The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  The Southern Pacific Railroad, with its terminus at the Oakland pier, ferried railroad cars and automobiles on steam-driven boats that served full-course meals during the eighteen-minute, 3.5-mile trip. Ridership was down, the Oakland Tribune reported that morning, but consumption was up—235,000 snails consumed during the previous twelve months!

  The Key System, a privately held commuter rail-and-ferry system created by Francis Marion Smith, manufacturer of the cleanser 20 Mule Team Borax, made the trip three minutes faster, thanks to a pier that reached three miles into San Francisco Bay. Commuters from Oakland and Alameda were accustomed to traveling with unshowered baseball players still in uniform. J. Cal Ewing, cofounder of the Pacific Coast League, still owned the Oaks and Seals then and saw profit in promoting the Bay Area’s version of New York’s subway series.

  The bright orange electrified Key boats, with stained-glass windows on the upper decks and inlaid tile floors, left the Ferry Building every fifteen or twenty minutes beginning at the top of the hour. They served coffee in the morning and corned beef hash and apple pie at night. On board, you could buy a shoeshine, a milkshake, or the morning paper with the recap of the Saturday game at the Rec.

  Ruth hadn’t done much. The quality of Bay Area competition may have had something to do with his sorry performance, though it didn’t bother Gehrig. He had a double and a long home run. Even so, the headline in the morning Chronicle was about Ruth: “Out in Cold Where Homers Figure.”

  “I suppose you’re going to rub it in now but go ahead and have your fun,” Ruth told Gehrig after the game. “I’ll get ahold of one tomorrow and when I do—”

  “They’ll forget that I ever hit one,” Gehrig replied.

  III

  Disembarking in the East Bay, Rugger and his friend took the San Pablo streetcar to the corner of Fortieth Street and Park Avenue, where a ballpark had been constructed in three months during the winter of 1912–13 to celebrate the Oaks’ first Pacific Coast League championship—and their last until they beat the Seals in 1927 by fourteen and a half games. The ballpark was happily situated on 495 acres once part of the homestead of town father John Emery and today is part of Pixar Animation Studios. Home plate currently resides in Pixar’s parking lot.

  By the twenties, the streetcar line along San Pablo Avenue had attracted lots of business to an assortment of speakeasies, racetracks, gambling parlors, brothels, and other establishments of the flesh that later prompted Alameda County district attorney Earl Warren to label Emeryville “the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast.”

  But the weather conditions were particularly favorable for baseball and a 120-game season. Geographically and financially independent from the big leagues, the Pacific Coast League—the third major league, as it was so often called—produced many of the game’s greatest names: Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, the Splendid Splinter, the Old Perfessor, “Poosh ’Em Up” Tony Lazzeri, Frank “the Crow” Crosetti, Frank “Smead” Jolley, Arnold “Jigger” Statz, Paul “Big Poison” Waner (and his brother, Lloyd). Also, Earl Averill, Harry Heilmann, Dutch Ruether, Mickey Cochrane, and Billy Martin. In 1928, the Cleveland Indians offered to trade outfields with the Seals—San Francisco management wisely declined. A year later, the Yankees bought pitcher Vernon “Lefty” Gomez from the Seals, salvaging their season and acquiring a lifelong friend for Babe Ruth.

  Oaks Park was the largest in the Pacific Coast League in dimension, with fences equal to if not farther than those in many major-league baseball stadiums, but seating capacity was only ten thousand. So when thirteen thousand people showed up by 10 a.m., half of them children, it was clear special ground rules would apply. Outfielders made up their own rules, dropping fly balls on purpose to allow kids a chance to grab a souvenir.

  Rugger and his pal arrived in time to find a place for themselves in a walkway along the third base line. They witnessed the presentation of floral pieces to Ruth and Gehrig. They heard the Big Brother Band from the Oakland Lodge of the Elks, which also entertained between innings, and observed eighty-eight-year-old Dan “the Plucky Pedestrian” O’Leary—known for walking 144 straight hours in 1875—circle the bases six times in five minutes.

