The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Before leaving Hollywood on May 18 on the Santa Fe Chief, he learned that the Yankees intended to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stadium on June 13 and retire number 3. He agreed to manage the 1923 team in an old-timers’ exhibition game. For one day, he would be the manager of the New York Yankees.

  All sixteen surviving members of the 1923 team, the Yankees’ first World Championship team, were getting dressed in the new clubhouse when Ruth arrived with Emory Perry on one arm and Frank Dulaney on the other.

  The teammates didn’t crowd him the way the photographers did trying to get a picture of the Babe putting on the uniform for the last time. Nat Fein, a thirty-four-year-old human-interest photographer for the Herald Tribune, had caught the assignment, because the usual guy had called in sick. He didn’t know the etiquette of the locker room or that there was etiquette in the locker room. “He pulled out the belt showing how much thinner he’d got and I wanted to make a picture then,” Fein wrote in an unpublished memoir, “but they told me he’s going to have all he can do to get out there—he’s a very sick man—and the least bother here as possible because there’s going to be a ceremony outside.”

  When he raised his Speed Graphic to take a picture, Anthony Camerano, an AP sports photographer, said, “Lay off him. He’s got all he can do with just lasting the day.”

  The photographers asked for a shot of him at his old locker. The Yankees had moved their clubhouse across the diamond to the first base side before the 1946 season but had left the old lockers behind, including the big red one still stenciled in white: Babe Ruth, No. 3.

  So they led him back to the old clubhouse, draped in a gabardine topcoat to ward off death’s chill.

  The Cleveland Indians were in town. Visiting clubs were accustomed to seeing Ruth’s locker all closed up. Invariably, one of their bunch would gesture to it as they were dressing, the way first baseman Eddie Robinson had that morning, and say, Sure could use the Big Fella today.

  The Indians were out on the field taking batting practice when Ruth arrived. He sat in a red wooden chair the color of his locker, placed incongruously on a beat-up Persian runner, legs crossed, left over right. Fein asked if he’d mind pretending to tie his shoe. The Sultan of Swat reached a bony right hand toward his already tied left shoe. Maybe Fein didn’t know he was a left-hander. Babe gazed up at him, a limp forelock draping his brow. Even his hair was drained of energy.

  Robinson was sitting in the dugout with Bob Lemon and Dale Mitchell when Ruth emerged from the tunnel. Ruth still had some belly on him, Robinson thought, and pride enough not to set foot on a baseball field without spikes. But the white long-sleeved undershirt he wore under his uniform was inadequate for the day. Raw and wet and cold, it was a day to stay home in bed even if you weren’t dying. Fifty thousand of Babe’s people showed up anyway.

  When at last they brought him into the dugout, he sat on the bench with the Indians, pulled his topcoat close with that bony right hand, and asked to see a left-handed glove, a marvel of webbing and stitching that he declared big enough to catch a basketball. He asked Mel Harder, now an Indians coach, if he remembered the day he got five hits off him in Cleveland, all to left field, and got booed by the crowd. Harder remembered.

  The Yankees lined up along the first base line, caps over their hearts as if expecting the National Anthem. Ed Barrow, the old general manager, with whom Ruth had contended his entire career, embraced him at home plate. The band played “Auld Lang Syne,” a tacit, melancholy acknowledgment of the estrangement between the Babe and his team. The Yankees gave him a gold pocket watch—an odd gift for a dying man. “The guys didn’t know what to do,” said Yogi Berra, then in his first full year with the Yankees. “We just stood and watched.”

  Ruth was the last player introduced, summoned into “the cauldron of sound he must have known better than any other man,” as W. C. Heinz wrote in his indelible phrase.

  Robinson gauged the rise of the dugout steps and reached into the bat rack for a bat. “He just looked wobbly to me,” Robinson said. “I just didn’t think he shouldn’t be going to up to home plate without some support and maybe he should have a bat in his hand—that’s what he was famous for.”

  The one he grabbed belonged to Bob Feller, who was in the bullpen warming up for his start.

