The Original Curse

by Sean Deveney; Ken Rosenthal

  So Ruth left. Took off his uniform. Did not get on the train to Philadelphia. Some of the reporters showed up with word that Ruth was in Baltimore and had signed up with the Chester shipyard team. Harry Frazee went nuts, said he would sue the shipyard. Barrow seethed.

  Hooper saw the team was in trouble. Without Ruth, the Red Sox ran out a team of pikers against Connie Mack that afternoon, July 3, and showed no pep. The lineup was barely recognizable. Heinie Wagner at second. One of the new fellows, Jack Stansbury, in center. Two other bushers named Bluhm and Barbare, with the rag-armed Bader on the slab. It wasn’t a big-league team. They made errors, they got just four hits, they lost, 6–0, and it was obvious that Barrow needed Babe more than Babe needed Barrow.

  The Strategy Board was working on the movements of General Pershing, but they really wanted word on the movements of Private Ruth. Especially Harry. He, however, was trying not to think about that just now. The war was more important, he told himself. “What else?” Hooper asked.

  “Baker sent out word that there are a million American soldiers in Europe now,” Mayer said, whistling. “That’s some reserves. They’re talking about a counterattack.”

  Harry sat back and looked at the map, envisioned the slow progress of Allied gains, imagined the angles and lines he’d draw as the front was pushed back toward the Hindenburg Line. Back and forth. Germany and the Allies. Ruth and Barrow. Offensives, fronts, angles, lines, maps, fly balls. It was all the same. Harry nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A counteroffensive—that would be a good strategy.”

  When the Red Sox went north from Washington to Philadelphia on the evening of July 2, Babe Ruth went south, to his father’s house in Baltimore. He hadn’t really wanted to quit, and though he did wire the shipyard team at Chester, he wanted to be with the Red Sox. But he’d lost patience with Barrow. Ruth contacted Wagner—who had served as Ruth’s quasi-chaperone early in his career—and told him so. Wagner took a late train to Baltimore, talking the wayward star into rejoining the team in Philadelphia. Wagner and Ruth arrived at the Aldine after 2:00 A.M. on July 4.10 The Red Sox had a doubleheader that day, and Ruth, happy to be back, showed up at Shibe Park in the morning. But Barrow continued the iron-fist act and refused to speak to him. He kept Ruth on the bench for the entire first game, letting the slugger stew through a long, 11–9 Red Sox victory.

  Déjà vu. Ruth “didn’t seem highly pleased at not being received with open arms” and again took off his uniform between games, again saying he was leaving.11 Hooper and some teammates talked Ruth back into the park before the second game and went to Barrow, persuading him to come to some kind of détente. Barrow put Ruth back in the lineup, in center field. From the Globe: “So far as is known, Ruth is resigned to his hard fate with the Boston Red Sox and Manager Barrow. It is not believed that he had any serious intention of jumping the team. His fellow players strongly resent his actions. They think he should remain loyal to the Sox.”12

  July 4 was the bottom for the Red Sox. Not only was the Ruth-Barrow situation tugging at the team, but Cleveland moved into first place. Boston lost third baseman Fred Thomas, who had been called to war two days earlier, and now the Red Sox were getting very thin very fast. Barrow had begun purchasing minor-leaguers to bolster his roster—utility man Jack Stansbury, outfielder Walter Barbare, pitcher Vince Molyneaux, pinch hitter Red Bluhm, Cuban infielder Eusebio Gonzalez (several teams signed Cubans, because they were not enemy aliens and not subject to the draft), infielder Frank Truesdale, and later infielder George Cochran and veteran pitcher Jean Dubuc. None helped. Thomas was no star at third base, but he was adequate, far better than any in Barrow’s new crop. (Thomas was rejected by the army because of diabetes, but, afraid of being labeled a draft dodger,13 he enlisted in the navy, which did not require a physical exam.)

