The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  Members of the International Union of the United Brewery Workmen, who signed the ad, were preaching to the choir. When Prohibition took effect in 1920, Reds fans—and Herrmann himself—made do. On April 25, 1925, in the middle of that dry decade, the Cincinnati Royal Red Rooters—the team’s fan club, which had been following the Reds on the road since 1919—chartered several Pullman cars and took over the seventeenth floor of the Statler Hotel in St. Louis for the Reds’ series with the Cardinals.

  A hotel manager watched the Rooters unload their larder, like a line of ants, carrying a “travelling delicatessen” that included Triple S sausages, bologna, and crates of what were labeled as Cincinnati sauerkraut, in quantities rather excessive for a four-game series. When the feds raided the floor, they found thirteen empty beer kegs, two that were tapped, and eleven more full ones in a refrigerator. “I can’t believe it,” said one of the guests—Reds owner Garry Herrmann—when informed that the beer had an alcohol content of 3.5 to 4.5 percent, emphatically above the legal limit of zero. “It didn’t taste like that to me.” Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, Herrmann was shocked—shocked—to learn he wasn’t drinking near beer.

  But these weren’t uncommon phenomena. In 1926, Cubs star Hack Wilson was busted in a midnight raid on a Chicago “beer parlor” while attempting to egress out the back window of a North Side row house.

  Prohibition was just as hard on fans. “Since beer has departed they choose ginger ale, sarsaparilla, and near-beer,” the concessionaire Harry M. Stevens said in 1924. “It is but comparatively recently that they have gotten around to taking these soft drinks with any seriousness and in any great quantities.”

  A soda vendor, his basket of bottles set down on the step, is among the first responders to Babe Ruth when the Bambino was knocked out after running into a wall in Washington’s Griffith Stadium, July 6, 1924. (Library of Congress)

  Even those fans drew the line at lemonade, to Stevens’s dismay. As Stevens put it, “The fans do not hear the music of the ice clinking in the glass.”

  The thought of watching, owning, or playing for a major-league baseball team without the aid of alcoholic diversion was not an appealing one. Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees on January 5, 1920, eleven days before the start of Prohibition, though Prohibition didn’t prohibit Ruth from drinking anything at all. As with Herrmann at the Statler Hotel in St. Louis, beer kegs were delivered to Ruth’s suite at the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway.

  But the Volstead Act did have a material effect on many others in baseball. Boston didn’t just lose Ruth when Prohibition took effect: It lost the Third Base Saloon. Nuf Ced McGreevy donated the extensive collection of baseball photographs that festooned his establishment to the Boston Public Library, which turned Third Base, in 1923, into its Roxbury Crossing branch.

  Likewise bereft was Ruth’s boss, the brewery scion and Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, maker of Ruppert Knickerbocker Beer. On the very day that Ruppert bought Ruth for $100,000 from Boston owner Harry Frazee, he lost his appeal before the United States Supreme Court to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer with a reduced alcohol content of 2.75 percent.

  “Maybe he will forget his disappointment over the beer decision when he sees Babe hoist a few circuit drives over the fence at the Polo Grounds,” the Boston Globe speculated, and indeed that is exactly what got Ruppert through the 1920s.

  A four-term U.S. congressman and colonel in the New York National Guard, Ruppert purportedly came to baseball as a Giants fan, though the New York Times columnist Arthur Daley claimed he cared little for baseball or ballplayers. “There was a Prussian formality to Ruppert,” he wrote. “Everyone was on a last name basis.” Twice—in 1903 and 1912—Ruppert tried and failed to buy the Giants. Owner Charles Webb Murphy made an overture to sell Ruppert the Cubs in 1912, but the Colonel would later recall, “I wasn’t interested in any thing so far from Broadway.”

  And so in 1914, having only seen the Yankees play twice in person, he bought the team in partnership with the memorably named Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, for $425,000 apiece. Ruppert bought out Huston in 1922, and spent the rest of the decade erecting Yankee Stadium, building baseball’s greatest team, and producing near beer and other soft drinks at the massive Ruppert Brewery, a Wonka-like edifice occupying three blocks of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, between 90th and 92nd and Third Avenue, a short walk from his baronial apartment on Fifth Avenue.

