The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  No squishing the bug for him. Grinding your heel in the dirt, flat-footed? Slapping at the ball? He wanted to swing right through the ball.

  “In boxing your fist usually stops when you hit a man, but it’s possible to hit so hard that your fist doesn’t stop,” Ruth once explained. “I try to follow through the same way.”

  So far so good. “The harder you grip the bat the more you can swing it through the ball, and the further the ball will go,” Ruth said.

  Actually, Ruth was wrong about that. “My mantra is, ‘The Grip Doesn’t Matter,’” says Alan Nathan. “The batter’s grip plays absolutely no role in determining the ultimate fate of the ball. In fact, the hitter could let go of the bat just prior to impact and it wouldn’t have any impact on the fate of the ball.”

  Few baseball players—Sandy Koufax and Ted Williams come to mind—are actual students of the game, conversant with the kinetic chain of events embedded in the pitching motion or the batting swing; fewer still can explain what happens when that chain breaks down.

  Partly that’s because the links could not be isolated or visualized until late-twentieth-century technology allowed for it. And partly that’s because these motions of childhood, memorized through a million backyard iterations, move from one memory center in the brain to another, from what’s called explicit memory (of people, places, and things) to implicit memory (sensory motor skills).

  Muscle memory is recalled through performance, not conscious effort or even the awareness that you are drawing on memory. A 90-mile-an-hour fastball, traveling at 132 feet per second, gives a hitter .4 second to decide whether it’s a ball or a strike and whether to swing at it. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for thought. So hitters rely less on the slower, decision-making part of the brain and employ more of their “subconscious motor cortex,” as Jason Ochart, the head batting instructor at Driveline Baseball in Kent, Washington, puts it. “Like Yogi said, ‘You can’t think and hit at the same time.’”

  In fact, research has shown that athletes who are compelled to articulate what they do, do it worse. That’s why so many hitters rely on batting coaches to supply language and explanations, especially when things go awry.

  The Babe may not have been a “smart hitter,” but he understood intuitively what his body was doing. And he explained himself in language and with concepts that are strikingly modern. “I swing right from the hips,” he noted in a 1932 instructional film. “Note that my weight is on my left foot and as I start to swing my weight shifts to my right foot.”

  No one else in baseball history so thoroughly mastered the principles of momentum and leverage as he did from either end of a pitch, an asset when he made the transition from starting pitcher to everyday player. As a pitcher Ruth had the advantage of a hill to work with; as a hitter, starting from flat ground and stasis, he had to create momentum by turning his body into a pendulum. This deceptively simple act is actually an intricate biomechanical task requiring the coordinated mobilization of virtually every muscle in the body in less than a second.

  “Imagine a little flatbed truck going down the street,” Jim Lefebvre, the 1965 Rookie of the Year, tells hitters trying to comprehend the physics of a baseball swing. “On the back of that is a merry-go-round. On top of that is a Ferris wheel. So those three entities, those three motions, have to blend together. The truck is your stride. Once I slam my brakes on—when I put my front foot down—what’s going to happen? Everything goes forward and initiates what, the hip rotation. That’s the merry-go-round. And as the hips start to rotate, the barrel of the bat follows that form of energy. That’s where the Ferris wheel comes in.”

  Every swing requires an ignition switch, one of the elements of batting style, which is idiosyncratic, as opposed to technique, which is universal. Stride, no stride, hands high, hands low, that’s all style, as Mike “Super Jew” Epstein used to tell his hitting students at Epstein Hitting. “But if a good technique doesn’t conform to the laws of physics, then you’re essentially rolling a boulder uphill.”

  Ruth’s trigger mechanism was a hand pump, moving his hands from his chin almost to his waist, a technique also employed by Barry Bonds and Chris Davis, who discovered the similarity while studying film with Sports Illustrated reporter Tom Verducci in August of his breakout season in the major leagues.

  Today that’s called preloading and it facilitates a faster, better contraction of the muscles in the arms and the trunk. As biomechanical gurus now know, and as Ruth intuited, power comes from the contraction of muscle, stretched to a breaking point, that snaps forward with propulsive force when released. Batting coaches with Chris Davis’s previous team, the Texas Rangers, told him he’d never be able to hit that way. Then he led the major leagues with fifty home runs for the Baltimore Orioles.

