by Jane Leavy
“This picture was taken at Fresno when Babe Ruth and Gehrig of the New York Yankees visited us on October 29th,” Zenimura wrote. “We played against them and made a wide reputation for our team. Babe Ruth is interested to visit Japan and have asked me to try and line up things in Japan so that he may be able to come to Japan with our team. I wrote to the Meiji University asking them to what extent they can offer to have Babe Ruth in Japan. I believe it will draw to have Babe Ruth in Japan.
“I am sending this picture to you so that you may have this picture in your leading page. It’s my remembrance to you.”
An offer was forthcoming. Again, it wasn’t enough. “I got a call from Japan to see if I could get Ruth to go to the Island and play for a $40,000 guarantee,” Zenimura told the Fresno Bee in 1962. “I contacted Ruth and he said he would go for $60,000.”
Conquering Japan was going to cost.
III
When Ruth returned to Firemen’s Park in the fall of 1931, the game was played at night under newly installed lights, which Ruth declared unnatural. Zenimura and the Nisei players were pointedly not included by the organizers, an omission Zenimura’s biographer, Bill Staples, attributes to rising ethnic tensions in the area stemming from the Depression.
Much had changed by then. The Yankees of Murderers’ Row encountered mortality in 1929. First in the bottom of the fifth inning of the first game of a Sunday doubleheader against the Red Sox at the Stadium on May 19. There were 50,000 people in the ballpark, 9,540 of them in the uncovered outfield bleachers. Of those, 5,000—mostly young boys known as “Babe’s gang”—were stationed behind him in Ruthville.
Ruth had hit his seventh home run of the year in the third inning and was due up again in the fifth. So even as the skies darkened, and rain began to fall, they held their positions, hoping he might gratify them again, but he grounded out to first.
Then: a cloudburst. The suddenness of the squall propelled them en masse toward the closest exit, down fourteen, steep, wet wooden steps constrained on either side by chicken wire and two-by-four wooden posts, a chute no more than ten feet wide.
The exact catalyst for the stampede that followed was uncertain. Someone said a woman screamed at a bolt of lightning; someone else said a boy slipped, or maybe it was a grown man. Accounts varied. “Panic Occurs in Ruthville,” read the thirteenth deck of the Times’ fifteen-deck front-page headline.
Sixty-two people were injured; two were trampled to death: sixty-year-old chauffeur Joseph Carter and seventeen-year-old Hunter College student Eleanor Price, who had brought her little brother, George, to the game. They were found at the bottom of the steps.
A patrolman, one of three hundred that converged on the scene, drew his pistol, ordering the pushing, fleeing, bellowing crowds to help him remove the chicken wire after one boy was pushed through it. A ladies’ room was converted into a temporary emergency room. There were no drugs or medical supplies on hand.
The players, who had retreated to the clubhouse, and the fans seated beneath the overhangs in the covered grandstand, were oblivious until sirens began to wail and the injured began straggling onto the field. The most serious cases were taken to the Yankee locker room.
The Associated Press and the Daily News credited Ruth with being first to return to the field and, “using his hands as a megaphone, summoned physicians to come to the Yankee offices.” The United Press reported that Price died in his arms as he stroked her brow. “Ruth Holds Head of Dying Girl Victim as Grandstand Throngs Laugh, Unaware of Tragedy,” blared the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The story mentioned that an elderly fan had collapsed in his arms and died during a barnstorming tour the previous year.
The Daily News called it “a tragedy of stupidity,” blaming throngs of fans who had huddled at the bottom of the stairs when the rain began, waiting in case it abated or Ruth pulled off another spectacular feat, something worth hustling back up the steps in the rain to see.
The Yankees were absolved of responsibility by the Bronx District Attorney. They did not cancel their exhibition game in New Haven the next day.
Upon their return, Babe and Claire, accompanied by Christy Walsh and a contingent of press photographers, went to Lincoln Hospital to visit the remaining convalescents, boys with broken ribs, fractured skulls, and battered faces, whose appearance compelled Claire to retire to the hospital office, where restoratives were applied. Then they paid condolence calls at the homes of the deceased. George Price, who did not yet know of his sister Eleanor’s death, told Ruth she would be sore at having missed him.