  It almost goes without saying that near beer was not well received at American ballparks. In 1921, the second year of Prohibition, a writer at the Polo Grounds described a vendor “burdened with bottles of one-half of 1 percent, calling out: ‘Here’s your good, cold beer!’ Undoubtedly he is a son of the man who, when his hungry baby cried for sustenance in the night time, offered it a nice milk ticket.”

  Ball games without beer were a perversion. “No more are empty beer bottles flung carelessly over the baseball greensward by enthusiastic fans,” lamented a columnist in the Rochester (New York) Evening Journal. “They lent a gala aspect to opening days not found now.”

  He was not alone in his nostalgia for a simpler time, prior to Prohibition, when lethal projectiles lent a festive air to ball games. “The patrons of the ball yards, after standing to the bar for a few innings, drinking the rye and bourbon which were then offered for sale under official auspices, sometimes found themselves swept away on an irresistible tide of emotion, as the lady defendants say, and took to throwing all sorts of loose objects at the umpires and visiting athletes in critical moments,” wrote the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler at the time of repeal. “These objects were of great variety, being decanters, beer bottles, beer crocks, and the arms of chairs, as well as an occasional walking cane.”

  But Prohibition hardly prohibited the meteor shower of bottles that enlivened earlier games. For starters, the absence of ballpark beer was no barrier to drunkenness. “A slightly inebriated gentleman was out of the stand in the eighth and half way to the plate for a quiet chat with [umpire] Hank O’Day before a guard overtook him and led him to a place of refuge,” went a note in the New York Times, of an unremarkable game at the Polo Grounds in 1924. (O’Day, you may recall, was the umpire beaten by an angry mob on that scorching-hot day in St. Louis in 1901.)

  Many incidents weren’t nearly as innocuous as the one at the Polo Grounds. The 1920s saw an epidemic of bottle throwing at baseball games, and an empty soda bottle proved every bit as dangerous as an empty beer bottle. Less than three weeks after Ray Chapman was killed by a pitched baseball at the Polo Grounds, New York’s acting chief magistrate, J. E. McGeehan, asked for jail sentences for all bottle throwers at baseball games. “Bottle throwing, with the umpires and players as targets, has become almost a daily occurrence,” he said. “A man who throws a bottle might sentence a player to six months in the hospital. I recommend that we sentence any such person to six months in jail.”

  The Dodgers saw their share of airborne glass, and in 1922, after a water-bottle-throwing incident at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers promised to raise grandstand ticket prices—from $0.25 and $0.50 to $0.50 and $0.75—in an effort to keep out the bottle-throwing rabble.

  Later, in 1922, in the ninth inning of a crucial September game at St. Louis billed as the “Little World Series,” Yankees outfielder Whitey Witt was hit between the eyes by a pop bottle, which sliced his forehead to the bone. Mounted policemen moved quickly onto the field to keep the standing-room-only crowd of Browns fans at bay while Witt lay unconscious in left center field. He would eventually be carried off by teammates. The force of the blow had knocked the bottom from the bottle, which was saved as evidence by umpire Bill Evans—the same Bill Evans, no longer boyish, brained by a bottle at the same Sportsman’s Park in 1907.

  Despite the presence of thirty thousand potential witnesses, and rewards totaling $2,050, the perpetrator of the “Pop Bottle Mystery” wasn’t caught, and American League president Ban Johnson asked for anyone with leads to write to him. Several did
—including a man claiming to have seen a ten-year-old boy throw the bottle—but no tip panned out until a witness from Evansville, Indiana, named James P. Hon wrote to Johnson. In his letter, Hon said that Witt, while sprinting across the outfield in pursuit of a fly ball, had stepped on the neck of a bottle, which cartwheeled into his forehead. Hon declined the reward money and offered to sign an affidavit swearing to his veracity. Johnson was so grateful to Hon, a salesman, for neatly—if implausibly—“solving” this mystery that he sent him a check for $1,000, round-trip transportation to New York, and tickets to every game of the World Series between Ruppert’s Yankees and the team he had tried and failed to buy, the Giants.

