The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  In 1909, for example, 28 uniformed teams played baseball at the school. Other sports were offered—football, soccer, basketball, wrestling, swimming, and boxing among them—but baseball was the winner. There were three times as many baseball teams as basketball teams, five times as many as football. Baseball, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, had become a national obsession. Teams from different floors in the dorms played against each other at St. Mary’s, teams from the different shops, from different classes, and from different age levels played against each other. An elite league had teams named after the Red Sox and other major league teams that played against each other. An all-star team from the school played against high schools and colleges.

  A true baseball feeder system existed, a ladder to be climbed on merit. Equipment was not a problem, as it might have been with low-income families in domestic surroundings. The boys even manufactured a low-grade brand of baseball in the shops. Instruction was not a problem. Many of the brothers were young men and still played side by side with the kids. Other brothers, like Brother Matthias, simply coached.

  The weak part of learning the game always has been the need for other people. Who will throw pitches to the young batter? Who will track down the baseballs he hits? How will enough people be found, nine on each side, to play a true game? None of these problems existed here. The number of available baseball players was almost inexhaustible. There always was someone at least to play catch or pokenans, the two-man schoolyard game between pitcher and batter.

  In a Baltimore climate far milder than the northern cities on the Eastern Seaboard, the season ran for at least ten months. Games could be played into November and December, and be back again in March. Spectators from Violetville and surrounding areas would visit and watch the biggest games, as many as 3,000 spectators in the crowd. There was an importance to baseball that pumped through the school. How do you separate yourself from the rest of the collected urchins, give yourself status, hear some cheers? Baseball was one of the ways, maybe the best way.

  For Nigger Lips, baseball was an everyday pleasure. He once said he played over 200 games a year at St. Mary’s. He played two and three games a day. He played all the positions, including third base and short, which a left-hander seldom plays. He caught a lot with that wrong-handed glove. When he joked one day about Congo Kirby’s pitching, he was asked if he thought he could do better. He pitched. He could do better.

  His talent and his size had him playing with kids older than himself. He eventually played with other teams, teams outside the school. He reached a point, somewhere in his teens, where he played more baseball, practiced more baseball, than a professional. He would return to the dorm most days with the shirt torn off his back after an afternoon of baseball and wrestling and running around.

  By the fall of 1913, when he was 18 years old (and thought he was 19), he was the absolute king of all of St. Mary’s baseball. He was a schoolyard star.

  “Ruth, one of the Stars star slabmen, allowed but one hit, that being a two-base hit,” the St. Mary’s Evening Star, the school paper, reported on a normal day, September 30, 1913. “He also struck out 22 and issued but one pass. During the game he hit safely four times.”

  A catcher for nearby St. Joseph’s College named Jack Morgan saw Ruth play and pressured his coach to take a look at this kid. St. Joseph’s also was a Xaverian institution, and the coach was Brother Gilbert Cairns. He was reluctant to make the trip, thought it a waste of time, but went to please his catcher. The good brother couldn’t believe what he saw.

  “Clad in a baseball uniform that was a trifle small for him, there strode up to the plate the most graceful of big men that I have ever seen,” he wrote in a 1928 series for the Boston Globe. “There was an ease in his manner and a confidence in his gait. With a slight manifestation of nervousness the opposing pitcher turned his back to home plate and waved his outfielders back. He need not have done so; they were already on their way.”

  The right fielder moved so far back that he left the playing field, crossed a path, and stood in the next field, where another game was taking place. The players in that game stopped playing and stood to watch the events on the first diamond. Nobody seemed to consider this unusual.

  The pitcher, finally assured that all was in place, went into his windup and delivered a low curveball. Ruth swung, hard as a person could swing. The ball jumped off his bat, flew out of the field and over the repositioned right fielder’s head, caromed off a concrete wall on the side, and went well into the other field. This was a home run, the first of three on the day.

