The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Walsh “really put one over” for the Babe that day, as he liked to say of his best PR stunts. The Daily News showed up as well as a newsreel cameramen. The New York Times played the story on page 1.

  There was no suggestion in the unsigned Times dispatch, datelined July 22, 1926, that Ruth intentionally ducked the first two balls bombed at him from a thousand feet up, which Major General Benjamin Foulois, chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, claimed “knocked him flat.”

  The newsreel cameras missed that.

  Then the pilot descended to three hundred feet and Ruth gloved the ball. There he was, down on one knee in the grass, making eye contact with the lens as the plane soared out of the frame. He looked like a supplicant, asking for what? Attention? Approval? Or maybe just to get the hell out of there?

  “Gee, it’s like trying to stop a bullet,” Ruth told the military men, who may or may not have appreciated the analogy.

  After dutifully turning over the record-setting ball to Foulois, signing a bat for the best athlete at each of the Citizens’ Military Training Camps, and enjoying a much-needed bath in the Officers’ Club, Ruth had returned to Yankee Stadium in time for a 3:00 P.M. game in which he went 2 for 5 with a triple and a stolen base.

  Sonofabitch.

  On October 10, 1927, he was the most famous man in America—who wanted to be famous, that is. Charlie Chaplin and Charles Lindbergh could give him a run for his money. But the Little Tramp, with whom Babe was known to play an occasional game of tennis on his court in Hollywood, wasn’t homegrown. And Lindy preferred higher altitudes to the fleshy business of being loved at field level.

  For Ruth, the visit to Providence that afternoon was a homecoming and a measuring stick of just how much had changed since the summer of 1914, when he’d spent six weeks with the Grays, pitching them to the International League championship and hitting his first professional home run. He was nineteen then and just five months removed from his final parole from St. Mary’s.

  This was a different Babe. “More portly, more famous but no less genial,” the Journal attested. “As a matter of fact, between the boys and the chorus girls gathered about him at the plate, the Babe seemed to give preference to the boys.”

  They knew all about him, or thought they did.

  He was an orphan. (He grew up in an orphanage, didn’t he?) Or an incorrigible sentenced to St. Mary’s, where the courts sent boys to straighten out. The brothers and baseball had imposed order on his rowdy soul.

  He was the guy who ate so many hot dogs he ended up in the hospital. The guy who drove Packards into ditches and climbed out smiling. The guy arrested for speeding who got a police escort from jail in time to bat in the sixth inning at the Polo Grounds.

  He was the Babe, the Bam, the Big Bam, the Great Bambino (or Slambino).

  The Bazoo of Bang and Bash. Behemoth of Biff, Bust, and Bangs. Blunderbuss. The Bulky Monarch and the Monarch of Swatdom.

  Caliph of Clout, Colossus of Club (and vice versa). The Circuit Smasher.

  Demon Swatter. Diamond-Studded Ball-Buster. His Eminence, the Priest of Swat.

  G. Herman Hercules and Pan Hercules. The Goliath of Grand Slam and Great Keagle of Klout.

  Hedjaz of Hit, Herman the Great, and Homeric Herman.

  Infant of Swategy.

  Kid of Crash, King of Clout, King of Swing.

  The Home Run King.

  The Maharajah and Mauler of Mash. The Mauling Menace, Monarch, and Mastodon. Also, the Mandarin of Maul and Mastodonic Mauler.

  The Modern Beowulf.

  Paladin of Punch. Prince of Ash and Potentate of Pounders.

  Rajah of Rap.

  Sheik of Slam, Sachem of Slug, the Sampson and Sultan of Swat. The Swattingest Swatter of Swatdom.

  The Terrible Titan and the Titan of Thump. Whazir of Wham, Wali of Wallop and Wizard of Whack.

  Jidge, Jedge, George.

  The Big Fella.

  And all the names put together were still not enough to encompass the idea of him. Maybe a few of the older men in the crowd had caught a glimpse of him in 1914 when he was young and lithe and just growing into his name. Maybe some of the younger ones had tried one of his candy bars. Or worn one of his Babe Ruth Sweaters for Boys. Or seen one of his movies. Or heard his voice on the new radio set in the living room.