  It was in his paneled office at the brewery—with the smell of hops rising from the floor below—that Ruppert negotiated his contracts with Ruth. Prohibition had robbed even these semiannual ceremonies of their alcoholic coda. Before the historic 1927 season, Ruth hitting sixty home runs on Murderers’ Row for the most celebrated team in baseball history, Ruppert signed the Babe to a three-year contract worth $70,000 a season, Ruth surpassing Ty Cobb as the game’s highest-paid player. As Ruth left hastily to visit his ailing wife in the hospital, Ruppert announced to the press throng waiting outside his office what few of them wanted to hear: “Boys, let’s go and refresh ourselves with a little near beer.”

  Perhaps because near beer was refreshing to no one, fans kept throwing soda bottles onto the field. On September 12, 1927, the New York Times described a Giants–Cubs game at Wrigley Field as “one-tenth baseball and nine-tenths bottle hurling.” After one disputed call, it took five minutes to gather up all the bottles thrown at umpires Charley Pfirman and Glenn Harper. Players from both teams formed a cordon around Pfirman, who’d been hit in the leg, as commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis watched impotently from his box seat.

  That year, Bill Evans recalled the early days of ballpark inebriation, beginning in 1906, when the twenty-two-year-old “Boy Umpire” became the youngest ump in major-league history, before or since. “At many of the parks there was a long bar that dispensed hard liquor and beer,” Evans wrote in a first-person newspaper account. “Venders peddled half pints of whiskey through the crowd then as pop is sold now, for the small sum of two bits. Mob scenes were almost daily occurrences, riots were frequently staged.”

  In a game in Cleveland in 1929, Indians manager Roger Peckinpaugh argued a call, which brought jeers and a sudden shower of bottles, one of which concussed umpire Emmett T. Ormsby, who was carried off the field. Peckinpaugh was suspended five games for inciting a near riot. The crowd was only placated when an Indians executive came onto the field and appealed for order. That executive was Bill Evans, much-concussed former umpire, who had hung up his mask the year before to become the Indians’ general manager.

  Anyone regularly attending baseball games could have seen the folly of Prohibition. By the winter of 1932, when Ruth hoped to renew his $75,000 contract with the Yankees, he told a reporter: “Give Colonel Jake Ruppert the right to make beer again and I’ll have no trouble signing any contract with the Yankees for 1933. The Colonel would be so tickled he’d never hear how much I was asking. He’d be such a soft touch for me if real beer ever comes back.”

  “If that’s done,” Ruppert said of Prohibition’s repeal, “my own brewery will be ready to produce the real stuff on a minute’s notice.” And so it was. When Prohibition ended five days before Opening Day of 1933—and Yankee Stadium received a license that June to sell beer—the House That Ruth Built became the single biggest market for Ruppert’s product, and his Yankees de facto ambassadors for the brand. A promotional photograph from the 1930s shows Ruppert—besuited and bow-tied, hat literally in hand—posing with Yankees stars Tony Lazzeri, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Crosetti in the bright sunshine of Yankee Stadium, above the legend KNICKERBOCKER—NEW YORK’S FAMOUS BEER. With his white mustache, dapper style, and bottomless fortune, Ruppert resembled Rich Uncle Pennybags, cartoon mascot for the Monopoly board game that was initially rejected by Parker Brothers that year.

  Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert with manager Joe McCarthy and players Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, and Tony Lazzeri, in the visitors’ clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, after winning the 1937 World Series. Gehrig and Lazzeri are holding Knickerbocker beer bottles. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Beer was back, in baseball as in bars, and the writer who pined a decade earlier for empty beer bottles littering the greensward didn’t have to wait long until breweriana was again taking flight in American ballparks. When the Yankees played at Comiskey Park in Chicago on Saturday, July 25, 1936, plate umpire Charlie Johnston was showered with beer tins and bottles. It took seven policemen to escort him off the field after the Yankees’ 5–3 win. The next day, in the second half of a doubleheader—during a full day shift of drinking by White Sox fans—home plate umpire Bill Summers was pelted with beer cans, oranges, lemons, and seat cushions. In the eighth inning, as Charlie Johnston looked on from first base, Summers was hit in the groin by a bottle thrown from the upper grandstand. The force of the blow knocked him to the ground, as you might imagine. He didn’t return to the game. Witnessing this, not for the first time, from his box seat, Commissioner Landis ordered an announcement: His office would give a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bottle thrower.