  The pumping motion initiated the complex sequence of motions that composed Ruth’s swing. What modern coaches call “syncing up the upper and lower half,” Ruth called “a harmony of action,” the biomechanical process of generating the leverage required to create torque and lift. As he rocked back, shifting his considerable weight onto his left foot, he was pile-driving energy into the earth. But the earth didn’t move—not even for Babe Ruth. The energy reversed course, traveling up the kinetic chain from his lower legs to his thighs through his trunk, shoulders, and arms, and eventually into the bat and ball.

  He twisted his upper and lower body in opposite directions until his body was stretched taut. Then, in rapid succession: his feet came square with the plate, and he took a menacing stride toward the mound as if to reclaim what was formerly his, while shifting all his accumulated power and leverage back to front. His stride was long—far longer than allowed for by the miles per hour of modern pitching. “Give him a 30-ounce bat and he would be fine,” Ochart says.

  His upper body rotated with such force his lower body twisted like a double helix, his back left shoulder pivoting until it was parallel with his firm front leg. And he did it while keeping his head down and still. No small task, albeit an essential one that placed inordinate stress on the muscles of the neck and shoulders. “You’re essentially keeping your eyes as still as possible while absolute chaos is happening underneath you,” Ochart says.

  Which explains this July 26, 1923, wire-service bulletin: “Babe Ruth Swings So Hard at Ball He Strains Neck.”

  Rick Schu, assistant hitting coach for the San Francisco Giants, couldn’t help but notice the resemblance to Bryce Harper, another force of nature, when he coached the Washington Nationals. Just to be sure, he put clips of the two of them side by side on his computer monitor: he watched their bats uncoiling through the strike zone around the axis formed by their stiff front leg and their rear foot coming off the ground, signaling the transfer of weight was complete. When they made contact with the ball, their bats were in the exact same position.

  Photographers crouched along the first base line in anticipation of the next Ruthian blow captured those moments of exquisite contact with their old-fashioned equipment: chest forward and chin up, Ruth hurled himself down the base line as if running for the elevated train that stopped just outside the Stadium. That mincing gait everyone described when he circled the bases—that was his home-run trot. He ran hard, and slid hard, when he had to.

  As for telling Abe Kemp in the train compartment heading for Oakland, “Lots of times I just close my eyes and swing,” it turns out this is just another example of how far ahead of the game and all its experts Ruth was. It would take another sixty years for science to demonstrate what he already knew.

  The results were published in a 1984 study in American Scientist called “Why Can’t Batters Keep Their Eye on the Ball?” After testing athletes who could track the ball until it was 5.5 feet from the plate, authors Terry Bahill and Tom LaRitz concluded, “The best imaginable athlete could not track the ball closer than 5 ft from the plate, at which point it is moving three times faster than the fastest human could track.”

  Which means, in Ochart’s words, when
“the ball enters this dark area, your swing is already on its path.”

  If, as claimed, Ted Williams was able to see the collision of his bat and the ball—and the smoke signals generated by it—the authors contended, “it could only be possible if he made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball and then let the ball catch up to his eye.”

  Which sounds an awful lot like what Ruth meant when he told Kemp lots of times he sensed “the ball was coming in a certain place” and swung.

  A 2016 Japanese study of college baseball hitters titled “Contribution of Visual Information about Ball Trajectory to Baseball Hitting Accuracy” confirmed Ruth’s conclusion that no useful information is gained by a batter in the last third of a pitch’s sixty-foot, six-inch journey to home plate, so you might as well close your eyes and swing.

  Unlike today’s visually primed hitters armed with video available for review before, during, and after games, Ruth had only his visual acuity, recall, and a few fleeting, flickering film clips to document his form. Rudimentary and grainy as they are, the footage that survives, culled from the library of Major League Baseball Productions, by Preston Peavy of Peavy Baseball, testifies to his exquisite athleticism.

