The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  “I know no words for his despondency,” Claire Ruth wrote later.

  Ray Robinson, a teenage delivery boy for a neighborhood liquor store on Manhattan’s West Side, who later authored a well-regarded Gehrig biography, delivered Scotch to Ruth’s Riverside Drive apartment one afternoon. He found the Babe in his robe and slippers. And he got a one-dollar tip—the only tip he ever got.

  Ruth went to very few ball games. The Yankees never issued him a lifetime pass to the Stadium. Ford Frick saw to it he got a pass for the National League. “It is nice to know the National League has a heart,” Ruth said. He had to pay his way into American League ballparks until 1936, when both leagues created a program of passes for ten-year veterans.

  That year, he was at the Polo Grounds for opening day. When the photographers found him, he was his most accommodating self: “Grin, sure I’ll grin,” he told the Associated Press. “What’s that? You want me to look bewildered? Okay, okay, anything to please.”

  Then the game began and they had better things to do.

  The AP referred to him as baseball’s forgotten man—a new name to add to the list of out-of-date honorifics that writers summoned now only in pity.

  The 1936 season ended with another Yankee World Series victory and rumors that Cap Huston was interested in purchasing the Dodgers and might want the Babe as his manager. At the Yankee victory banquet at the Commodore Hotel, Walsh arranged to have the band play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” as Ruth entered the room and eased his passage, escorting him to the table where all the bigwigs were gathered. But the rumors came to naught. Frick, whom he’d enriched through Walsh’s ghostwriting syndicate, had taken up broadcasting for WINS and championed Ruth’s managerial cause: “Miller Huggins predicted that if ever Babe Ruth grew up, quit his kidding, and got serious, he’d make a whale of a manager. Babe has done just that. I’d like to see him get his chance. I think he’d be a howling success.”

  Upon Frick’s elevation to president of the National League in 1937, however, he had a stone-cold change of heart, telling the Associated Press, “Despite all these heart-rending pieces I’ve been reading about what a pitiable figure he is—forced to spend his days shooting golf and moose [hunting] and following the sunshine in winter—I can’t help thinking there must be many folks in a worse fix.”

  The night before his forty-third birthday, Ruth rounded up a bunch of reporters for an impromptu celebration. He had installed a beer spigot in the kitchen. Claire had purchased a new easy chair for his less-than-easy retirement. He told reporters gathered in the den his proudest possession was a cartoon showing his bat parting the black clouds hovering over the game after the cheating scandal of 1919.

  Someone asked about his golf handicap. “Boys, if it wasn’t for golf I think I’d die,” he replied, according to the AP’s February 6, 1937, dispatch. “God bless the man who invented golf. I’m 43 on the head. But I can’t tell whether I’m just beginning to live. If it’s okay with everyone, I’d just as soon be 21 again.”

  He divided his time between bowling (usually alone, often at the Riverside Plaza Hotel) and golf (240 rounds in 1936). The day he retired, he called his friend Granny Rice and said, “Get out your clubs, kid, I’m ready for you now.”

  But how many rounds can a man play for fun or for charity before his patience wears thin and an executive in the Babe’s foursome who’d been berating his caddy finds himself dumped in a water hazard by the Big Fella who had nothing but time on his hands but no time for such foolishness.

  He began spending time at Greenwood Lake, a resort community in Orange County, New York, where he kept a Morin Craft speedboat and, according to Dorothy, a mistress. The lake straddled the New York–New Jersey border, its shore lined with restaurants and roadhouses. He spent most of his time at Greck’s Maplewood Inn on the Lake, a resort where he was treated like family.

  Ruth hunted with proprietor Ted Greck Sr. and bunked in a cottage bedroom with two twin beds belonging to Ted Jr., who piloted Ruth’s boat when he was too drunk to do so. He also played catch with local kids brave enough to approach him in one of the bars he favored and treated them all to ice cream. He hung out at the local firehouse and helped raise money for the ladies’ auxiliary. He always came alone.

  “He had sad eyes,” said Sally Jo Greck, Ted Sr.’s granddaughter. “He was looking for something.”