  “No baseball acumen was necessary to recognize in Ruth a batter of remarkable promise,” Brother Gilbert said. “A 14-year-old boy could have sensed as much.”

  The doors of St. Mary’s were about to open for Nigger Lips. There were places he could go.

  The effects of the school on the boy who became famous cannot be overstated. He always would be a child in many ways, a locked-in adolescent forever, stepping out of some weird isolation into a world of pleasures that had been just rumors, whispered after the brothers had turned out the lights. He would be naive and gullible, sometimes navigating through society as if it were a jungle in some far-off land. There were languages, nuances, that he never would understand.

  At the same time, there were other languages that he knew quite well. Professional baseball—with its physical, competitive, king-of-the-mountain daily existence, with everything accomplished in the rough company of rough men—would be an extension of the life he always had lived. He was well trained for carrying a lunch box and a thermos every day, for the demands of manual labor. He knew how rough men talked and acted, knew how to draw their praise, knew how to confront their anger, knew how to react to overbearing bosses, knew very well how to survive. He never would be shy. He very well knew the basic world of work that he entered.

  His wants and longings while at St. Mary’s would drive much of his future behavior. A degree in psychology wouldn’t be needed to see that fact. If you never have had enough of anything and everything as a child, how much is needed to fill the hole? Is there ever enough of whatever it might be—food, clothes, love, fun—to make up for all that you have missed? The trail for all of the excesses and successes in the future would be traced back neatly to the big school on the other side of Caton Avenue from Violetville.

  Ruth always would speak well of the place. He would stay friendly with many of the brothers. He would buy Brother Matthias a Cadillac for $5,000 in a famous gesture in 1926, then replace it when the car was demolished after it stalled on a railroad track and was hit by a freight train. He would reappear at the school in the following years to participate in exhibitions and fund-raising drives. The story of his troubled beginnings would be served often—along with the starch-filled meals—at orphanages around the country as a bowlful of hope for the residents. He never would argue with it. Indeed, he would appear at many of these places in his travels, walk their corridors as an orphan king of orphan kids.

  The Catholic religion would stay with him, the rhythm of mistakes and redemption perfect for his life of rapidly accumulated venial sins. Three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and a good Act of Contrition would clear out his moral digestive system and set him back on the road. He would amaze teammates sometimes when he would appear at Mass in the morning after a night of indulgence. Three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, a good Act of Contrition, a $50 bill in the collection basket, ready to go. He would become a celebrated member of the Knights of Columbus.

  The school would continue to function for 36 more years after he left, but it would evolve into a total reform school as it took more and more money from the state of Maryland. The first two Baltimore natives to die in the coming Great War, Harry Luckman and Albert Vogel, both would be graduates of St. Mary’s. Over 3,000 graduates would take part in the war, 572 of them enlisted straight from the school, many of them kids who had been there with Ruth.

  The failures in the syst
em sometimes would make headlines. A kid named Leroy Baker, 18 years old, same age and class as Ruth, was arrested in 1912 in Washington after an escape from St. Mary’s. He had embarked on a burglary career in Washington, entering at least seven houses in the middle of the night, shining a flashlight into sleeping residents’ faces, and holding a gun on them. He then would ask for their money and jewels. When apprehended at a rooming house, he was found reading a Raffles, a popular mystery series about a thief, written by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. He dropped the book and went for his gun before being subdued.

  “I had no money,” he said when asked why he had become a robber. “I was hungry.”

  The most notorious graduate of St. Mary’s, Richard Reese Whitte-more, would stay for only a year, from 1916 to 1917. Like Ruth, he was sent there as “incorrigible” by distressed parents. In later life he would form a gang responsible for at least nine murders. He would be executed by hanging in 1927 for the murder of a prison guard during a successful escape attempt in 1924.

