Cookie hit the fence. A character named Al Gionfriddo ran home. Running, he turned and beckoned frantically to a character named Eddie Miksis. Eddie Miksis ran home.
Dodgers pummeled Lavagetto. Gionfriddo and Miksis pummeled each other. Cops pummeled Lavagetto. Ushers pummeled Lavagetto. Ushers pummeled one another. Three soda butchers in white ran onto the field and threw forward passes with their white caps. In the tangle Bevens could not be seen.
The unhappiest man in Brooklyn is sitting up here now in the far end of the press box. The v on his typewriter is broken. He can’t write either Lavagetto or Bevens.
HUTCH AND THE MAN
1958
France and Algeria heaved in ferment, South Americans chucked rocks at the goodwill ambassador from the United States, Sputnik III thrust its nose into the pathless realms of space—and the attention of some millions of baseball fans was concentrated on a grown man in flannel rompers swinging a stick on a Chicago playground called Wrigley Field.
Warren Giles, president of the National League, had come down from Milwaukee to sit in the stands and watch Stan Musial make his 3,000th hit against major-league pitching. When the event came to pass, the game would be halted. Giles would walk out on the field to congratulate Musial with full benefit of Kodak and formally present to him the ball he had struck—if it could be found. Then the Cubs and Cardinals would return to their play.
On his first time at bat, Musial made his 2,999th hit. He got no more that day. There were still only seven men in history who had made 3,000. To be sure, there were only eight who had made 2,999, but nobody thought of that. Giles left town.
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Stan said, but just before dinner the Cardinals’ manager, Fred Hutchinson, phoned Jim Toomey, the club publicity man, and asked him to notify the press that Musial wouldn’t start the next day’s game. Unless he were needed as a pinch-batter, Hutch would let him wait until the following evening to try for the big one before a home crowd in St. Louis.
At dinner, Toomey and the newspaper men and the club secretary, Leo Ward, talked about it. Musial hadn’t asked to be held out the next day. Nobody in the St. Louis office had suggested it. It was Hutchinson’s own idea, prompted by his respect and affection for Musial and his realization that Stan would derive a special satisfaction out of attaining his goal in the park where he had grown to greatness.
“Maybe I’m speaking out of turn,” said Bill Heinz, who was there on a magazine assignment, “but it seems to me Hutch is sticking his neck out. His team got off to a horrible start and now it’s on a winning streak and he’s got a championship game to play tomorrow, without his best man because of personal considerations.
“Not that the guy hasn’t earned special consideration, but from a competitive point of view I think it’s wrong. If the Cardinals lose tomorrow, Hutch will be blasted. Hell be accused of giving less than his best to win and it will be said the club rigged this deliberately for the box office, gambling a game away to build up a big home crowd.”
“You’re absolutely right,” another said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing and I’m glad somebody agrees.”
They talked it over but didn’t mention it to Hutchinson. He’s the manager. He must have known what he was doing.
Now it was the next day and Musial was sunning himself in the bullpen and the Cubs were leading, 3 to 1. Gene Green, a rookie outfielder, was on second base. It was a spot for a pinch-batter. Hutch beckoned.
Musial hit the sixth pitch to left field for two bases, scoring Green. The game stopped, Hutchinson walked out to second and shook hands. Frank Dascoli, umpiring at third base, got the ball when it was returned from the outfield and gave it to Musial. Eight cameras fired away.
You don’t see that often. They don’t stop games in the major leagues and let photographers invade the playing field to celebrate individual accomplishment. Baseball is as ceremonious as a Graus-tarkian court, but they butter the Golden Bantam before the game, not during play. Maybe this sort of thing has been done before, but not in thirty years of firsthand observation.
When the last picture was taken, Hutchinson called for a runner and Musial left the game. The manager was sticking his neck out again. The score was still 3 to 2 against the Cardinals and Musial’s bat might still be needed to win, but Hutchinson took him out. It could be that Hutch lost sight of the score in the theatrics of the moment. It is no discredit to him if, just for that little while, the personal triumph of one great man meant more to the manager than team success.