  The lineups featured plenty of talent: Lefty O’Doul, another pitcher turned slugger, who would twice lead the National League in hitting; just-retired Babe Pinelli, who went on to become an umpire, calling balls and strikes for Don Larsen’s 1956 World Series perfect game; Gussie Suhr, who hit .279 during eleven years in the majors; Willie Kamm, the Chicago White Sox third baseman; Gordon Slade, who would play five years in the majors; Yankee shortstop Tony Lazzeri, another San Francisco boy who started in the PCL and ended in the PCL with the Seals in 1941.

  The Sunday-morning lineups were further distinguished by the presence of two of Ruth’s roommates, both of whom claimed authorship of one of the most quoted of Babe-isms: Ping Bodie, who played the outfield for the Bustin’ Babes, and Jimmy Reese, who played second base for the Larrupin’ Lous: “I didn’t room with Ruth. I roomed with his suitcase.”

  Otherwise, the game was noteworthy for what Ruth failed to accomplish. His back was balky. His hands were bleeding. “Just try hitting for about a solid hour each day and see how sore your hands get,” he said.

  Wylie Wells Kelley, the official cinematographer of the Oakland Tribune, trained his trusty movie camera lens on the Bambino, as the paper put it in its Monday edition, capturing a succession of Ruthian pop-ups, fly-ball outs, and groundouts, and his outsized attempt to please, all of which appeared nightly that week at Oakland’s Hippodrome Theater. “Failing to hit, he tried to pitch and then to satisfy the customers he jumped into the stand and led the band,” Abe Kemp wrote in the San Francisco Examiner.

  Which was situated just in front of Rugger Ardizoia, who admired the way the Babe swung his arms in time to the music just like a real conductor.

  Gehrig, who drove in four runs with a homer, a triple, and a double, went to the mound in the ninth. But Oakland fans were so eager to get a look at Ruth they refused to let the last hitter bat, clambering over the fence en masse. Gehrig tossed the last ball in the air, as was the custom at Oaks Park, and fled. The game was called. The Lous won 6–3.

  Rugger did not join the stampede. “Being a little guy, you could get trampled,” he said.

  IV

  Jack “Whitey” Stuart was already in uniform when Rugger’s chaperone dropped him off at the Rec for the second game of the doubleheader. “Then I was in charge of my own self,” Rugger said. “I had to get around. Otherwise, what could I do?”

  Jack—wearing his home white Seals uniform, the pants just reaching the knee as was the fashion, with thick, dark stirrups covering his white socks, and white baseball shoes with real spikes—arrived early with his father, who was a good friend of the Seals’ manager Nick Williams. They had work to do.

  Rugger had to get there early enough not to get caught climbing the twenty-five-foot stack of lumber that hugged the left field wall. “That’s where we sneaked in,” Rugger said. “We’d climb up the lumber and over the fence. I went down into the stands and got a seat.”

  The ballpark, built a year after the quake, was idiosyncratic even for its time. The clubhouse was in deep center field with a Camel cigarette billboard mounted on top. Beside the clubhouse stood a fifteen-foot-high woodcut figure of a bull—an advertisement for Bull Durham Tobacco. A fifty-dollar prize went to any player who hit the bull on the nose. According to the ground rules any ball coming to rest in the one-and-a-half-foot-square hole in front of the clubhouse housing the gas meter was an automatic home run.

  A goat housed under the grandstands cut the grass. Two apartment buildings perched over the right field fence provided target practice for lefty sluggers. “They haven’t moved the fences back at Rec Park, have they?” was Ruth’s first question for Abe Kemp when he met their train.

  No, Kemp said. But they had mounted a thirty-foot chicken-wire screen on top of the right field wall to add a measure of respectabili
ty to all those cheap chip-shot home runs.

  “You’ll like the park,” Ruth assured Gehrig.

  Christy Walsh was busy meeting with a delegation of city fathers from Santa Cruz who hoped to secure the last open date on the tour, Wednesday, October 26, but were outbid by deeper pockets from San Jose. News photographers jockeyed for position as Lefty O’Doul, the PCL’s first Most Valuable Player, received a thousand-dollar check from Lou Gehrig, the major league’s unremunerated Most Valuable Player. Ruth had requested O’Doul’s presence in as many of the California games as possible. O’Doul was an old running buddy from the 1920 and 1922 Yankees who later explained their friendship to his cousin Tom this way: “Everybody liked him because he had an automobile.”