  “The Boy is ever the same,” Brother Paul Scanlon, the headmaster, would say at the school’s closing in 1950. “The Boy is a crude machine that develops physically from infancy to manhood. The mental growth begins about seven and continues indefinitely. To make this human machine a perfect whole it must be under the supervision and constant direction of the specialists. Every part—heart, mind and body—must have particular attention. The specialists for this are naturally, the parents and the home, the teacher, the school and the church. If these agencies cooperate and the subject is normal, the result generally will be favorable. If one or another of these is remiss it will be the exception if the product is not a failure, or at least imperfect.”

  For St. Mary’s, perhaps imperfection was the best that could be expected. Starting with flawed materials, kids from broken and troubled homes, the Xaverians did the best they could. They tried to bang out as many dents as possible, tried to bring order to young lives that had no order. Compassion was served along with a good crack across the back of the head. The Xaverians shaped up and shipped out their charges, put young adults into the outside world. Their methods worked with some, didn’t work with others.

  Singer Al Jolson, the other famous onetime resident, a few years before the Babe, a Jewish kid in mostly Catholic surroundings, never liked the place. He returned to St. Mary’s with his wife in 1949, more than 50 years after he left, to show her his strict beginnings. He was amazed to see the front gate open.

  “It was always shut when I was here,” he said. “There were bars all around.”

  “Was Al a bad boy?” his wife, Erle, asked Brother Benjamin, a teacher from Jolson’s days still at the institution.

  “He was like other boys,” the brother replied. “Some boys run away from Harvard too, you know.”

  In 1919 sparks from a tinner’s torch would start a fire during repairs on the roof of the administration building. The water pressure wasn’t strong enough to reach the fire, and the administration building, a dorm, the junior building, and the old chapel were destroyed. Ten boys, trapped in the tower of the administration building, had to slide down a rope to safety, but injuries were minor and no student died. Virtually all of the school records were destroyed, including the ones that detailed the progress of the boy from Pigtown.

  At the height of the fire, Brother Theodore, the head of the school, gathered the student population in the courtyard. He asked everyone to pray.

  “I prayed,” one student remembered. “But I prayed the place would burn down.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  T HE MAN who freed Nigger Lips from the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys was Jack Dunn of the minor league Baltimore Orioles. He was 42 years old, a baseball man, had been a player and then a manager, and now was the owner of the Orioles. He was a bit of a baseball genius.

  When he was nine years old, playing with a bunch of kids at a railroad siding in Bayonne, New Jersey, a boxcar ran over his left arm. The kids had uncoupled the car, and it started to roll slowly. As Dunn jumped to get free, his foot caught in the track, and he was thrown back and the car rolled over the arm. Doctors told his mother and him that the arm had to be amputated or he would die.

  “If it makes no difference to you, I’d just as soon die with my arm on,” the nine-year-old declared.

  His mother agreed. There was no operation. He didn’t die, was brought back to health, but the arm was left in a strange condition. Below the elbow, everything functioned fine. Above the elbow, the arm was crippled. He couldn’t lift it higher than his neck. Also, a running wound on his shoulder refused to heal for the next 20 years. Surgery was prescribed. Dunn again refused. Even then he wanted to be a baseball player and didn’t want to risk any further loss of motion.

  With his withered left arm and its limited abilities, he still played eight years in the big leagues as a shortstop, third baseman, and right-handed pitcher. He learned tricks, ways to overcome his restrictions at both the plate and in the field. He became a conniver, a schemer, a student of the game, working all of its angles and shortcuts simply to survive. He learned extra lessons as a pitcher. Never a hard thrower, he had to study other players, figure out their tendencies, look for weaknesses and take advantage.

  All of this helped when he became a manager, winning an International League pennant in Providence in 1905, and then, after mortgaging everything he had, as both the owner and manager of the Orioles. Studying players, he developed preferences for body types, for a “look.” He liked big, agile, rangy athletes. (Unlike himself, it should be noted. He was 5-foot-9 and slender.) He was unorthodox and confident in his selections. He would sign players to a contract on sight alone, simply by how they presented themselves.

