The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  “For one thing,” he said. “I don’t like Bali and Java women. They are too chesty and too black. They’re billed as the most beautiful women in the world, but you see them walking down the street chewing that red tobacco.”

  He also was not impressed with Paris. The city was a harrowing look at anonymity. Nobody knew who he was. He could walk for an entire day, straight down the Champs Elysées, visit the old churches and museums, and never hear someone shout, “Hey, Babe.” He couldn’t remember a situation like that. They’d known who he was in Bali. How could they not know in Paris? A notice from the American consulate appeared in the Paris Herald-Tribune, his name in a list of people with unclaimed mail. Unclaimed mail? He received mail at home with no address, no name, only his picture drawn on the front.

  The French people, it seemed, knew nothing about baseball. Even the kids he visited at the American School, nice lads, didn’t know how to throw a ball. He found that incredibly sad. He advised them to get back to the United States in a hurry because the old guys were being pushed out of the picture and had to leave their shoes behind. There were “a lot of shoes to fill.”

  The next stop was St. Moritz, a trip down the bobsled run, a funny picture right there, a big man thump-thumping through the long, icy chute, yelling all the way. That was much better. He went skiing, an even funnier picture. Can a man ski while smoking a cigar? Also better. The final stop was London, the one city that measured up to his expectations. Jimmy Walker, the former mayor of New York, now deposed in scandal, apparently unmindful of the famous advice he once gave the Babe, was in London. Other friends were there. The Babe liked London.

  He made a well-publicized trip to a cricket grounds on the banks of the Thames. Fitted with leg pads and handed a cricket bat, Ruth went to work. Two fast bowlers bounced the red ball at him off the green grass, and the Babe started swinging. He had trouble with the cricket stance, switched to his baseball stance, and did fine. The red balls started flying around the grounds.

  “I wish I could have him a fortnight,” former Australian star Alan Fairfax said. “I could make one of the world’s greatest batsmen out of him.”

  The Babe vetoed that idea when he learned that the top cricket players earned about $40 a week. That didn’t seem like much for a great batsman. Did Col. Ruppert know about this? He did like the game. By the time he finished, his bat was destroyed, chunks of wood gone from both edges. He said he’d like to use a bat that fat in baseball. He’d be able to play for five more years.

  He also tried pitching—bowling—with less success. He was skeptical of all suggestions that some bowlers could throw a ball faster than Walter Johnson. He also was skeptical of suggestions that some batters could hit a ball 550 feet. He and the American reporter from the Associated Press debated with the hosts. It all was fun, a hoot.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said, only half serious, on February 13, 1935, when he bid good-bye to Jimmy Walker at Waterloo Station, where he and Claire and Julia caught a train for Southampton and the trip home. “We had the best time here of our whole trip.”

  On February 20, he stepped down the gangplank of the USS Manhattan as a band played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” to welcome him back to New York. He had been gone for over four months, traveled over 21,000 miles, seen places that were not even rumors when he was inside the walls of St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. It was a spectacular trip. How many people in the United States had traveled around the world in 1935? He was now one of the few.

  “It was great,” he told the reporters who waited for him at the dock. “But I wouldn’t do it again for $100,000.”

  His description of Paris, alas, was not preserved for future generations. Only the description of his description saw print.

  The day after the Babe’s return to New York, Paul Gallico reported in the Daily News, “I do not think the French care very much about baseball and, hence, probably were not much concerned about Le Gros Bebe when he was in Paris. All I know is that coming up the bay on the USS Manhattan somebody asked Ruth how he liked Paris and Babe answered in 10,000 well-chosen words and never repeated himself once. In short, he does not like Paris.” These 10,000 words never appeared in print.

  The world traveler was back, ready to find out what his future might be. He didn’t have to wait long. Seven days later he was a Boston Brave.

  The deal had a stench to it from the beginning. The Babe was the only pure heart in the entire proceeding. He had said he wanted to be a manager. Period. That was his goal. The other parties in the transaction took that desire and bent it to fit their needs. The Babe never knew what hit him.