  All summer long in American League cities boys played hooky, jumped turnstiles, scaled lumberyards, and otherwise evaded flat-footed coppers, pleading with indulgent fathers to let them see for themselves. Roger Angell, who grew up to be the Babe Ruth of baseball writers, was one of the lucky ones, whose father took him to see the Great Bambino at Yankee Stadium. “I had heard about Babe Ruth,” he said. “I read about Babe Ruth. I remember looking for him and there he was. He was instantly verified. It was stunning. The creature I’d heard about. He didn’t look like anybody else in the whole world. The monkey swollen body tapering down to the ankles—I once called them debutante ankles.

  “Everything about him was absolutely extraordinary, starting with his name. The first name was a baby and the second name was a girl’s, which suggested to me the complexity of the world. He was so available. You got on the subway, paid a nickel, and there he would be in right field. The other thing I remember is not him hitting a home run but him swinging and missing. His whole body swiveled to face the first base stand.”

  Here was a man who kept promises, who exulted in making them and daring himself to keep them. It would take until the second to last day of the season to make good on his New Year’s pledge to Jake Ruppert but make good he did.

  II

  All season he and Gehrig had chased each other and the home-run record few thought would ever be broken: Ruth’s fifty-nine home runs in 1921. Newspapers charted “The Great American Home Run Derby,” as the Times called it, with hyperbole, charts, and diagrams. The World measured “The Fence Busting Heat” against an illustration of a bulb thermometer accompanied by mug shots of the two protagonists.

  Gehrig refused to wilt in the heat of August. Then, in September, Ruth remembered who he was, hitting seventeen home runs in twenty-nine days. In Philadelphia, on September 2, he hit number forty-four; Gehrig hit numbers forty-two and forty-three and tied him three days later in the first game of a Monday doubleheader in Boston on Labor Day. Something, or someone, had to give. They played another doubleheader on Tuesday, and twenty thousand people took another day off in hopes of seeing who it would be. Ruth hit two home runs in the first game and another in the second; Gehrig managed just one. He would never come close again.

  Ruth’s splurge continued with two more homers the next day. He left Boston with forty-nine home runs; Gehrig wouldn’t hit another until September 27. Numbers fifty-one and fifty-two came in a doubleheader against the Cleveland Indians on September 13, the day the Yankees clinched the pennant, freeing him, he said later, to turn his attention to the record. Number fifty-six came on September 22 in the bottom of the ninth inning with a man on and the Yankees trailing the Detroit Tigers by a run. It was the Yankees’ 105th win.

  As he made his way around the bases, carrying his bat as he often did, a boy bounded out of the stands and chased him down between home and third, pounding the Babe’s back and grabbing ahold of his wood. “At last sight,” the Times reported, “in a swirling crowd of other juveniles, the youngster was like the tail of a flying comet, holding onto the bat for dear life and being dragged into the dugout by the Babe, who raced to escape the rush.”

  Ruth had three more games to outdo himself. Number fifty-seven was a grand slam off Lefty Grove in Philadelphia. Numbers fifty-eight and fifty-nine came at home against the Washington Senators. The record-tying home run—a grand slam!—came off a rookie pitcher, Paul Hopkins, making his major-league debut. His catcher told him to throw only curves, so that’s what he did. The one Ruth hit, Hopkins told Sports Illustrated in 1998, was “so slow Ruth started to swing and then hesitated, hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he ca
me through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second. Put everything behind it.”

  Hopkins struck out Gehrig to end his misery, then retreated to the dugout and cried.

  “Once he had that 59, that Number 60 was as sure as the setting sun,” declared Paul Gallico in the Daily News.

  Luckless Tom Zachary was on the mound for the luckless Washington Senators the next day, September 30, 1927. He had helped the Senators to their only world championship, winning two games in the 1924 World Series, but had been shipped to the St. Louis Browns in 1926. The Nats had reacquired him in July, in hopes that his left-handed junk might stymie the Yankees’ left-handed hitting.