  Lefty also said they had a lot in common: neither was college educated, both came from working-class families, and both liked to have a good time.

  When one of the photo jockeys asked Ruth for a picture, Babe summoned his batboy to join him. Maybe it was in thanks for bringing a first-aid kit to the mound when he hurt his finger while throwing batting practice, or some other bit of baseball business that Whitey had seen to in the clubhouse.

  They stood shoulder (Whitey’s) to waist (Babe’s) on the infield grass. Ruth’s ham-hock arm reached all the way around him, his ring finger extending below the boy’s elbow; Jack stood stiffly with his fist clenched at his side. Two holes oddly excised from the bill of his cap let the light shine through, making him squint and exposing his nervousness. Ruth was his hugely nonchalant self, hand on hip, fingers splayed like the prongs on the end of a backhoe.

  More than any other photograph taken of Ruth with children, this one gives a sense of his size and how it must have felt to be a boy standing in his shadow.

  “Looming,” is how Jack would describe Ruth to his daughter. “A big, looming guy.”

  V

  In the seventh inning when the teamsters and working joes in the Booze Cage had had their fill, they opened the place up to kids who came to gawk and transact business with representatives of the daily papers who needed paperboys, like Rugger, to hawk the afternoon editions in the stands. “In those days, they used to grab you and put newspapers under your arm: ‘Sell these, kid,’” Rugger said.

  Boys with ambition spread out through the stands with afternoon papers to sell. Rugger’s goal was to earn enough to buy the candy that would sustain him on the forty-minute walk up Potrero Hill. The paper sold for three cents. Sometimes his customers would give him a nickel and say, “Keep the change.”

  All that divided the players from the booze cagers was a scrim of chicken wire. It was very intimate and very profane. Women were not welcome in the eight rows of seats that stretched from third to first. You said whatever you wanted and the players said whatever they wanted back to you.

  “Everybody was yelling, calling, trying to commandeer the Babe’s attention,” Rugger said. “‘Hey Babe!’ ‘How you doin’ there?’ ‘Hey Lou!’ But nothing personal.”

  Ruth and Gehrig didn’t acknowledge him. “Aw, no, too many guys are yelling. They’d be turning around all the time.”

  Ruth couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet away from him. What Rugger noticed, right then and there, was the size of his hands. “Oh, Christ! Another half the time bigger than an ordinary man’s.

  “And goddamn can he hit that ball.”

  Ruth resumed his “murderous art” that afternoon, Kemp wrote after counting seven batting-practice home runs bombard the Welsh Church behind the center field fence.

  “Holy,” Rugger said.

  When boys in the left field stands cried out for him to hit a few their way, he did—the boy working the scoreboard caught one on a fly. During the game, he hit two home runs, one of which, Rugger said, was caught by a boy standing on the roof of one of the apartment buildings behind the chicken-wire fence in right field.

  The Babes won 15–4 and he was redeemed.

  After the game, Rugger went back to the Booze Cage with the money he’d made from the papers he’d sold to settle up with the newspaper dealer. On a good day, he’d end up with maybe ten, eleven cents. “Enough for a couple boxes of Zeenuts. A Zeenut with a baseball picture inside.”

  He was pooped after the long day and the two-mile walk home. He didn’t tell his father about it. Carlo didn’t speak English. “No use talking to him,” Rugger said. “He didn’t know what baseball was. He only cared in 1936 and 1937. I was taking home $150 a month. And he was making $20 a week.”

  VI

  Other kids left the Rec with miniature bats and balls that Ruth threw into the stands. Jack Stuart came away with the jersey he wore, an autographed bat and ball from the Babe, and bitter memories at odds with the sentiment he would come to attach to the occasion. In June 1997 he would tell a reporter from the Register-Pajaronian, a not-quite daily paper in Watsonville, California, that when he asked Columbia Lou to pose with him and the Babe, Gehrig refused on the grounds that he didn’t approve of Ruth’s morals, which doesn’t sound like something an eight-year-old batboy would know or something Gehrig would have said then, no matter how strongly he would come to feel later about Ruth’s behavior.