As it turned out, the Cardinals kept the rally going and won the game. The next night Musial got his twenty-one guns from the fans in St. Louis, and on his first time at bat acknowledged the salute by flogging one over the pavilion in right.
So everything worked out happily. The way it happened was theatrical but it wasn’t staged. There was nothing planned, nothing tawdry, no prearranged billing to disfigure the simple reality. Stan got his hit in honest competition, and it helped his team win.
Like anybody else, Musial relishes personal success and takes pleasure in the honors he wears so gracefully. Above all, though, he’s a ballplayer in a team game, and the object is to win. Circumstances saved his greatest moment from the carnival vulgarity that would have debased it. That was good for baseball, good for the Cardinals, good for Hutchinson, and good for The Man.
BABE RUTH: ONE OF A KIND
1973
Grantland Rice, the prince of sportswriters, used to do a weekly radio interview with some sporting figure. Frequently, in the interest of spontaneity, he would type out questions and answers in advance. One night his guest was Babe Ruth.
“Well, you know, Granny,” the Babe read in response to a question, “Duke Ellington said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.”
“Babe,” Granny said after the show, “Duke Ellington for the Duke of Wellington I can understand. But how did you ever read Eton as Elkton? That’s in Maryland, isn’t it?”
“I married my first wife there,” Babe said, “and I always hated the goddamn place.” He was cheerily unruffled. In the uncomplicated world of George Herman Ruth, errors were part of the game.
Babe Ruth died twenty-five years ago but his ample ghost has been with us all summer and he seems to grow more insistently alive every time Henry Aaron hits a baseball over a fence. What, people under fifty keep asking, what was this creature of myth and legend like in real life? If he were around today, how would he react when Aaron at last broke his hallowed record of 714 home runs? The first question may be impossible to answer fully; the second is easy.
“Well, what d’you know!” he would have said when the record got away. “Baby loses another! Come on, have another beer.”
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s remark about another deity, Ruth must have admired records because he created so many of them. Yet he was sublimely aware that he transcended records and his place in the American scene was no mere matter of statistics. It wasn’t just that he hit more home runs than anybody else, he hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and a more flamboyant flourish. Nobody could strike out like Babe Ruth. Nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed, mincing majesty.
“He was one of a kind,” says Waite Hoyt, a Yankee pitcher in the years of Ruthian splendor. “If he had never played ball, if you had never heard of him and passed him on Broadway, you’d turn around and look.”
Looking, you would have seen a barrel swaddled in a wrap-around camel-hair topcoat with a flat camel-hair cap on the round head. Thus arrayed he was instantly recognizable not only on Broadway in New York but also on the Ginza in Tokyo. “Baby Roos! Baby Roos!” cried excited crowds, following through the streets when he visited Japan with an all-star team in the early 1930’s.
The camel-hair coat and cap are part of my last memory of the man. It must have been in the spring training season of 1948 when the Babe and everybody else knew he was dying of throat cancer. “This is the last time a
round,” he had told Frank Stevens that winter when the head of the H. M. Stevens catering firm visited him in the French Hospital on West 30th Street, “but before I go I’m gonna get out of here and have some fun.”
He did get out, but touring the Florida training camps surrounded by a gaggle of admen, hustlers and promoters, he didn’t look like a man having fun. It was a hot day when he arrived in St. Petersburg, but the camel-hair collar was turned up about the wounded throat. By this time, Al Lang Stadium had replaced old Waterfront Park where he had drawn crowds when the Yankees trained in St. Pete.
“What do you remember best about this place?” asked Francis Stann of the Washington Star.
Babe gestured toward the West Coast Inn, an old frame building a city block beyond the right-field fence. “The day I hit the adjectival ball against that adjectival hotel.” The voice was a hoarse stage whisper; the adjective was one often printed these days, but not here.
“Wow!” Francis Stann said. “Pretty good belt.”
“But don’t forget,” Babe said, “the adjectival park was a block back this way then.”