  Neither she nor her brother remembers the redheaded woman called Loretta mentioned in Dorothy Ruth Pirone’s memoir.

  The relationship with the Greck family did not end well. Ruth and Ted Sr. liked to gamble on the ponies and would sit in the bar and listen to the races broadcast from Monticello Raceway. “The bookie, Mr. Zimmerman, would come over, and they would bet on the horses,” she said. “One night he kept getting up to make a phone call. So the bookie says to my grandfather, ‘There’s something wrong, Teddy; he’s winning too much money.’

  “Ted goes, ‘No, no, no, he’s probably just luckier than me.’

  “Lo and behold, he was getting the race results from the race they were going to bet on because there was a delay from the time it was announced on the radio. They had a falling-out at that point. They never reconciled; then shortly thereafter, he passed away.”

  In June 1938, the phone rang. The Dodgers wanted him—basically as a lawn jockey in the first base coaching box, but they wanted him. Also, he would play in exhibition games and bat in pregame long-distance hitting contests. In his mind, and his mind only, there was also a possibility he might succeed Burleigh Grimes as manager. He asked Walsh to handle the negotiations. He asked for $25,000 and settled for $15,000 and cried when he signed the deal.

  His first day in uniform was June 19, a Sunday doubleheader. He did his job well, clapping and gesturing broadly in the first base coaching box, and helped increase Dodger attendance by two hundred thousand over the previous year. Then he got into a scrap with the ineffably scrappy Leo Durocher, the Dodgers shortstop and managerial heir apparent.

  They had never liked each other—both were still sore over the watch that went missing from Ruth’s locker when Durocher was with the Yankees in 1928–29, which Leo either did or did not steal, depending on who you believed. In the Yankee locker room, only Ruth was believed.

  At the end of July, Durocher got even, telling a reporter that Ruth had not called for the successful hit-and-run that scored the winning run on July 27. The reporter called Ruth a “wooden Indian” in the coaching box, according to Paul Dickson’s account in Leo Durocher. The next day in the clubhouse, Ruth demanded the opportunity to confront his accuser in front of the team. Durocher was not alone in the belief that Ruth’s inability to remember signs and plays should disqualify him from higher office, an ambition the Lip viewed as an expression of Ruthian entitlement.

  Durocher shoved Ruth into his locker, slapping his face repeatedly, leaving a mark beneath his right eye—Durocher said—and leaving Ruth in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  A month later, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, with nothing left to lose, Ruth asked the club road secretary to relay a request to be activated as a pinch-hitter, a conversation overheard by a young reporter for the New York Sun, Herb Goren, who recounted the events in a 1985 story for the New York Times.

  I asked him why he wanted to be a pinch-hitter.

  “Well, nobody sees me now,” he said. “By the time they get to the park, we’re done with batting practice.”

  And then the Babe had this afterthought: “In a couple of days the rosters go up from 25 to 40. I wouldn’t be taking anybody’s job. I wouldn’t want to do that. Oh, I know what the guys are saying. I wouldn’t get any fat ones to hit at. I can’t run. OK, if I hit one out, I don’t have to run.”

  The request was rejected. The clubhouse fracas with Durocher became public during the World Series, dooming whatever limited prospects remained for a managerial job. He couldn’t control himself! He walked away from his last job in major-league baseball with another black eye on his reputation.

>   The following spring, the May 8, 1939, issue of Look magazine featured a two-page photo spread devoted to baseball’s deposed home-run king—“The Strange Case of Babe Ruth.” The author was Christy Walsh. He found Ruth in the den of his Riverside Drive apartment dressed in a gaudy kimono and surrounded by 350 equally gaudy trophies and 150 cartoons. The Babe was at peace with his modest fortune. “They’ll never have to throw a benefit for George Herman Ruth,” Walsh said. “Only a month ago, he rejected an offer that would have made him wealthy ($5,000 just to sign the contract) because it involved liquor and that involved his obligation to his kid fans.”