Two weeks later, after hitting his tenth home run on June 1, Ruth disappeared from the Yankee lineup. His right wrist was hurting, and he had developed a heavy chest cold that threatened to turn into pneumonia. But it seemed more dire than that when Dr. Edward King, his personal physician, sent him to St. Vincent’s Hospital overnight, and later acknowledged hearing a slight heart murmur. Rumors spread of a heart attack.
“Reported at various times yesterday first as desperately ill, then as dying and finally as dead, Babe Ruth, lying comfortably on a day bed in the living room of his apartment . . . chuckled at the radio bulletins” and, the Times said, instructed Claire to inform reporters congregating at the front door: “You tell them that I’m far from a dead one.”
The next day, the invalid granted them an audience in a room the New York Sun compared to the rotunda of Grand Central Terminal and Versailles. He was reclining in a chaise longue in “a Paisley dressing gown of the stuff and design so beloved by our maiden great-aunts,” the Sun opined, “over which was spread a pale violet coverlet of heavy silk. Upon his small feet were fawn-colored slippers.”
Ruth informed the press that henceforth he would no longer play both games of a doubleheader or any regular season exhibition games. Also, he was going on vacation. He said he needed some time to “get my nerves in shape.”
Ordered to bed for a minimum of ten days, and warned that he would have to observe certain abstentions—no smoking, no chewing? No bending an elbow?—Babe and Claire took off for parts undisclosed. A cottage on the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, it turned out, where he did some fishing and swimming. He also played croquet in Washington.
He did not return to the team until June 19, pronouncing himself fine and acting as if nothing had ever happened. But things were not fine. The team was slipping and aging and maybe a bit spooked. Manager Miller Huggins developed a bacterial infection on his cheek that began as a carbuncle, which he could not quit worrying about. Three times during the summer he missed games because of illness. He entered the hospital on September 20. Five days later he was dead.
News reached the Yankees in the bottom of the fifth inning at Fenway Park. After a moment of silence, while the flag was lowered to half-mast, they played on, with the Yankees winning in the eleventh inning by the score of 11–10. In the clubhouse, Ruth cried, as did several of his teammates. When Tom Meany reported this to a copy editor at his paper in New York, he was ordered to quit overwriting. “I can’t help it,” Meany replied. “They were crying.”
They finished second behind the Philadelphia Athletics in 1929 and 1930 and third in 1931. The Ruth-Gehrig-led Yankees would win only one more championship, which is remembered more for the legend of the Called Shot than for Ruth’s accomplishments in that World Series (preceded by a week in bed, packed in ice with a low-grade fever and suspected appendicitis.)
Perhaps this explains, at least in part, why everything after the sixtieth home run and his three-home-run game in the 1928 World Series feels almost anticlimactic—just more of the same.
Ruth became a constant in a time of national upheaval, a last repository of American bravado. No one begrudged him his eighty thou a year for 1931–32. Or minded one little bit his braggadocio when asked about making more than the president of the United States: “I had a better year.”
His decline as an offensive player was hardly precipitous. In his last seven years in Yankee pinstripes, designed to
make him look more svelte, his percentage of home runs per at-bat actually increased from 8.4 percent to 8.7 percent, compared with Gehrig’s career percentage of 6.2 percent. His rate of RBI production also increased later in his career: from 0.84 RBI per game between 1914 and 1927 to 0.95 RBI between 1928 and 1935. (Gehrig’s career value was .92 RBI per game.)
His WAR for his last seven years as a Yankee was 8.2, compared with 9.2 during his first eight years in New York. Most tellingly, according to Dave Smith, founder of Retrosheet, the online compendium of major-league statistics, his OPS+ was 195 for the later years of his career, “which is still 95 percent better than the average major leaguer.”