  Most of the photographers had hustled across the field to the first base side of the dugout and were kneeling on the grass near the Yankees, waiting for the Babe to climb into the cauldron. Fein hung back. “The story was ‘No. 3 Bows Out,’ Fein said later, the title he gave the picture, “the uniform being retired and all.”

  So with the band playing, he walked behind the Babe and took the picture that would earn him the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded for sports photography.

  Mel Allen’s booming introduction—“Ladies and Gentlemen, George Herman Ruth”—reverberated back and forth across the diamond, creating a swell of applause that turned into a riptide, waves of sound that eddied and crested as they bounced off hard surfaces of copper filigree and swelling chests. The roar spilled out of the Stadium, filling the side streets, and the avenues, and the airwaves. Allen’s voice reached into every borough of the city and into every living room and den equipped with a radio like the Philco that had kept Ruth company during so many afternoons when he sat in his leather easy chair wondering if this day would ever come.

  To Ruth, at home plate, Allen whispered: “Do you want to speak?”

  “I must,” Ruth replied, his voice a scrape of sandpaper on wood.

  No one knew in advance of the ceremony whether he’d be able to do so; they hadn’t written him into the script. He steadied himself on Feller’s bat and leaned into the microphones adorned with the call letters of WINS radio and WABD TV, the DuMont television station broadcasting the “Baseball Fanfare,” as the daily TV listings described it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to say one thing. I am proud I hit the first home run here. God knows who will hit the last one. It is great to see the men from twenty-five years ago back here today and it makes me feel proud to be with them.”

  He swung Feller’s bat a couple of times at home plate for photographers and cameramen. In the drama of the moment, the extraordinary span of his baseball life went unnoticed, or at least unspoken: as a teenager he pitched his first major-league game seven years before baseball debuted on radio; he left the baseball diamond with TV cameras recording his final unsteady steps.

  In the visiting dugout, Robinson asked Ruth to autograph Feller’s bat for him. The Babe said what he always said. “Sure.”

  He didn’t stay for the old-timers’ game. His doctors decided the day was too raw. So he never did manage the New York Yankees even for three innings.

  Ruth’s fate was clear to everyone, including him, when he disappeared down the dugout steps into the tunnel, out of the chill, where he was greeted by his old teammate Joe Dugan. “Joe, I’m gone,” he said. “I’m gone, Joe.”

  In the next eleven days, he traveled to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, where ten thousand children gathered for a baseball clinic sponsored by Ford and the American Legion; to Sioux City and Sioux Falls, where he had ridden Molly the Pony in October 1927; and to Minneapolis.

  The designated representative of the boys in St. Louis was six-year-old Billy DeWitt, the son of Browns owner Bill DeWitt Sr. He was too young to realize how sick Ruth was or how bad he looked or how hard it was for him to hold the bat he was supposed to show Billy how to swing. He just knew how important he felt when people started asking for his autograph as he made his way through the stands in his St. Louis Browns uniform. “Being six, I signed, ‘Billy,’” DeWitt said. “My mother said, ‘You might want to add your last name.’”

  Ruth received a trophy from Joe DiMaggio in honor of his work with the youth of America. He greeted the players on the Browns’ bench, a bunch of baseball nobodies he treated like somebodies because, first baseman Chuck Stevens said, “We were ballplayers.


  “We knew he was dying. We all knew he was a rascal and God love him.”

  He posed with Yogi Berra, who looked as nervous as he felt, and wished him luck in the future the Babe knew he wouldn’t witness. “Found out later it was the last time Babe ever appeared in a ballpark,” Berra said.

  In Minneapolis, he was interviewed on the radio by an eleven-year-old blind boy sitting in his lap. “How are you, Babe?” Johnny Ross asked.

  “I don’t feel so good. I have a very bad throat and my head aches.”

  Johnny asked a bunch of other stuff about Ruth’s new autobiography and who was likely to win the pennant before running out of questions. “I think both of us are out of words, Johnny,” the Babe said.