  Nothing was going right. Pitcher Carl Mays was moved into Class 1A and was harangued daily by agents of the shipyard league. Shortstop Everett Scott, it appeared, would not win his exemption appeal and would remain in Class 1A too. Stuffy McInnis struggled and missed time after an “attack of boils.”14 Barrow bought the rights of outfielder Hughey High—who had left the Yankees to join the shipyards—hoping to play High in left field and move Ruth back to the mound. High consented to join the Sox but failed to show up in Philadelphia. When contacted by Barrow, High said, “My wife won’t let me.” Even spousal duty was conspiring against the Red Sox.15

  But the outlook brightened after July 4. Ruth, Barrow, and Frazee had a meeting, and Frazee agreed to give Ruth a bonus of $1,000 for pulling double duty on the mound and in the field. Ruth agreed to pitch when Barrow needed him—and Barrow wasted no time, calling on Ruth to pitch July 5. For the first time in over a month, Ruth was in the box, finishing the forgettable trip by pitching the Red Sox to a 4–3 win. Back in Boston and facing second-place Cleveland, Ruth had the day off, but Barrow could not resist pinch-hitting him with two men on base and the Red Sox down, 4–2, in the sixth. Ruth smacked a triple and scored on an errant throw. That gave Boston a 5–4 win and put the Red Sox back in first place. Ruth solidified that lead on July 8, when he hit what would have been, under modern scoring rules, his 12th home run, into Fenway’s right-field bleachers in the 10th inning of a scoreless game. Under old rules, the batter stopped when the winning run scored, even if the ball left the park. Because there was a man on first, Ruth’s hit counted only as a triple. But the Red Sox won, 1–0, part of a July string in which they won 15 out of 18. Ruth would stay stuck at 11 home runs.

  Hooper, in his 10th season with the Red Sox, finished the year in a bit of a slump (he was batting over.320 on July 1 but hit.249 the rest of the way). Still, the 1918 season was his best all-around year. Hooper tutored Ruth, helped defuse the Barrow-Ruth situation, advised Barrow, and got comfortable as a team leader. For the first time in his career he was the best, most polished everyday player on his team. Hooper thrived. He hit .289, finishing second in the AL in doubles and triples and third in walks and runs. And, he noted, “Barrow was technically the manager, but I ran the team on the field.”16

  A fact that surely made the Strategy Board proud.

  Crowder’s work-or-fight order went into effect as soon as July 1 arrived, but men of draft age had a 10-day grace period to secure essential work. On July 11 the grace period was up. That day the Cubs took the first half of a home doubleheader from the Braves, 4–3, and between games, as some fans made for the exits, an announcement went up by megaphone: no one would be allowed to leave the park without giving an account of their draft status. The gates were locked and manned by federal agents. If draft-eligible men were found not carrying their cards, they were taken to the nearby Town Hall police station and jammed into the squad room until they could adequately explain their circumstances. This was part of a “slacker sweep” around Chicago that day. Movie houses, theaters, railway stations, cabarets, and poolrooms were swept, and more than 5,000 suspected slackers were detained. Of those, 500 had been at the Cubs game.17

  While there was rancor in the stands, there was anxiety on the field. The Cubs and Braves played the second game of their doubleheader (the Cubs won, 3–2, behind Phil Douglas), but players had to wonder what was to stop officials from asking them to show they were not slackers. Ten days after work-or-fight became law, the question of baseball’s usefulness remained unanswered. The notion that the fans who drove the game’s popularity were subject to arrest simply by being in the stands could not have been comforting. Baseball was still waiting for a test case that could be appealed to the War Department and decide the sport’s fate.

  A few candidates emerged. The Brighton, Massachusetts, draft board, which oversaw the district in which Braves Field was located, summoned the entire team (eventually modified so that only catcher John Henry had to appear). The board found that baseball was not essential, and an appeal to Washington was prepared. In St. Louis, Rogers Hornsby received word from his home draft board in Fort Worth, Texas, that he needed an essential occupation. He, too,
readied an appeal. But the first appeal to reach Baker and Crowder was that of a player in their backyard—Washington catcher Eddie Ainsmith. Manager Clark Griffith filed the appeal for Ainsmith the next day. (In a strange and sad twist, Ainsmith’s wife had died just one week earlier after a long illness, leaving him with a young daughter.)