  Much as he longed to be back in the old monkey suit, Walsh wrote, “he happens to be one of those-old-fashioned Americans who admits an employer has rights”—including the right not to hire him. That said, Walsh testified to Ruth’s expectation that he would be back with the Dodgers in 1939. “Babe would never have signed for a ‘short haul,’” he said.

  It was about this time that he was spotted wandering around the upper deck in right field at the Polo Grounds, directly across the Harlem River from the House That Ruth Built, where he no longer felt welcome, much less at home.

  It was a weekday afternoon. A bunch of kids from the Catholic Youth Organization and the Police Athletic League had gotten in free. One of them, Vin Scully, had walked twenty blocks from his grammar school to see his favorite player, Mel Ott. “There was a disturbance. And all the kids started going over to see what was going on. Well, curiosity killed the cat. There was the man, dressed the way you’d expect him to be, in a camel hair coat and cap. I guess it was early spring or fall. He said, ‘Hold it, hold it.’ He reached into his pocket and got a fistful of autographed, stamped cards, about the size of business cards with his name. He didn’t want pen and paper: he didn’t want ink on his coat.

  “When I told that story to friends of mine, they said, ‘Why was he in the Polo Grounds?’ When you’re eleven years old, you don’t think about those things. There he was. Maybe he heard there was a bunch of kids there. Then he kind of wandered away.”

  It was June 1902 all over again. It wouldn’t have been so painful if he hadn’t made the mistake of conflating fans and family. “As much as he surrounded himself with people, I think he was alone,” said his granddaughter Donna Analovitch. “He couldn’t get enough of people, but I don’t know if he was ever attached to anything other than his fans and the game. And I don’t think he had to have it because he was an egomaniac. I think he had to have it . . . for that sense of family.

  “I think Babe was a window-wisher. You look at other people’s lives and you wish. You’re in a car, you drive by a house, the windows are open, they’re all sitting down to dinner, and you wish some more. But you don’t really connect with it. And you don’t ever feel like you can have it.

  “Look at how he related to people. ‘Hey, kid! What can I sign?’ ‘Hi, Ma, how are you?’ ‘Hi, Pop, how are you?’ He really related to his fans on a level of his pals or his mom or his pop. You have all these people, but you can’t be close to any of them. They’re not yours; they’re not your people. You get to enjoy them and then they go home to their family, their parents, siblings, wives. And there he is alone again.”

  When the war came and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he took it almost personally. Hadn’t they loved him, mobbed him, celebrated him? The framed flag of Japan presented by the emperor—gone. The flags he’d hung in the living room—out the window. The two engraved bronze vases earned for the “Long Distance Hitting Competition” and “Most Runs Scored”—one of them he kicked across the room so hard he dented it.

  And when he learned they were taking his name in vain, charging into the American lines with a battle cry, “To hell with Babe Ruth,” he replied, “I hope every Jap that mentions my name gets shot—and to hell with all Japs anyway.”

  The New Yorker sent an emissary from “The Talk of the Town” to his apartment to find out how he was bearing up.

  “Sort of thing you’d expect from the itty-bittys,” Ruth replied hoarsely—he was nursing a scratchy throat.

  “I figured at the time that they were acting awful friendly. Why, we arrive at Yokohama and there’s one million of the little fellows lined up, bowing and cheering and carrying American flags in one hand and Jap flags in the other. We take the train to Tokio and there’s another million standing around near the station, all too damned polite. We schedule a practice game at a secret hideaway and when we arrive sixty thousand Japs are there first, yelling their lungs out. We get up in the mornings and are invited to eight different breakfasts by assorted committees. We step out of the hotel room and they’re jammed in the corridors and down on the street, waiting for autographs. They were lovely to us, just lovely. . . .

  “I’d go to bat and they’d yell, ‘Hooray, God of baseball, yee, yee, yee.’ I’d dust off my pants at second and they’d roar fit to die.”

  The patent wistfulness dissolved in an instant of baseball realpolitik. “A bat is as about as big as a Jap, and the fact is the itty-bittys can’t hit.”