  The around-the-world trip, wonderful as it was, had hurt him in the job market. The only offers that had surfaced for his services while he was abroad had been from the promoter of the House of David bearded barnstorming team and from Zack Miller, who ran a Western-themed circus called the “101 Ranch Show.” Zack was offering $75,000 for the Babe to ride an elephant every day for a year. He said Tom Mix, the cowboy, had made $110,000 on the same tour. The real jobs—the managerial jobs in baseball—had been filled without the Babe ever being placed in consideration.

  Enter Judge Emil Fuchs, owner of the Boston Braves.

  The good judge, 57 years old, was a glib and politically connected character who had started out as a millionaire from New York and then, in partnership with Christy Mathewson, bought the team in 1923 and steadily worked his way to the edge of bankruptcy. Matters were so bad that he had petitioned the owners from the National League at the last winter meeting for the right to bring dog racing to Braves Field on nights the team didn’t play. Denied that request, he needed some other drastic move to revive his team’s finances. The Babe was his new greyhound.

  He wanted the Babe to sell tickets to a Boston public that had packed Fenway Park, remember, at the Babe’s last appearance. He wanted the Babe to play, hit home runs, fill seats. That was all he wanted, an attraction. He wanted the Babe to ride the elephant. The question now was how to get him to do it.

  Working with Col. Ruppert, who more than ever wished to see the Babe gone from the Yankees without a lot of commotion and unfavorable press, Fuchs devised a plan while Babe was at sea that would help both Ruppert and himself. The Judge would offer a bunch of fine-sounding but hollow inducements that contained phrases like “vice president” and “stock options” and “opportunity to manage.” The Colonel would say that he couldn’t stand in the way of a man bettering himself. Voilà, everyone would be happy.

  The best part was that they would keep all of this a secret. Fuchs met with the Babe and Claire and laid out his offer as if it were new. The Babe called Ruppert and told him about the offer. The Colonel, acting like he was hearing about it for the first time, said the Babe should take it. Voilà.

  The press conference was held on February 26, 1935, at Ruppert’s office in the brewery. Ruppert, Fuchs, and the Babe, all in blue suits, stood in front of the gathering.

  The Judge talked of Ruth’s greatness as a player, his impact on American children, the great regard the people of New England had for him. He talked—but without specifics—of the great opportunities that awaited the Babe in Boston. The Colonel seemed overwhelmed at those opportunities.

  “It would have been unsportsmanlike of me if I didn’t grant Ruth’s request,” Col. Ruppert said with the straightest face. “Opportunity knocks but once at the door of any man, and I saw here the greatest opportunity Ruth ever had. It would not have been fair to stand in his way.”

  The specifics of the offer were these:

  A straight contract ($25,000) An executive position as vice president of the Braves A position as assistant manager of the team, serving as an aide to manager Bill McKechnie A share of the profits An option to purchase stock An opportunity to become a part owner

  Air whistled through every item except the line that gave the Babe $25,000 (another $10,000 salary cut, in fact). The Babe bought it, though, and the fans in Boston bought it. Whe
n he arrived at Back Bay station two days later to sign the contract, he was greeted by a madhouse. Police lines broke down. He was hustled through the crowd saying the word “jiminy” and holding his cap in the air so no one could steal it. At a dinner that night, attended by every political freeloader in the commonwealth, he was welcomed as a returned hero.

  The one touch of reality came from Charles C. Adams, a Braves vice president. The owner of the Boston Bruins hockey team and a developer of the Suffolk Downs racetrack, Adams had been installed in the Braves operation by the bank to protect its interests. He brought the big loophole in the Babe’s situation to the front.

  “No one is fit to give orders until he can take them himself,” Adams told the crowd. “Judging from Ruth’s past career, we can hardly consider him of managerial caliber now. I certainly hope he will merit promotion as manager of the Braves. He has much to learn within the next few months. He must prove himself to be a good soldier if he is not that already, and he must gain the loyalty of his teammates.”

  Two days later the Babe left for St. Petersburg and spring training. In an odd coincidence, the Braves trained six miles from where the Yankees trained. He soon would learn that his number 3 pinstriped uniform (numbers were first used in 1929 according to a player’s spot in the batting order) had been given to his replacement in right field, George Selkirk. Though his locker had not been reassigned, his name had been scraped off the top, and the space was now used to store firewood.