  Watch him move his feet, adjusting his stance in the batter’s box, trying this and that—sometimes even crossing his front foot over the back one in order to accentuate his weight shift; other times, literally walking into the pitch. “Watch where he walks through a pitch, where he actually moves his feet in the batter’s box,” Schu said.

  Probably he was trying to time whatever junk those early-twentieth-century hurlers were throwing. Whatever the reason, his technique remains an exemplar and a teaching tool for Schu and Lefebvre, trying to help players who are “dead in their lower half” regain rhythm and timing that has been coached out of them. “When I say, ‘Do the Babe Ruth drill,’ they all know exactly what it is,” Lefebvre says.

  Ochart does it, too, but he calls it the Happy Gilmore Drill. “He didn’t follow any rules,” Ochart says. “Of course, there weren’t any rules to follow. It was like dancing, art really.”

  He had no fear of failing, only of being ignored, and no need to be like anyone else. He conformed to one thing only—the kinetic ideal. He may not have invented the crack of the bat but he altered the acoustics of the game. He created the syncopation of modern baseball—and inspired its soundtrack: from Ronald Reagan’s wood-block re-creations on WHO in Des Moines to Red Barber’s gentle home-run call from the catbird seat (“Going, going, gone!”) to the booms that punctuated eighties TV highlight packages. Buck O’Neill, the future Negro League Hall of Famer for the Kansas City Monarchs, heard the future as a young boy, shagging balls outside a spring training game in Sarasota, Florida. It was a sound he had never heard before, the full muster of weight and leverage brought to bear on a big-league baseball. He wouldn’t hear anything like it again until the sound of Josh Gibson’s bat meeting a ball in a head-on crash at Griffith Stadium lured him out of the locker room in his jockstrap.

  Balls hit by Ruth looked different, too. “They were like homing pigeons,” his teammate Lefty Gomez once said. “The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.”

  For an instant, the ball defied the laws of gravity and was free. He knew that kind of liberty. Free since childhood from the constraints and conventions that governed everyone else, he was granted autonomy to define himself.

  Why not soar?

  He viewed every called strike, every swing and a miss, not as an impediment but as a prelude to the next home run. He swung the bat the way he lived his unexpected life—like a boy with nothing to lose. “I swing big with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big.”

  And in so doing he changed the trajectory of America’s game.

  Chapter 13

  October 23 / Bay Area II

  HOME-RUN KING AND RUNNER-UP DO STUFF HERE

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  BABE RUTH, "SULTAN" OF SWAT ARTIST, JUST A BIG "KID" WITH ZEST FOR PLAY

  —SAN FRANCISCO CALL

  I

  Two San Francisco boys, Rinaldo Ardizoia, known as Rugger, and Jack Stuart, known as Whitey, awoke on Sunday morning with the same American ambition: to see the Great Bambino hit a home run.

  They had little in common except for the opportunity the day presented. Jack had status, thanks to his father, a city cop who moonlighted for the San Francisco Seals. Rugger had moxie, a quality acquired through independence and derived from the name of the president’s preferred soft drink. Jack knew baseball; Rugger knew his way around town. But they had everything in common with the millions of boys—thousands in the Bay Area heading for the ballpark—who would hang from rough-hewn outfield fences trying to catch a glimpse of the Babe, and maybe even catch his eye; who darted across infield dirt to attach themselves to his arms, legs, bat, so he had no choice but to carry them home; who joined forces to hold him hostage in a sea of knickers and bandit caps. Boys for whom, as big as the Babe seemed to them on that Sunday, he would only grow bigger in meaning and memory.

  Rugger was two years old when he and his mother, Annunziata, arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Colombo on December 6, 1921, from Oleggio, a small town in northwest Italy. His father had emigrated a year earlier, having gotten a job in a Port Costa brickyard. By the time Rinaldo was six, his mother was dead from double pneumonia. His father, Carlo, was working six days a week—“eight hours a day, almost ten hours coming and going”—boiling animal by-products into glue in a factory in a windblown part of the city known as Butchertown, where decades later someone had the misbegotten notion to build a ballpark. “I lived by myself since I was six,” he would say.