  VI

  In the second week of May 1942, three months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens, Kenichi Zenimura; his wife, Kiyoko; and his sons, Howard and Harvey, were sent to live in an assembly center adjacent to the site of Firemen’s Park, which had been destroyed by fire in 1932. They lived in hosed-down horse stalls for five months, during which Howard celebrated his fifteenth birthday and his father built a baseball field and organized an Assembly Center baseball league.

  Meanwhile, Ruth was doing his bit for the war effort, selling war bonds, playing charity golf matches against Ty Cobb to raise money for the British War Relief Society and United Service Organizations, joining other prominent German Americans in condemning “every thought and deed of Hitler and his Nazis.”

  On August 23, 1942, he returned to the Stadium to face Walter Johnson, the Big Train from Washington, D.C., in a hitting exhibition between ends of a doubleheader on behalf of the Army and Navy Fund, for which they raised more than $80,000. Johnson was fifty-four; Ruth was forty-eight. For the first time in seven years he was back in pinstripes, and fretful in anticipation, worrying about his spikes and his uniform—was it back from the dry cleaner?

  Ruth hit Johnson’s fifth pitch into the right field stands. Johnson, who as a Senator surrendered 7 of Ruth’s 714 career home runs, kept throwing. Ruth kept swinging. Seventy thousand fans kept roaring. On the twentieth pitch, Ruth hit a ball into the upper deck that went just foul. He circled the bases anyway, doffing his cap to seventy-thousand partisans.

  In October 1942, the Zenimura family was deported to the Gila River Relocation Center, constructed on Pima Indian land in the Arizona desert, some fifty miles from Phoenix. The seventeen-thousand-acre center, divided into the Butte and Canal camps, was built in part by future Yankee owner Del Webb, who had competed in the Fresno Twilight League where Zeni had served as a manager. At its peak, the camp held 13,348 prisoners—most of them from the central California valley areas of Fresno and Sacramento—making it the fourth-largest city in Arizona.

  In a modern retelling of Zeni’s story, a children’s book called Barbed Wire Baseball published in 2013, the photograph of Ruth and Gehrig and Zeni taken in 1927 meant so much to him that he took it to Gila River, hanging it on the raw wood wall of the barracks as soon as he arrived.

  “Oh, no.” Howard shook his head. They had only one suitcase. He had to leave room for his baseball uniform, glove, and spikes. For two weeks Kenichi Zenimura refused to unpack his suitcase. Angry at the loss of his freedom, his automobile garage and dealership, his possessions, and at having burned everything he owned that he brought back from trips to Japan; depressed at being separated from his friends, who had been sent to a relocation center in Arkansas, he refused to do anything at all. And there was plenty to do. The barracks at Gila River were better built than other
s that had just black tar-paper roofs; they had double-roof construction and mason-board walls. But there were cracks between the floorboards, which had been raised above the unpaved desert roads. Kiyoko, who had lost a lung to tuberculosis, struggled to breathe when the wind picked up and the dust blew in. She spent days stuffing sheets in the cracks.

  The temperature in July reached 109 degrees. The desert nights were cold. The Zenimuras lived in Block 28, on the edge of the Butte camp, next to the barbed-wire fence and near a pile of cast-off lumber left behind by construction crews in their haste to finish the job in four months. One night at a bonfire, Zenimura decided to build a baseball diamond there.

  At first, he and his sons did all the work, cutting and burning sagebrush, cactus, and greasewood out in the desert, beyond the chain-link fence. Then other internees began to pitch in. Everyone in camp had a job—farming, cooking, working in the camouflage net factory, or building warship models. Zeni’s job? “The ballpark,” Howard said. “The camp was all dirt. Every so often they had to come and grade it. The scrapers that they had, the guy driving it was a Japanese guy so my dad said, ‘Can you level this area for us?’”

  An irrigation ditch from the camp farm ran right by the edge of Block 28. “We dug a trench at night from the irrigation canal to water the field. We diverted that wastewater into the ballpark and flooded the whole area and packed it down, let it set.”