  Old Tom, as the baseball writers called him, wasn’t any older than the Babe—a year younger, in fact. But he pitched old before he got old, crafty like the college graduate he was, and as slow as a summer afternoon in his native North Carolina. He was a shuffling, drawling, knock-kneed country boy who threw slop as thick as molasses and stayed employed through nineteen major-league seasons by making others look foolish. “He hasn’t got a muscle in his arm,” Casey Stengel said of him. “His pulse carries the ball to the plate.”

  One out, one on in the bottom of the eighth inning, the score 2–2. Zachary’s first pitch was a strike and Ruth took it. Umpire Bill Dinneen, the pitching star of the 1903 World Series, called the second pitch high. Ruth stood at the plate awaiting the next delivery, his left foot slightly behind his right, his toes turned inward. He had hit number fifty-nine with the bat he called Black Betsy. This time, he brought Beautiful Bella to the plate. He held it back, behind him, as if playing hard to get.

  By 1927, fans were accustomed to the size of the man and the size of the swing and had forgotten, perhaps, how revolutionary a thing it was, this weight shift that, in concert with his exquisite timing, generated such unprecedented power. It was a model of biomechanical efficiency, though no one possessed the language or the technology to understand it then. They saw the big chest, like an accordion with its bellows full, turning with the swing, and called him an upper-body hitter: a tornado on chopsticks. It would take decades to fully appreciate the modernity of his approach and technique.

  The third pitch was a screwball that broke down and into the trajectory of Ruth’s swing; he caught it flush. By the time he hit the ball, he had taken a long stride forward and had “turned his shoulders and ass and wrists into it,” Shirley Povich of the Washington Post told Sports Illustrated in 1998. His upturned chin and chest, canted toward right field, were already moving out of the batter’s box as if yanked by the thrust of the ball. Dinneen rose out of his crouch and Muddy Ruel, the Senators’ catcher, rose, too, following with their eyes and their body language the trajectory of inevitability.

  The ball crashed into the right field bleachers, fifteen rows from the top, and fair by just six inches. Old Tom threw his glove down in disgust, protesting loudly that the ball was foul.

  There was history between Dinneen and the Big Fella. So perhaps Zachary thought he would get a sympathetic hearing. Five years earlier, Ruth had been suspended after charging in from left field to protest a call, scalding Big Bill with obscenities and challenging him to a fistfight in the dugout the next day. And it was Dinneen who called Ruth out, trying to steal second, to end the 1926 World Series.

  Dinneen saw the ball fair; Ruth pranced around the bases. “I threw him a curve, but I made a bad mistake,” Zachary would write in a letter to a fan decades later. “I should have thrown a fast one at his big fat head.”

  Returning to right field for the top of the ninth, Ruth was greeted with an array of white handkerchiefs, waving in abject surrender to his omnipotence. He saluted his troops in Ruthville with bows and military aplomb, then caught the final out—a fly ball off the bat of Walter Johnson, making his final major-league appearance as a pinch-hitter for Zachary.

  Upstairs in the press box, Gallico typed new orders for readers of the Daily News: “succumb to the power and romance of this man.”

  The Times recorded the score: Ruth 4, Senators 2.

  The Babe himself professed to be unimpressed and unsurprised. “I knew I was going to hit it,” he said.

  What delighted him most was the sight of Charlie O’Leary’s bald head shining in the falling sun. Now that was something. O’Leary was a Yankees coach and Ruth’s longtime pal. He had been in the car when Ruth drove off the road outside Philadelphia in 1920 en route home from a game in Washington, D.C., prompting headlines that Ruth was dead. O’Leary was thrown from the car and knocked out cold—the first thing he said after returning to consciousness was “Where’s my hat?” But he had remained as partial to the Babe as he was unhappy with his pate. He always managed to disappear on those rare occasions when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. But when Dinneen signaled “fair ball,” O’Leary threw his cap in the air in jubilation.

  Ruth was chased back to the dugout and down the tunnel toward the clubhouse by a tumult of humanity that seemed much greater than it was. Only eight thousand fans attended the game, among them Joe Forner, a Yankee Stadium regular, who had situated himself strategically—and successfully—in the right field grandstand after learning that a cash reward was in the offing for the sixtieth home-run ball.