In 1931, he had one of his finest offensive seasons, the last of six straight years in which he led the major leagues in home runs (46), along with 162 RBI and 149 runs scored. At Wrigley Field a year later, where he sabotaged a short fly ball hit to him in the outfield, the problem was clear. “My dogs ain’t what they used to be.”
Watching from the press box, Westbrook Pegler wrote, “As an outfielder he is pretty close to his past tense, which may mean that one year from now he will be only a pinch-hitter. He has been breaking this news to himself and the customers all year.”
Whatever he had lost in reflex and mobility, he maintained in dramatic timing—hitting the first home run in the inaugural All-Star Game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1933. He finished that season, his twentieth in the major leagues, with 34 home runs, 104 RBI, and a .301 batting average. Pretty good for anyone else. He was thirty-nine years old. The Yankees had had enough of him.
At the end of the season, Frank Navin, the owner of the Detroit Tigers, asked for and received Jake Ruppert’s (grateful) permission to speak to Ruth about becoming player-manager for the Tigers. But Christy Walsh had scheduled exhibition games in Hawaii. Ruth blithely said he’d call Navin when he got back.
By the time he got home the job had been filled by Mickey Cochrane.
In December, Walsh staged a celebratory dinner at the New York Athletic Club on the occasion of the announcement of Ruth’s All America Baseball Team. He created a testimonial tabloid he called “The Daily Ghost,” which included a tribute from Hendrik Willem van Loon casting Ruth as the unlikely antihero of the self-indulgent twenties:
During the great and unglorious period of our national delusion when every man was a potential millionaire and the wisecrack was the passport to success, when nobody any longer tried to do things well or at least as well as he could which is all we can ever ask of anyone all the old standards went by the boards and all that was necessary to become a hero was a sneaky ability to “get by” with the least possible effort. It was then that you rendered us all a service for which I am among many others who still believe in human progress are profoundly grateful. For during those unfortunate years, we could still be certain of two absolute standards of values that could not possibly be challenged: the integrity of Christy Walsh and the perfection of your work on the diamond.
It read like an epitaph. Only Ruth didn’t recognize it.
Desperate to be rid of their arthritic, obese albatross in the outfield, Ruppert and Barrow cut his salary to $35,000. When that didn’t discourage him, Barrow suggested he might like to manage the Yankees farm club in Newark.
Why, that’s like asking Jake Ruppert to run a soda fountain, Ruth replied.
Walsh indulged his vanity, as did Claire, and later rued his bad advice, telling columnist Joe Williams that had Ruth accepted the minor-league assignment and gotten some managerial experience, Ruppert surely would have summoned him to the Bronx after another desultory season under McCarthy. “That year the Yankees were to finish second for the third straight year,” Walsh said. “If I hadn’t dissuaded Ruth against going to Newark I’m sure Ruppert would have called him up.”
By 1934, his body was breaking down; his knees so painful, his grandson, Tom Stevens, said, he once had to ask teammate Joe Sewell for help putting on his baseball pants. He had taken some kind of painkiller and in his stupefaction had put them on backward.
His roistering days were behind him. If not quite sedate, the Babe had become at least respectably middle-aged, especially around the middle. He had made his future ambitions all too clear, all too often. He hadn’t understood why the Yankees turned to former teammate Bob Shawkey to succeed Huggins in 1930. He wasn’t alone in his perplexity; that experiment didn’t work. He fumed, pouted, and turned surly when former Chicago Cubs manager Joe McCarthy was hired to succeed Shawkey in 1931.
His thwarted ambitions filled hundreds of column inches in the summer of 1934. Friendly writers pointed out that the Babe had never made a mistake on the baseball field; naysayers responded that he couldn’t remember anyone’s name much less all those complicated signs that needed to be relayed from the dugout—like scratching your head when the batter was supposed to take a pitch.
On Saturday morning, June 25, Jhan Robbins, the boy reporter from Samuel Tilden High School in Brooklyn, boarded the train for the hour-and-a-half ride to Yankee Stadium to interview the Babe. He wasn’t a Yankee fan—he was from Flatbush, after all. But he had an assignment for his school newspaper and a note from his teacher, which served as a press credential, and a brown-bag lunch his mother had tied with string. He headed for the bleachers, where he asked an usher for directions to the Yankee locker room.