  Jack’s adult children figured he had gotten some inside dope from players on the Seals’ bench. He also said that when cries rose up from kids in the bleachers—“Hit it here, Babe!”—Ruth would nod and smile and mutter under his breath, “Little bastards.”

  Jack used the bat that Babe Ruth gave him and broke it, not the biggest loss of his childhood, which wasn’t any happier than the Babe’s. His mother bet the ponies and lost the family house in the Marina district. His father was killed by a shotgun blast from his own rifle on Jack’s twenty-first birthday. Police ruled Harry’s death an accident after finding that the trigger caught on a coat hanger in the back seat of his car, discharging the bullet that killed him. It also shattered a window in the garage, through which Jack and his mother saw him slumped across the running board. It fell to Jack to inform the police.

  He joined the force and then the Army and became an investigator. He saw a lot of the world but not his own family. After he retired, he was asked to join the San Francisco Baseball Old Timers Association, an invitation-only group formed in 1941 for the express purpose of talking baseball and occasionally playing baseball, which Jack did, not particularly well, until the mid-1990s. His claim to fame was that he had once been Babe Ruth’s batboy.

  As he grew older, he found that the Babe still loomed over his life. When the Register-Pajaronian resurrected the story of his day with the Babe and reprinted the photo of them together on the field. Jack gave it to all the past presidents of the Old Timers Association, including Rugger Ardizoia. Sometimes he even signed autographs at Candlestick Park—Jack “Whitey” Stuart, Babe Ruth’s batboy—and after that at Pac Bell or whatever it was called next.

  When Jack died in October 1998, his death notice in the San Francisco Chronicle listed all the places he had served: Japan, Korea, Germany, and the Old Rec. At his wake, the jersey he wore that day was laid out in the coffin with him.

  VII

  Rugger Ardizoia never figured to get any closer to the Babe than he did that long, sweet day in his hometown by the San Francisco Bay. It was enough that they had baseball in common and some other things, too—they had led independent lives at a very young age.

  He joined the CYO baseball league when he was old enough, played American Legion ball, and became a pitcher late, like Ruth, in his junior year at Commerce High School (striking out sixty-three batters in seven games, including two no-hitters). Like the Babe, he signed a contract when he was underage with the Mission Reds, forcing him to forgo a scholarship offer from Stanford University that arrived after high school graduation. For a time he was considered the best pitching prospect in the PCL since Lefty Gomez. “My father said, ‘I supported you for seventeen years, now you support me.’”

  In his first professional game, he pitched five innings of no-hit ball against the Padres, inc
luding Ted Williams, in San Diego. Then he came home to pitch at the Rec.

  In 1939–40 he pitched for the Hollywood Stars, the Pacific Coast League franchise in Los Angeles owned by Bob Cobb, Christy Walsh Jr.’s father-in-law, and was good enough to be acquired by the Yankees, who brought him to spring training in 1941—just in time for the war to get in the way of his aspirations. It did not occur to him to object to the draft on the grounds that he wasn’t a citizen.

  He served in the Air Corps and played on the Seventh Air Force baseball team that entertained the troops in the Pacific, including on the battlefield of Iwo Jima, less than a week after the shooting ended. Also on the team were a couple of other Italian boys from San Francisco—Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Silvera. And some other local guys who went to the majors: Walt Judnich, Red Ruffing, and Joe Gordon.

  In 1946, he returned to baseball and to Oaks Park, where he won fifteen games for manager Casey Stengel, helping the Old Perfessor win back some of the respect he’d lost after being canned by the Boston Braves.

  In the spring of 1947, he went to spring training with the Yankees again and this time he made the big club. He was a relief pitcher who threw batting practice, a mop-up man with Zelig-like timing if not a powerful arm. He was the unidentified player standing beside Joe D. in a nude locker-room photo taken in the spring of 1941, auctioned off for big money some sixty years later. Some doubted its authenticity until Rugger vouched for his privates. “Jesus, that’s me,” he said, after recognizing himself in the Sporting Green section of the Chronicle.