  Then he went home to die.

  He left his room at Memorial Hospital only twice after being admitted on June 26. On July 13, he flew to Baltimore for an Interfaith Charity Game—he had promised to present an award to Paul Geppi, a boy from St. Mary’s Industrial School. The organizers included the Knights of Columbus and B’nai B’rith. Sig Seidenman’s father, a lodge president, called his son home from a stickball game and said, “I’m going to meet Babe Ruth at the airport. Do you want to come?”

  En route they bought two baseballs at a sporting goods store. At the airfield, Ruth’s sister, Mamie, was waiting for the Babe along with a photographer from the Baltimore News-American, who suggested that Sig and some of the other boys greet him at the top of the stairs when he arrived and needed to be helped down to the tarmac. “It was shocking,” Seidenman said. “There was no TV yet. The only picture I’d ever seen of him, he was Babe Ruth—a strapping guy. This guy, his fingers were like twigs. I felt like if I’d squeezed his hand I’d have broken all his fingers.”

  The game was rained out but Ruth insisted on staying for the banquet, where he saw Rodger Pippen, the Baltimore sportswriter who had covered the Orioles’ spring training camp in 1914, describing Babe Ruth’s first professional home run as “a hit that will live in the memory of all who saw it.” On the ride through the slick city streets of the hometown he had abandoned, men on street corners doffed their hats. Women waved and youngsters shouted, “It’s the Babe! It’s the Babe!”

  A car was waiting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport to take him back to the hospital. He did not stop to talk to reporters.

  A week later, Ruth received the last rites from Father Thomas H. Kaufman, which some members of the faith felt he didn’t deserve. Kaufman, a Dominican priest from St. Catherine of Siena parish, was filling in for a priest who was on vacation. He was from Baltimore and had spent one troubled night at St. Mary’s as a boy. The bond was as fortuitous as it was strong. They talked as much as Ruth’s condition allowed.

  Five days later, Ruth was hauled out of bed to attend the premiere of The Babe Ruth Story downtown at the Astor Theater. He stayed twenty minutes. He was so doped up he didn’t know the movie was about him, which was just as well. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times dismissed the movie as “a typical debasement of human qualities in the muck of the cliché.”

  V

  RUTH GETS ONLY DOUBLE OFF ROOT AND RED OLDHAM

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 31, 1927

  The game at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles ended with Ruth’s prophecy of two home runs unfulfilled—his only hit a first inning opposite-field double off Charlie Root, who bore down on him, having taken umbrage at Ruth’s showbiz braggadocio. “Root got two strikes on Ruth,” the Times reported, “then served up an outside pitch to the Bambino. Babe calmly reached with his big bat and shoved a double down the left field line.”

  The two promised home runs would have to wait until they met again in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series where, Root said, if Ruth tried to show him up, pointing to the grandstand and calling his shot, he’d have “put one in his ear and knocked him on his ass.”

  Gehrig fared better, leading the Larrupin’ Lous to a 5–2 win with two home runs. The Babe was the only pitcher who got him out all afternoon.

  After the game, they climbed to the top of the stands and began hurling one hundred autographed baseballs to several times that many children gathered on the field below. Ruth had grown weary of his feet getting trampled by littler ones.

  “There couldn’t have been more excitement if the Twins had been tossing out gold pieces or passes to ride in Lindy’s plane,” the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reported.

  The skies were clear. The breeze was light. If the Babe had gone up higher, all the way up to the observation deck, he might have seen the mountains, the ocean, and the future he had created. He might have glimpsed the future of big-league baseball on the West Coast—even briefly at Wrigley Field—although he might have had a hard time believing it would take three decades for the pooh-bahs of baseball to see what was right there before his eyes.

  In 1957 Walter O’Malley would purchase Wrigley Field and its home team, the Los Angeles Angels, as part of his master plan of moving the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. They would play at Wrigley until a suitably modern California ballpark could be completed. But the neighborhood of Spanish bungalows had declined over time and O’Malley soured on the plan, Los Angeles sportswriter Mel Durslag said later, when he got a look at a cathouse across the street.