  Griffith was generally a good representative of baseball. The Old Fox was smart and moved easily in Washington’s political circles. His appeal was based on three precepts. First, that baseball was a big business, and enforcing the work-or-fight edict would cripple the business—part of Crowder’s order exempted workers from the mandate if removal of those workers would ruin an entire industry. Baseball would be ruined without players. Second, Griffith noted that players are specialized. Few had skills outside of baseball that could be useful to the government. Because of those limited skills, they could get only menial new jobs in useful fields, which would cause severe financial hardship (another cause for work-or-fight exemption). Third, baseball was the national sport, and to stop it would end the country’s most popular form of outdoor recreation. Additionally, Griffith pointed out, baseball was not seeking special exemptions for players. It just wanted baseball to be considered an acceptable way to fill the “work” part of the work-or-fight order. Players who were already Class 1A would continue to join the army as called.

  Griffith may have made a miscalculation or two in his brief, though. He did not make clear to the War Department just how many of baseball’s players were of draft age—remember, in May, Baker had said he thought most players were outside draft age. Surely, too, Griffith slipped by bringing up the willingness of baseball men to answer the draft call. It was true that many players had joined the colors. But the War Department was also well aware of the many players who had skipped the draft to play for shipyard teams, which had been an embarrassment for the military as well as for baseball.

  As Baker considered Griffith’s brief, players kept playing, with their eyes on Washington, their minds on shipyards, and their tired bodies going through the motions on the diamond. “So long as Washington officials keep the players in suspense, there is certain to be bad baseball,” Hugh Fullerton wrote. “The uncertainty and worry already have affected not only individual players, but entire clubs.”18 The Cubs, without ace Grover Cleveland Alexander and wondering when they might lose catcher Bill Killefer, got more worrisome news when Charley Hollocher was ordered to appear before his draft board on July 15 for a physical that, if he passed, would make him eligible to be immediately called. Little-used pitcher Vic Aldridge, who had made three relief appearances, got a jump on his draft board and left the Cubs to join the navy.

  The Braves were so short of material that, when they played the Cubs on July 12, manager George Stallings sent Ed Konetchy to the mound and Hugh Canavan to the outfield. Konetchy was a first baseman, and Canavan was a pitcher (who happened to go 0–4 with a 6.36 ERA in 1918, his only major-league season). The Cubs won, 8–0. When the Cubs played Philadelphia two days later, tempers were so testy that Phillies manager Pat Moran nearly came to blows with Otto Knabe, Moran’s teammate for four years in Philadelphia. The Cubs were exhausted but had to play a doubleheader against the Phillies the next day. They were swept. The fatigue got worse. On July 17 the Cubs and Phillies played a 21-inning game, second-longest in NL history at the time, with Lefty Tyler throwing a complete game (now, there’s an understatement) in a 2–1 win. It got even worse. The next day the Cubs and Dodgers played a 16-inning game, with Hippo Vaughn throwing all 16. In three days, the Cubs played 55 innings, part of their worst stretch of the season with six losses in seven games.

  But some rest was on its way, whether the players liked it or not.

  Baker wasn’t buying Griffith’s plea. On July 19, well past the halfway point of the 1918 season, the government finally gave baseball the advice that Ban Johnson had been seeking for a year. And that advice was a bombshell. In the War Department’s eyes, the game was not essential. Baker shot down Griffith’s three major points. He started by noting that baseball had enough players outside of draft age to make the game viable (which was, of course, not true). He mocked Griffith’s notion that ballplayers could do nothing else but play ball—“It is quite inconceivable,” Baker said, “that occupations cannot be found by these men.”19 He did take the recreation angle seriously, but he decided that in war citizens should and would sacrifice recreation for the good of the country. Baker had made it official: every ballplayer of draft age was a slacker and should get useful work or be forced to join the army.

  Chaos followed. Baker’s ruling came out late on a Friday, and little could be resolved over the weekend. Baseball was unprepared for Baker’s decision. The National League scrambled to call a meeting in New York the following Wednesday but moved it to Tuesday in Pittsburgh. Johnson, with no authority to do so, said the American League would shut down immediately. Griffith countered that Johnson was “talking through his hat,”20 and Harry Frazee, of course, criticized Johnson sharply. Johnson saved face by sending out a telegram directing AL teams to keep playing their schedule, which they were already doing. Barrow seemed as unimpressed with the big-league magnates as he had been with those of the International League. “Barrow was all het up,” the Globe reported. “His impression was that the baseball men had bungled the job.”21