Ruth was not noted for a good memory. In fact, the inability to remember names is part of his legend. Yet he needed no record books to remind him of his own special feats. There was, for example, the time he visited Philadelphia as a “coach” with the Brooklyn Dodgers. (His coachly duties consisted of hitting home runs in batting practice.) This was in the late 1930’s when National League games in Philadelphia were played in Shibe Park, the American League grounds where Babe had performed. I asked him what memories stirred on his return.
“The time I hit one into Opal Street,” he said.
Now, a baseball hit over Shibe Park’s right-field fence landed in 20th Street. Opal is the next street east, just a wide alley one block long. There may not be five hundred Philadelphians who know it by name, but Babe Ruth knew it.
Another time, during a chat in Hollywood, where he was an actor in the film Pride of the Yankees, one of us mentioned Rube Walberg, a good lefthanded pitcher with the Philadelphia Athletics through the Ruth era. To some lefthanded batters there is no dirtier word than the name of a good lefthanded pitcher, but the Babe spoke fondly:
“Rube Walberg! What a pigeon! I hit twenty-three home runs off him.” Or whatever the figure was. It isn’t in the record book but it was in Ruth’s memory.
Obviously it is not true that he couldn’t even remember the names of his teammates. It was only that the names he remembered were not always those bestowed at the baptismal font. To him Urban Shocker, a Yankee pitcher, was Rubber Belly. Pat Collins, the catcher, was Horse Nose. All redcaps at railroad stations were Stink-weed, and everybody else was Kid. One day Jim Kahn, covering the Yankees for the New York Sun, watched two players board a train with a porter toting the luggage.
“There go Rubber Belly, Horse Nose and Stinkweed,” Jim said.
Don Heffner joined the Yankees in 1934, Ruth’s last year with the team. Playing second base through spring training, Heffner was stationed directly in the line of vision of Ruth, the right fielder. Breaking camp, the Yankees stopped in Jacksonville on a night when the Baltimore Orioles of the International League were also in town. A young reporter on the Baltimore Sun seized the opportunity to interview Ruth.
“How is Heffner looking?” he asked, because the second baseman had been a star with the Orioles in 1933.
“Who the hell is Heffner?” the Babe demanded. The reporter should, of course, have asked about the kid at second.
Jacksonville was the first stop that year on the barnstorming trip that would last two or three weeks and take the team to Yankee Stadium by a meandering route through the American bush. There, as everywhere, Ruth moved among crowds. Whether the Yankees played in Memphis or New Orleans or Selma, Alabama, the park was almost always filled, the hotel overrun if the team used a hotel, the railroad depot thronged. In a town of 5,000, perhaps 7,500 would see the game. Crowds were to Ruth as water to a fish. Probably the only time on record when he sought to avert a mob scene was the day of his second marriage. The ceremony was scheduled for 6 A.M. on the theory that people wouldn’t be abroad then, but when he arrived at St. Gregory’s on West 90th Street, the church was filled and hundreds were waiting outside.
A reception followed in Babe’s apartment on Riverside Drive, where the 18th Amendment did not apply. It was opening day of the baseball season but the weather intervened on behalf of the happy couple. The party went on and on, with entertainment by Peter de Rose, composer-pianist, and May Singhi Breen, who played the ukulele and sang.
Rain abated in time for a game next day. For the first time, Claire Ruth watched from a box near the Yankees’ dugout, as she still does on ceremonial occasions. Naturally, the bridegroom hit a home run. Rounding the bases, he halted at second and swept off his cap in a courtly bow to his bride. This was typical of him. There are a hundred stories illustrating his sense of theater—how he opened Yankee Stadium (The House That Ruth Built) with a home run against the Red Sox, how at the age of forty he closed out his career as a player by hitting three mighty shots out of spacious Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, stories about the times he promised to hit a home run for some kid in a hospital and made good, and of course the one about calling his shot in a World Series.
That either did or did not happen in Chicago’s Wrigley Field on October 1,1932.1 was there but I have never been dead sure of what I saw.