  He would check out the player the way a trainer or potential buyer might look at a young Thoroughbred horse. If he liked the player’s size, the way the player moved just walking across a room, he might make an offer. Dunn sometimes never even saw the player play a game, but the amazing part was that he seldom was wrong.

  In this case, a respected referral came from Brother Gilbert. Dunn was trying to sign a highly regarded left-handed pitcher named Ford Meadows from the brother’s team at St. Joseph’s. The brother wanted to keep Meadows, who was a senior, for one last season. In trying to send Dunn elsewhere, Brother Gilbert suggested an alternative…there was this kid at St. Mary’s Industrial School, you see, a left-handed pitcher who was too good to believe. Dunn already had heard about a talented kid at the school from Joe Engel, a pitcher for the Washington Senators. Engel said that he played against the kid, who not only was terrific but at the end of the game had joined the band and played a big bass drum. Dunn was interested.

  There are various descriptions of what happened next. A story is told by Fats Leisman of a legendary game played solely for Jack Dunn’s benefit at St. Mary’s, and Nigger Lips running away from the school, then returning to pitch a shutout and sign a contract. Ruth in his ghost autobiography mentions no game, says he pitched for half an hour in a workout for Dunn before he signed. The account of Brother Gilbert and Rodger Pippen, a Baltimore American sportswriter and friend of Dunn’s, is much more romantic. Maybe it is even true. In this story, Dunn went to St. Mary’s on a February day accompanied by Brother Gilbert and Fritz Maisel, a Baltimore native who now was the third baseman and captain of the New York Yankees. They traveled in Maisel’s big-time car, which had been purchased with big league money. Dunn never had seen Ruth play.

  Brother Gilbert was nervous. He had recommended Nigger Lips as a pitcher, but never had seen him pitch. The big kid was a wrong-handed catcher on that one day when Brother Gilbert saw him. Admittedly he looked like he had a very good arm, and he was amazingly adept at removing the ball from the wrong-handed mitt and rifling it to second on a line, all in one motion, but could he pitch? People said he could. Brother Gilbert didn’t know.

  The little group of Brother Gilbert, Dunn, and Maisel ran into Brother Matthias
as they searched for Ruth. They all chatted a bit about the subject. Brother Matthias was not a flamboyant conversationalist.

  “Ruth can hit,” was his scouting report.

  “Can he pitch?” Dunn asked.

  (Brother Gilbert held his breath.)

  “Sure,” Brother Matthias said. “He can do anything.”

  And so it happened. The group found Ruth, wearing overalls, making his one fashion statement with rings on three fingers, sneaking a chew of tobacco, sliding on the ice, fooling around with a couple of kids outside the tailor’s shop. Introductions were made. The calibrations, based on a lifetime of making calibrations, whirred inside Dunn’s head. The numbers and memories said that Ruth, large and lean and ambitious, was the ideal baseball candidate. It was as easy as that. Dunn settled down to do business.

  The man who never had seen the potential pitcher play a game, on the recommendation of a man who never had seen the potential pitcher throw a pitch, offered a contract for $250 per month to the potential pitcher. The potential pitcher, who never had seen a professional game, who never really had known that money could be made from playing baseball, accepted immediately.

  It was a grand and odd transaction, all at once, and took place on February 14, 1914. The date at least was documented. Two weeks later, George Herman Ruth, the legal ward of Brothers Gilbert and Paul, under the guardianship of baseball manager and owner Jack Dunn, was on his way to spring training.

  Where to begin with the new sights and sounds and tastes and smells and experiences that awaited the 19-year-old boy? The Orioles were heading to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and he went to the train at Union Station on March 2, 1914—the train, yes, would be a good place to start—in a blizzard, breathing free and different air. He had new clothes, a new suitcase, had money in his pocket, and was outside the walls and on his own for the first time in his life, heading into a horizon he had seen only from afar.