  A misguided blush of euphoria touched everything when the new vice president hit the field at Waterfront Park on March 5, 1935, wearing Hank Gowdy’s pants, Shanty Hogan’s socks, and a bright yellow sweatshirt because his own uniform hadn’t arrived. The vice president hit a home run in the first intrasquad scrimmage, and his uniform came, and the Braves soon beat the Yankees, back to back on two exhibition days, take that, and after only eight games had made more money and attracted more fans than they had in all of 1934’s spring schedule.

  Maybe this would work….

  On the road north, the Babe whacked his first homer in a game as a Brave, pounding a shot over the right-field fence in a 13–1 rout of Southern Georgia Teachers College in Savannah. In a particularly gratifying stop in Newark, he pounded out two more against the Yankees’ top farm club, the Newark Bears, before a crowd of 10,000, mostly Yankees fans who had come across the Hudson River to see the odd sight of their hero in different clothes. The second home run was a monster blast. With two strikes, the Babe stepped out of the batter’s box, tightened his belt, stepped back in, and unloaded a 500-footer over the right-field wall and onto the street, the longest home run in the history of, take that, Ruppert Stadium.

  Maybe…

  And on opening day, Braves Field, 25,000 people in the stands, including the governors of five of the six New England states, snow falling, a band playing “Jingle Bells,” he blasted a fifth-inning shot off Carl Hubbell of the Giants. He added a single, made a terrific diving catch of a sinking Hubbell line drive in left, drove in all the runs in the Braves’ 4–2 win.

  So, maybe…

  No.

  The realities of the situation soon landed. The Braves manager, Bill McKechnie, whom Ruth was supposed to replace eventually, had no plans of being replaced. Ruth was another player on his roster, not someone to consult about team matters. The vice presidency? The duties seemed to involve attending store openings, sitting behind a desk, and autographing 500 tickets for the first 500 patrons. The stock options? The team’s finances were in terrible shape. Stock options were worth nothing. Stories were abundant that Judge Fuchs was trying to sell the team.

  The baseball too had been a mirage. The Babe caught a cold and couldn’t shake it. He always had been troubled by colds, a big man, prone to sweat, no matter the weather, prone to colds. This was a doozy. He had played in only four games by the middle of May. He also had realized Fuchs was a fraud, realized he’d been duped. An even sadder realization was that he was an old man, overmatched now in the game he had played all of his life.

  “I’ve played my last inning of baseball,” he shouted, loud enough for the Braves Field fans to hear as he came back to the dugout after being struck out by the Cubs’ Lon Warneke on May 12. “I’m through.”

  The next day he asked to be put on the voluntarily retired list. Fuchs asked him to at least make the coming western trip. In every city, a Babe Ruth Day was planned. Tickets already had been sold. Maybe he should take the trip, see how he felt at the end. The Babe already knew how he felt, but agreed to take the trip. He went back to New York for a day with Claire, then proceeded to St. Louis.

  He told friends in New York that he was done, and his words made the papers, but he backed off in St. Louis. He said he never told anyone, “I’m all washed up.” He said, yes, if he couldn’t shake the cold, he would request to be put on the voluntarily retired list. The cold was what was killing him. His batting average was .155.

  “One result is that my eyes have been giving me a good deal of trouble,” he said. “They water considerably, and my failure to hit up to my past records undoubtedly is due to this ailment. If I can break this cold, I believe I can carry on without any trouble.”

  The Braves played three games in St. Louis, two in Chicago, where the Babe hit his third homer of the year, then hit Pittsburgh. This was where, during the third and final game of the series, the sun shone on his large head for one last day in the major leagues.

  Waite Hoyt, the old student of the Babe in the Murderers’ Row days, had done some traveling since then, playing for four different teams since 1929, landing finally in Pittsburgh with the Pirates. He was in the clubhouse on May 25 as starting pitcher Red Lucas tried to assemble a last-minute strategy to handle the famous Babe. The other pitchers told Lucas not to worry because the Babe was done. Lucas still worried.