  Albert “Truly” Warner, a haberdasher with a flagship store on Forty-second Street and fifty or so others around the country, had spread some cash around the grandstand, paying vendors to apprise the tenants of Ruthville of a one-hundred-dollar reward, a mighty sum in the embryonic world of sports memorabilia. Clutching the ball, Forner made his way through the joyous tumult to the Yankee locker room where Truly was waiting and Ruth was admitting to Arthur Mann of the New York Evening World that he had been kicking himself for batting right-handed in the second game of a doubleheader on May 31.

  Forner relinquished the ball and Ruth autographed it for Truly though oddly not on the sweet spot and not with the quotation marks he customarily used to set “Babe” apart from Ruth. He owned the name now.

  Truly had photo enlargements made for display in each of his showroom windows, further amortizing his investment with newspaper ads that ran in Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York throughout the World Series. Sales would soar.

  Arriving home that evening, Ruth was greeted with a profusion of floral arrangements—mixed bouquets and long-stemmed roses. “Where did these all come from?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  It was almost like somebody died. Then he saw the notes of congratulations.

  There is no official record of how he celebrated that evening. But it was Saturday night. And, tellingly, he went hitless the next day, the last of the regular season.

  He was a one-man antidote to the grimness of Prohibition. He had arrived in New York ten days before the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, fleeing puritanical New England for the joie de vivre of Broadway. He was a beer man and drank lots of it. Later he had a tap installed in the sink of his Riverside apartment. Some called him a lush and a drunk, “a carousing bum,” as his friend and teammate Waite Hoyt wrote in rebutting the assertion. “He drank no more than an insurance agent—and less than many sports writers during the prohibition era—when everone [sic] it seems took advantage of an opportunity.”

  Fact is: he imbibed whatever life had to offer. He indulged in excess, guzzling it down with a chaser of more.

  III

  While Ruth was in Providence accepting postseason plaudits and more floral arrangements as his due, the righteous baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and club owners Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Barney Dreyfuss were counting their losses. The net result of the attenuated World Series was this: receipts had failed to reach $1 million for the first time in five years. The Babe giveth and the Babe taketh away. Ruppert and Dreyfuss were compelled to refund some $350,000 in ticket sales, including $200,000 for the Sunday game at the Stadium.

  Christy Walsh, sometimes known in the sports pages as the Impresario of Swat, and other times as
“the man who relieves Babe of his burden of thinking,” functioned not only as Ruth’s agent, but as his manager, promoter, factotum, amanuensis, conscience, and mythmaker. On Saturday night, while everyone else had been celebrating the Yankees’ World Series triumph, he was in his Seventh Avenue office trying to figure out what to do with the Babe. Murderers’ Row was hell on pitching and planning.

  On September 26, Walsh had announced plans for a twelve- to fifteen-game barnstorming tour featuring the “Home Run Hitting Twins.” The carefully worded press release noted that permission had been obtained from Colonel Ruppert. This was a nod to the cranky commissioner who had suspended Ruth for the first six weeks of the 1922 season for having had the audacity to insist upon his right to make a living in the off-season doing what he did best, traveling from town to town with a bat in his hands.

  As it turned out, Ruth made as much money touring in vaudeville that winter as he lost in salary and fines and got the idiot rule changed. So now he was allowed to barnstorm as long as he said pretty please and promised not to play after Halloween.

  Walsh billed the tour as a competition for “the Copper Cup”—a continuation of the season’s home-run chase. It was a victory lap across America for the Babe, a chance to showcase Gehrig, who had never been west of St. Louis—which was as far as big-league baseball would venture until 1958—and a chance to generate some coin. Walsh printed the promotional brochure on yellow tour stationery in bold red ink:

  AFTER THE SEASON CLOSES! AFTER THE WORLD SERIES ENDS!

  THE BATTLE FOR THE HOME RUN TITLE CONTINUES

  RUTH VS. GEHRIG

  A SERIES OF POST-SEASON GAMES FROM NEW YORK TO CALIFORNIA

  BABE RUTH AND LOU GEHRIG

  THE GREATEST DOUBLE-BARREL BOX OFFICE ATTRACTION IN BASEBALL HISTORY—GOING OUT TO THOUSANDS THAT CANNOT COME TO THEM.