The Yankees had won the first two games and the score of the third was 4-4 when Ruth went to bat in the fifth inning with the bases empty and Charley Root pitching for the Cubs. Ruth had staked the Yankees to a three-run lead in the first inning by hitting Root for a home run with two on base. Now Root threw a strike. Ruth stepped back and lifted a finger. “One.” A second strike, a second upraised finger. “Two.” Then Ruth made some sort of sign with his bat. Some said, and their version has become gospel, that he aimed it like a rifle at the bleachers in right center field. That’s where he hit the next pitch. That made the score 5-4. Lou Gehrig followed with a home run and the Yankees won, 7-5, ending the Series the next day.
All the Yankees, and Ruth in particular, had been riding the Cubs unmercifully through every game, deriding them as cheapskates because in cutting up their World Series money the Chicago players had voted only one-fourth of a share to Mark Koenig, the former New York shortstop who had joined them in August and batted .353 in the last month of the pennant race. With all the dialogue and pantomine that went on, there was no telling what Ruth was saying to Root. When the papers reported that he had called his shot, he did not deny it.
A person familiar with Ruth only through photographs and records could hardly be blamed for assuming that he was a blubbery freak whose ability to hit balls across county lines was all that kept him in the big leagues. The truth is that he was the complete ballplayer, certainly one of the greatest and maybe the one best of all time.
As a lefthanded pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, he won 18 games in his rookie season, 23 the next year and 24 the next before Ed Barrow assigned him to the outfield to keep him in the batting order every day. His record of pitching 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series stood 43 years before Whitey Ford broke it.
He was an accomplished outfielder with astonishing range for his bulk, a powerful arm and keen baseball sense. It was said that he never made a mental error like throwing to the wrong base.
He recognized his role as public entertainer and understood it. In the 1946 World Series the Cardinals made a radical shift in their defense against Ted Williams, packing the right side of the field and leaving the left virtually unprotected. “They did that to me in the American League one year,” Ruth told the columnist, Frank Graham. “I coulda hit .600 that year slicing singles to left.”
“Why didn’t you?” Frank asked.
“That wasn’t what the fans came out to see.”
He changed the rules, the equipment and the strategy of baseball. Reasoning that if one Babe Ruth
could fill a park, sixteen would fill all the parks, the owners instructed the manufacturers to produce a livelier ball that would make every man a home-run king. As a further aid to batters, trick pitching deliveries like the spitball, the emery ball, the shine ball and the mud ball were forbidden.
The home run, an occasional phenomenon when a team hit a total of twenty in a season, came to be regarded as the ultimate offensive weapon. Shortstops inclined to swoon at the sight of blood had their bats made with all the wood up in the big end, gripped the slender handle at the very hilt and swung from the heels.
None of these devices produced another Ruth, of course, because Ruth was one of a kind. He recognized this as the simple truth and conducted himself accordingly. Even before they were married and Claire began to accompany him on the road, he always occupied the drawing room on the team’s Pullman; he seldom shared his revels after dark with other players, although one year he did take a fancy to a worshipful rookie named Jimmy Reese and made him a companion until management intervened; if friends were not on hand with transportation, he usually took a taxi by himself to hotel or ball park or railroad station.
Unlike other players, Ruth was never seen in the hotel dining room or sitting in the lobby waiting for some passerby to discard a newspaper.
Roistering was a way of life, yet Ruth was no boozer. Three drinks of hard liquor left him fuzzy. He could consume great quantities of beer, he was a prodigious eater and his prowess with women was legendary. Sleep was something he got when other appetites were sated. He arose when he chose and almost invariably was the last to arrive in the clubhouse, where Doc Woods, the Yankees’ trainer, always had bicarbonate of soda ready. Before changing clothes, the Babe would measure out a mound of bicarb smaller than the Pyramid of Cheops, mix and gulp it down.
“Then,” Jim Kahn says, “he would belch. And all the loose water in the showers would fall down.”
The Red Smith Reader Page 21