  When business opened on Monday, things looked grim. The Cubs and Reds canceled their doubleheader. At Fenway, 10,000 fans were sure they were giving their Red Sox a wartime send-off. Down in Washington, though, NL president John Tener, Giants owner Harry Hempstead, and Indiana senator Harry New visited Crowder, essentially asking him to overturn the decision the War Department had just handed out.22 Crowder got another group of baseball visitors: Griffith and Senators owner Ben Minor, along with Ohio representative Nicholas Longworth.23 They employed a different strategy, asking that Crowder give baseball enough time to finish the season before enforcing the ruling. (Interesting that baseball’s leaders took along two very partisan Republican congressmen who were critics of Baker and Wilson—Longworth, in fact, was the son-in-law of the administration’s bane, Teddy Roosevelt.) Crowder, hoping to settle the thing once and for all, told the baseball men to get organized and present a brief that Wednesday.

  In a rare show of unity, 15 of baseball’s leaders, including Frazee and Weeghman, gathered at Ben Minor’s office to work out their request to Crowder. Even Johnson and Tener made nice. Their disdain for each other had grown over the course of the year, in part because of an interleague contract squabble involving the rights to pitcher Scott Perry. Two weeks later Tener would resign, but for now Johnson and Tener were all handshakes and guffaws. The 15 arrived at Crowder’s office and presented their brief. One of the key points was that only 63 big-league players were not within the draft ages, finally disabusing Baker of his notion that baseball would not be disorganized by the work-or-fight order. They requested that baseball be given an extension through October 15, enough time to finish the year, play the World Series, and settle their business.

  In the midst of the chaos, the Red Sox players looked to Captain Hooper, who called a team meeting in the clubhouse at Fenway Park. Hooper, like most players, would have taken a serious financial hit if the season had stopped. He had a wife and two children at home in California, where he had also built up some farmland holdings. The previous winter his farm’s foreman urged Hooper to buy more land. Hooper took out loans and did so.24 With that debt hanging over him, the thought of losing his Red Sox income, including probable postseason pay, was surely worrisome. But, at the same time, players were worried about whether they should be playing at all after Baker’s ruling.

  Harry and his teammates decided to play until the final word came from Washington. On July 22 they played a doubleheader at home against Detroit and swept both games with shutouts. Two days later the Red Sox headed west to play Chicago, unsure of whether the AL would still be running when they got there. They lost the series opener, 4–2,
in what the Globe described as “about as quiet a victory as ever was won on the South Side grounds. The 2,000 persons present seemed afraid to cheer, for they didn’t know just how Sec. of War Baker would take such actions.”25

  On July 26, Crowder and Baker denied baseball’s request for an extension to October 15. They did, however, grant an extension to September 1, enough time to allow the game to wrap up its business affairs. After that, both leagues would shut down for the rest of 1918 and, it seemed, for all of 1919.

  THE ORIGINAL CURSE: JEAN DUBUC

  As the Red Sox ranks were thinned by the draft, Barrow began signing players from minor leagues that shut down because of the work-or-fight order. One of those players was Jean Dubuc, a so-so, 29-year-old right-handed pitcher who had slipped out of the big leagues after seven seasons. Dubuc didn’t pitch much for the Red Sox—only two games, though he was used as a pinch hitter. He was signed by the Giants the next year and had some success as a reliever.

  In 1912 Dubuc had befriended a teammate with the Tigers, little-used pitcher Bill Burns. Yes, the same Bill Burns who fed the Cubs wild turkey in spring training and gained further fame as briber of the Black Sox. During the trial, Giants pitcher Rube Benton testified that Dubuc had received telegrams—presumably from Burns—telling him how to bet on the 1919 World Series. His friendship with Burns convinced manager John McGraw to drop Dubuc from the Giants after his solid 1919 season. In 1920, after news of the Black Sox scandal broke, McGraw would explain: “Bill Burns, also indicted in Chicago, hung around the Giants the latter part of the 1919 campaign. He was trying to interest me in a Texas oil proposition, he said, but when the season ended and the Reds had clinched the pennant, he disappeared. He constantly associated with one of our pitchers, Jean Dubuc, for which reason I finally decided to release Dubuc unconditionally.”26