  Of course, there was a simpler, less expensive solution to the menace, as the Sporting News illustrated in an editorial cartoon in 1935. In one panel, a player lies on the diamond holding his head, an empty bottle next to him. “A guy that would do that should be strung up,” says a fan in a fedora, to which another replies, “Nobody but a rat would do it.” In the cartoon’s other panel, a white-capped soda vendor decants a bottle into a paper cup, beneath the headline POUR OUT [THE] POP BOTTLE PERIL!

  To this day, of course, caps are removed from plastic soda and beer bottles at the point of sale, or the beer is decanted into a plastic cup, so that the fan who purchases a cold one is not simultaneously armed with alcohol and weaponry. Though we can’t any longer produce it by unscrewing tops ourselves, that little wisp of water vapor that escapes the beer bottle when the cap is removed—like gun smoke curling from a Colt .45, or a ghost levitating from a cartoon corpse—is quietly mesmeric to many of us who grew up working in ballparks.

  By the end of the decade, beer and baseball were happily remarried. In 1939, when the bachelor Ruppert died of phlebitis at age seventy-one, in his twelve-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, alone but for a staff of servants, his fortune was estimated at $100 million. In life, he was both Croesus and colossus, and now his casket was borne by honorary pallbearers from the twinned worlds of baseball (Ruth, Gehrig, Wagner, McCarthy) and beer (including Rudolph Schaefer, president of the Schaefer Brewing Company, a frequent sports sponsor whose most famous advertising slogan—“The One Beer To Have When You’re Having More Than One”—was a jocular invitation to binge drinking).

  In nationwide obituaries, the Colonel was remembered for his menagerie of monkeys—he kept a score of capuchins on his country estate—and stable of horses. He was also recalled as a lifelong bachelor and collector of antiquities. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the New York Times obituary stressed his many manly pursuits, exemplified by baseball and beer and his unmistakable taste in interior decor. “He was distinctly of the masculine type, and this was reflected in his business office, which was paneled in dark wood,” it read, before delivering the coup de grâce: “There were no curtains.”

  When those first reports of Ruppert’s death began to circulate, police were dispatched to guard the block on which he lived. Twenty-five officers were required to control a public clamoring to pay its respects, for the Colonel had become an unlikely man of the people, a millionaire who gave the masses what they wanted: beer and baseball, direct descendants of bread and circuses.

  From St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Ruppert’s body was driven twenty-eight miles north, to Kensico Cemetery in suburban Valhalla, where he was interred in the Ruppert
family vault—a great, columned mausoleum. There he rides out eternity in the company of Lou and Eleanor Gehrig, not to mention Harry Frazee, the man who sold him Babe Ruth. Ruth himself is almost next door, in the adjacent Gate of Heaven Cemetery, where visitors still decorate his headstone with baseballs, beer cans, and bottle caps.

  It wasn’t until 1939, the year of Ruppert’s death, that beer and baseball found connubial bliss on the radio. That season, the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants first broadcast their ball games and that medium entered its golden age. And it was golden: Beer quickly became baseball’s single biggest sponsor and was ubiquitous. Dizzy Dean was hired to call all home St. Louis Browns and Cardinals games for KWK in 1941, and to shill for Griesedieck beer on the air. When English teachers in Missouri publicly criticized his appalling grammar—base stealers “slud” into second—Dean was unmoved. “This beer outfit that hired me to learn the people baseball thinks I can talk all right,” he said.

  So powerfully patriotic was the combination of baseball and beer that the Columbia Brewing Company, St. Louis brewers of Alpen Brau, ran ads in the 1942 World Series program in which the redbird from the Cardinals uniform front—the one inspired by Allie May Schmidt—perched menacingly on Hitler’s shoulder. It looked alarmingly like Poe’s raven on the bust of Pallas.

  “There’s only one flag that you and your team mates are ever going to run up in the game you started,” the Cardinals mascot tells the Führer. “It’s the white flag of surrender.”

  Like Dean in St. Louis, doing both the Browns and Cards, Jim Britt in Boston called all Red Sox and Braves home games, urging Narragansett beer on his listeners. In the Bronx, Mel Allen bowed to his beer sponsor every time he called a Yankees home run a “Ballantine blast.” When a Cincinnati Red homered onto the sundeck at Crosley Field, Waite Hoyt would say, “He hit it into Burgerville,” a reference to Burger Beer, “The Beer That Brings You Baseball.” These announcers became so synonymous with their sponsors that many had to be replaced when a team switched breweries.