The Babe was drinking a soda pop, and gulping handfuls of salted peanuts when Jhan found his way to the clubhouse. “Have a swig,” the Babe said, handing over the soda bottle.
Somehow overcoming the germophobia his mother had instilled in him, Jhan helped himself to a deep gulp of independence and recalled the sports column he’d read on the train, the sum total of which was the old saw: “How can he manage the Yankees when he can’t even manage himself?”
Hoping to sound grown-up, he thought that might make a good line of questioning, and worked that one in after lobbing some initial softballs. Ruth’s response was molten. “That’s the trouble with you newspaper guys,” Ruth roared. “You never forget the past. You never give a guy a credit for learning anything.
“Maybe I lived it up in my time; but don’t forget, I did the papers a favor—I gave you plenty to write about!”
The spasm of fury directed at the high school boy—you newspaper guys—was as poignant as it was hilarious.
Now I’ve got to answer to a kid?
“I’ve settled down now,” he said. “All I want is a chance.”
It was the plaintive cry of a man whose epitaph had already been carved in a million headlines: Just a big overgrown kid. It was an authentic voice, not the confabulation of a ghostwriter. This was a man begging to be seen for who he had become and not for the image he so happily collaborated in constructing. It figures he would reveal himself most fully to a fourteen-year-old boy reporter trying to play the role of an adult, but ironic, too, that he was pleading with a child to be seen as an adult.
The Babe couldn’t allow the kid to go away feeling as bruised as the banana his mother had packed for him that morning. So he made him a promise he could no longer keep. “I’ll show you I still got plenty,” he vowed. “I’ll hit one just for you.”
He didn’t. But he hit a grand slam the next day, the sixteenth and last of his career.
It would take decades for Robbins to understand the complexity of the emotional transaction that had taken place between them. If Ruth was the first athlete to fully avail himself of the modern mechanisms of image making, he was also the first to feel trapped by them. The boy who never grew up. The idea was as fixed and as immobile as he had become in the field.
He was a national monument, something to ogle, to say you’d seen. Kids on the West Side of Manhattan, like Arnold Hano, went to the Stadium and demanded that Joe McCarthy put him back in the game after he’d been taken out for a late-inning defensive replacement—as he was seventy-nine times in 1934—though they knew the rule. We want the Babe. We want the Babe. “Still we were disappointed,” said Ha
no, who became a sportswriter and twice wrote about Ruth for Sport. “You couldn’t replace him. It was like having a godfather that we could look up to and be proud of, doing all those things nobody had never done before.”
Kids like Blake Talbot, a young Missouri recruit at one of the Citizens’ Military Training Camps that Ruth supported, who swelled with pride when he was selected to attend a St. Louis Browns game at Sportsman’s Park and visit the Yankee locker room. “And there was the ol’ Babe setting on one of the wooden benches taking his pants off and getting ready to get dressed in front of his old tin locker. His tummy was hanging over his belt.”
Low over his belt.
Naked except for the burning stogie in his mouth, he talked to the kid for maybe half an hour, answered all his questions, leaning over to Gehrig to ask, “Did they give me a hit or an error on that one I mauled?”
“Gehrig said, ‘An error.’
“And Babe said, ‘Those SOBs. I have to put it over the fence to get a hit.’”
After hitting his 700th home run on July 13 in Detroit, he announced he was done as an everyday player. He went 0 for 3 in his last game as a Yankee on September 30. At season’s end, he asked Ruppert if he was still satisfied with McCarthy as his manager. “Thoroughly,” Ruppert replied.
His Yankee career was over.
The Babe made plans to set sail for Japan with Lefty O’Doul, Connie Mack, and a team of American League all-stars, among them Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, and Moe Berg, the catcher who would become better known as an American spy. It was then, in applying for his passport, that he discovered he was a year younger than he thought: his birth date was February 6, 1895, not February 7, 1894.