  “Never mind him being through,” he said. “I’m the guy pitching to him, and he might start again.”

  The pitcher suddenly remembered Hoyt was in the room. Hoyt, the former Yankee, would know what to do.

  “The best way to pitch Ruth is to pitch behind him,” Hoyt said. “He has no weaknesses except deliberate walks. You have your choice—one base on four balls or four bases on one ball.”

  The other pitchers laughed. Ruth was done. Guy Bush, the Babe’s dugout antagonist from the 1932 World Series, also had landed with the Pirates. He said he had handled the Babe with sinkers in the Series. Red Lucas nodded. Sinkers.

  “Charlie Root threw him a sinker in the ’32 Series,” Hoyt warned. “The Babe hit it into the center-field bleachers.”

  Lucas, armed with all of this conflicting information, took the mound against the doddering old man. One pitch later, the doddering old man was circling the bases. The baseball was in the right-field stands. Hoyt, in the bullpen, nudged right-hander Cy Blanton.

  “Should have pitched behind him,” Hoyt said.

  Bush, of all people, replaced Lucas. Bush faced the Babe in the third and threw a sinker. The Babe promptly blasted it out of the park. Home run number two on the day. Bush then faced him again in the fifth, and the aging slugger ripped a single. Finally, in the seventh, Bush and the Babe squared off one last time. This time Bush worked more carefully. The sinker was gone from the arsenal. The Babe would receive all fastballs now.

  Bush hummed a strike past the doddering old man and was pleased with his change of strategy. Fastballs worked. He then tried to hum another one past. The pitch was about two inches farther over the plate than it was supposed to be. It was between the knees and at the waist. It was a perfect hitter’s pitch. The Babe smacked Guy Bush’s fastball straight into the air, high, like a pop-up, except it kept carrying, far, far, over the right-center-field fence at Forbes Field, bounced in the middle of the street, and rolled into Schenley Park. The estimated distance the ball traveled was well over 500 feet, the longest home run ever hit at Forbes Field.

  Hoyt nudged Blanton again.

  “It was the longest cockeyed bal
l I ever saw hit in my life,” Bush said years later.

  He said he was mad at himself, mad at Ruth when the ball went over the fence. He stopped being mad when he saw Ruth circle the bases.

  “The poor fellow, he’d gotten to where he could barely hobble along,” Bush said. “I ain’t mad no more then. So, when he rounds third base, I just look over at him and he kind of looked at me. I tipped my cap just to say, ‘I’ve seen everything now, Babe.’”

  This was homer number 714, the third of the day, the last of a career. The Pittsburgh crowd of 10,000, not knowing the exact implications of what it had seen but knowing this was pretty darn good, applauded as he left the game. He was Babe Ruth, dammit.

  That night everyone he knew urged him to quit. Claire urged, Christy Walsh urged, everyone urged. The Babe said he had to go to Cincinnati for another Babe Ruth Day, then to Philadelphia.

  He never had another major league hit. He struck out three times and pulled a muscle in the outfield on Babe Ruth Day in Cincinnati and had to leave the game. He pinch-hit the next day, then had the worst experience of his major league career in the third game. In the fifth inning, the Reds attacked him in left field. Every batter purposely hit the ball to left in a five-run inning. Ruth, unable to move, was hopeless as he tried to field the balls. When the inning ended, he went directly toward the clubhouse, not the dugout, as the fans jeered him. It was a pitiful sight. A small boy approached. Ruth picked up the boy, hugged him, then set him back down and kept walking.

  In Philadelphia, on Memorial Day, first game of a doubleheader, he batted in the first inning, grounded out softly to Dolph Camilli at first, went back to the dugout, took himself out of the game, and his major league career was finished, just like that. He had played 28 games with the Braves, with six homers, seven singles, and a .181 batting average.

  He didn’t know he was finished, but he was. The experiment officially was closed with great rancor back in Boston on June 2. The Babe had sat out the opening doubleheader at Braves Field in a series against the Giants, dressed in a suit on the bench with a towel wrapped around his neck. The game the next day was rained out, and June 2 was the finale.