happened. If all went well, he was prepared to make an offer.

  “Babe Ruth will manage the Philadelphia Athletics next year,” one premature report out of New York stated on October 25, 1933. “The glamorous Babe, the most colorful figure in baseball for upwards of a decade, whose career ended with the close of the 1934 season, will succeed Connie Mack.”

  The news, alas, was wrong. The audition ended quickly. The old baseball man watched Ruth and, more importantly, watched Claire’s domination of him around the ship. When she barked, the Babe jumped. The old baseball man would later tell friends, “If I gave the job to him, she would be managing the team in a month.” Mack went back to his original stated plan that he would manage his baseball team until he was 80. (Which he did.)

  The job was not open. The Babe was still a man without a country—except, of course, for Japan.

  The welcome was overwhelming in Tokyo, the site of the first four games. The Babe and the All-Stars drew the full Lindbergh treatment in a ticker-tape parade through the Gînza witnessed by a crowd ranging in estimates from 100,000 to half a million people. A cold-shoulder diplomatic testiness that had developed between Japan and the United States, primarily over naval and trade issues, was missing. There was only warmth for the Babe. Polite little boys would knock at the door to his hotel room and ask Claire if they could meet “the God of Baseball.”

  He was Babe Ruth, dammit. Yes, he was.

  “We had come expecting a welcome from you,” he said that night at a dinner at the Hibiya Amphitheater, “but we did not expect a welcome of such magnitude.”

  It was a triumphant tour. In the first game, the Americans battered their hosts, 17–1, at the huge Meiji Shrine Park before a crowd of 60,000 to set the tone. The Americans never lost a game, winning mostly by huge scores against players who never had played against this kind of competition. To the fans, it didn’t matter. They were excited to see the foreigners play. The fans in Tokyo mostly waited for the Babe or for anyone to belt a ball out of Meiji Shrine Park, since it never had been done. They cheered every well-hit ball, but, alas, the fences simply were too distant.

  The Babe didn’t hit a home run until the fifth game of the tour. Then he seemed to hit one every day. He finished with 13 home runs in the last 13 games in Japan. He played a lot of first base (Gehrig was in the outfield) and clowned with the fans. In one game he played seven different positions. In another game, the only real contest of the tour, his homer in the seventh off 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura was the only run either team scored. Eiji Sawamura became an instant Japanese legend.

  In Shanghai, China, the next stop, the Babe bopped three home runs in a 22–1 win over the Shanghai All-Stars on a freezing day. He reported that he wore a set of long johns and four shirts and still froze. In Manila, after a 7–3 win, he proclaimed that he had changed his mind and “will play baseball until I’m 100 years old.”

  The Japanese organizers presented four brass urns at the conclusion of the tour: for the highest batting average, for the longest hit, for driving in the most runs, and for the best pitcher. Ruth received three of them. Lefty Gomez won the one for pitching. Connie Mack said Ruth looked better on the tour than he had at any time during the previous two years. The crowds kept him excited, and he kept the crowds excited. It was an even trade despite the prevailing anti-American sentiment across the country. Baseball was a common language.

  “When we landed in Japan, the American residents seemed pretty blue,” Mack said. “The parley on the naval treaty was on, with America blocking Japan’s bid for parity. There was strong anti-American feeling throughout Japan. Things didn’t look good.

  “And then Babe smacked a home run, and all the ill feeling and underground war sentiment vanished like that.”

  There seemed to be little doubt that trouble was ahead for the two countries. All-American catcher Moe Berg of the Cleveland Indians took a lot of pictures on the trip. A graduate of both Princeton and the Sorbonne, conversant in ten languages, and able to hit a hanging curve, he had been recruited by the OSS as an American spy. His pictures cleverly showed military and industrial installations in the background and w
ould become valuable in future years. The Japanese became suspicious of his constant attention to his camera, searched his room, but could not find the film he had hidden. They did confiscate film from other members of the All-Stars, including the Babe, and when it was returned, black ink had been added to individual shots to blot out buildings the hosts did not wish the world to see.

  In another indication of the tensions, the Japanese promoter of the trip, newspaper publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, was stabbed nine weeks later. His attackers were sword-wielding members of the Secret Warlike Gods Society, a nationalist group upset that American baseball players had taken Japanese money out of the country. Japanese money should stay in Japan to help Japanese people. Shoriki, left for dead in an alley, recovered and lived to be 84 with a 16-inch scar on the left side of his bald head.

  The Empress of Japan, the boat that had carried all of this drama to the country, all these plot lines, eventually would become a plot line herself. Seven years later, her name would be changed. Very few international ships are allowed to change their names, and the process is costly and complicated; English prime minister Winston Churchill himself, however, would sign the order for this one. The Empress of Japan, now an Allied troopship, would become the Empress of Scotland.

  The Babe, Claire, and Julia left on a German liner, the MSS Tjinegara, from Manila on December 13, 1934, bound for Java, then Bali, then the Suez Canal, and then France and England. Lou Gehrig and Eleanor also were headed to Europe, but took a different boat with a different itinerary. (Moe Berg went from Japan to Moscow. Everybody except the OSS wondered why he’d do that.) The Ruths did not reach Paris until January 18, 1935. The Babe promptly declared that he had not been too impressed with Java and Bali.