  More to the point, Wrigley had proved to be an exceedingly generous home for sluggers—its diminutive power alleys made the park play especially small. Ford Frick, who was baseball’s commissioner by then, weighed in against the plan. He didn’t want anyone breaking Babe’s home-run record in a “cow pasture,” he told the Los Angeles Times. But it was the perfect setting for the Home Run Derby, the syndicated TV series that debuted in 1959.

  If the Babe had peered that far into the future, he might have seen Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays down on the field, vying for two thousand bucks in the same kind of competition he and Lou put on before every barnstorming game in quest of Walsh’s Copper Cup. The same kind of competition that is now a heavily promoted prelude to every All-Star Game.

  So the Dodgers ended up playing in the Olympian Los Angeles Coliseum until Dodger Stadium was completed in 1962. And, when major-league baseball finally came to Wrigley Field in 1961, it was for a single year as the home of the new American League expansion team, also called the Los Angeles Angels. Fred Haney, the third baseman for the Bustin’ Babes on October 30, 1927, was the general manager.

  If Ruth looked further into the future—and thirty miles south of Long Beach, where he and Gehrig were scheduled to play their final barnstorming game the next afternoon—he might have seen Scott Boras, the only sports agent in 2017 with more than $2 billion in active player contracts, in his Newport Beach office, preparing another Boras binder crammed with fifty or maybe even a hundred pages of proprietary data, generated by MIT-trained engineers. That binder would document not just the worth of a particular client but the argument for why signing that client to the $60 million to $90 million a year he figures Babe Ruth might be worth in today’s $10 million to $12 million industry makes financial sense for a particular baseball owner. And Ruth might not have liked what Boras had to say.

  Boras wasn’t all that impressed with Walsh—because he didn’t get himself in the room with the owner. In his world, you don’t wait to be asked in—you barge. As a result, he said, “Ruth was never contractually rewarded as the game’s greatest player. More importantly, he was never rewarded for the amount of money he generated for the league and his specific teams. Once they didn’t establish that precedent, asking the player to negotiate for himself is the equivalent of someone going out on the field and to play for the player.”

  Babe’s worth in today’s market? Well, that depends. First: “You would never use what other players are paid as a method because that is unilaterally controlled by owners.

  “You’re talking about someone bringing a value to a multibillion-dollar regional sports network, then to a multibillion-dollar franchise, then to a league itself, that may have an impact on the league for national TV contracts.”

>   Negotiating with the owners isn’t the hard part. You simply have to explain to them why the player’s worth what Boras says he is in terms of raising ticket prices, advertising revenues, concession sales, championships, and potential resale of the franchise.

  The hardest negotiation is with his own client, to get him to understand that the ultimate competition is between himself and the game. “You can’t let the influence of greatness erode greatness,” Boras explained. “That is always the hardest dynamic for a great athlete. It’s not that the game will not beat you in the end; it’s how long can you beat it? Your behavior is going to limit or sustain the number of years you can beat the game. We’re trying to keep the performance focus at a level where it’s myopic.”

  Which might mean telling Babe Ruth not to grant an interview to a reporter wanting to talk about how his swing compared to Joe Jackson’s, the way Boras advised his client Bryce Harper not to discuss the similarities his batting coach saw between him and the Babe.

  And if instead, from his perch high above Los Angeles, Babe Ruth chose to look back, to look east, into the past with those eyes he never taxed in the dark of movie palaces—unless they were showing one of his own movies, which never failed to make him laugh—he might have seen in black and white just how far George H. Ruth Jr. had come, how much he had made of himself, for himself, and by himself.

  Now that was power.

  VI

  The $12,000 in rain insurance Ruth purchased in advance of the tour finally paid off on Halloween when the game in Long Beach was called on account of the downpour. The town where he had been unduly arrested nine months earlier for exploiting children was still jinxed.