  He spent his days in a park across the street from their home at 145 Arkansas Street watching the big boys play baseball at Jackson Playground. Some of them would go on to play in the Pacific Coast League; a few, Eddie Joost and Walt Judnich, would even make it to the bigs. They called him Rugger in admiration for the ruggedness he showed ducking through the thistles that surrounded the park.

  He took Joseph as his middle name upon confirmation and took his meals at the Connecticut Yankee, a neighborhood joint owned by the Salvotti brothers, who didn’t need encouragement to look after a motherless boy.

  Jack Franklin Stuart was eight years old, the son of Harry F. Stuart, a special officer attached to the Southern District of the San Francisco Police and to the city’s first bloodhounds, King and Lady. Harry and his boss, George Merchant, who trained the dogs to track the scent of missing children and miscreants, preferred the more dignified Scottish term sleuthhounds. “Just don’t call them meathounds,” Merchant told the press.

  Harry loved hunting and baseball and worked as a security guard at Rec Park. It was a wreck of a place—an old wooden ballpark swaddled between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets on the north and south, and Valencia and Guerrero Streets on the east and west in the Mission District. It was a snug fit, 250 feet or so down the right field line, beloved by lefty sluggers. And it was a raucous place to watch a ball game. Especially in the Booze Cage, a field-level enclosure behind home plate where, before Prohibition, seventy-five cents bought a seat, a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and two beers or a shot of booze. The Eighteenth Amendment was federal law; it did not apply in the Booze Cage: Harry F. Stuart looked the other way if patrons chose to bring their own flasks.

  Thanks to his connections and largesse, his son Whitey was named batboy for the Seals in 1927 and would keep the job through the 1930 season. On Sunday, October 23, it was his job to serve the Babe.

  II

  The Bay Area went to bed on Saturday night swathed in thick coastal fog as it so often did, and awoke that Sunday morning to news that the outward-bound steamer Coos Bay, loaded with lumber and a crew of thirty, had run aground at Mile Rock at the Golden Gate. Overnight radio airwaves had been cleared for emergency transmissions. The city was still draped in mist as Rugger Ardizoia and
an older friend from the playground made their way from Potrero Hill, a working-class neighborhood on the eastern side of the peninsula, insulated from fog and chill and tourists, to the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street.

  Christy Walsh had scheduled a Sunday doubleheader for Ruth and Gehrig, which by local custom called for one game to be played on either side of San Francisco Bay. The morning game was called for 10:00 A.M. in Emeryville, a small town snuggled between Oakland and Berkeley, home of the 1927 Pacific Coast League champion Oakland Oaks. The afternoon game would be played at Recreation Park, home of the once and future champion San Francisco Seals and the also-ran Mission Reds.

  The matinee would start after church let out. Sunday services at the Welsh Presbyterian Church located just beyond the center field fence had been interrupted once too often by loud home runs. By covenant, no Sunday-morning baseball was played at the Rec.

  Rugger had listened to the World Series on the radio, the first carried coast to coast. He couldn’t remember years later whether he heard Babe and Lou on the radio the night before with Al Santoro on KGO. He didn’t know that much about the game then—he didn’t start playing ball with the Catholic Youth Organization until three years later. All he knew about the Babe was that he hit home runs and had a candy bar named after him.

  He was determined to see both ends of the Sunday doubleheader, never imagining that one day he’d call each of the ballparks home.

  The Ferry Building, built on the Embarcadero in 1898, was still the locus of the city. It survived the 1906 earthquake—housing city refugees beneath its 660-foot skylight—with the hands on the 22-foot clock face frozen at 5:16 A.M., when the earth split in two. At peak operation, it accommodated fifty thousand travelers each day. Despite the optimistic lead story in the Chronicle that Sunday morning, the Bay Bridge, first proposed in 1872, was nine years from realization. The Golden Gate Bridge, that haughty feat of human artistry and engineering, would follow six months later. In October 1927, San Francisco and its residents were still living at the mercy of the tides and the fog. The steamer Coos was a total loss.