The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  “Since I signed with you, I’ve played eight games,” he informed Jack Dunn at the station.

  This was winter. Eight games?

  “And your arm isn’t sore?” Dunn asked.

  “No, sir, Mr. Dunn,” the 19-year-old boy replied. “We had some snow this winter, and I was the commander of Fort McHenry in the snowball fights. My arm doesn’t get sore.”

  He never had ridden a train. He never had been able to pick from a menu, then pick again and again, as much as he wanted. He never had done a lot of things. Dunn did not take the train, waiting to lead a second group of players south, including the ones who had not been able to reach Baltimore due to the blizzard. Scout Steinman, an old-timer who took care of odd jobs with the team, was in charge of the first group. Off it went.

  The veterans pulled the requisite old tricks on the newcomers on the ride, and the newcomers wound up in the requisite foolish situations, guarding their shoes during the night from the porters, who surely would try to steal them, counting off the towns loudly toward Fayetteville. Ruth fell for everything. He spent his night with his left arm in the hammock over his upper berth, told that it was a special conditioning contraption for pitchers rather than a place to store clothes.

  Fayetteville was a warm marvel. The temperature was 70 degrees. The men in town already were wearing straw hats in the middle of March. How can this be? Everything was a marvel. The Orioles checked into the Hotel Lafayette, where Ruth was fascinated by the elevator, riding up and down for days, leaving the door open, sticking his head out—watch it!—pulling back just in time to avoid serious injury. He was up in the mornings at five, familiar time for St. Mary’s, early for everywhere else, and down at the train station to watch the activity. He walked early to the Cape Fear Fairgrounds, where practice was held in a field next to the racetrack. He ate prodigious amounts of food at every sitting, buckwheat cakes piled into a syrup-drenched tower, gone in a moment, seconds on the way.

  He was as raw as any kid who ever had stepped off any farm into this situation. He was very happy.

  “He looked like a big, overgrown Indian,” Fred Parent, a former big league shortstop brought to the camp to work with the younger players, said. “He really had a dark complexion. He seemed to be really a happy-go-lucky kind of kid, made acquaintance easily. He had a really big voice. You’d think he weighed 500 pounds with that voice, and it grew bigger as he grew older.”

  His nickname, the nice one, the one that would stick and become famous, arrived early. There are assorted versions of the story about when and how it arrived during the camp, but the one that is tidiest and, again, maybe even true has interim leader Steinman telling the veterans to take it easy with the new kid because “he’s one of Dunnie’s babes.” Rodger Pippen and Jesse Linthicum of the Baltimore Sun were in camp, heard Steinman use the word, and began to refer to “Babe Ruth” in their reports. It was not an uncommon nickname at the time. The babe officially was the Babe.

  Some of the first newspaper stories that mentioned his name came after the first scrimmage at the fairgrounds. The team was divided in two, the Buzzards against the Sparrows, and he played a left-handed shortstop and pitched a few innings. He also hit the longest home run in Fayetteville history.

  A white post had been planted at the edge of right field to mark a spot where Jim Thorpe, the decathlon champion in the 1912 Olympics, now with the New York Giants, once had hit a ball while playing in the Carolina League. In the seventh inning against the Sparrows, Ruth hit a ball that went past the post and over the racetrack and into a cornfield. The ball was hit so far that right fielder Bill Morrisette said he refused to retrieve it unless given cab fare. Rodger Pippen, 26 years old and filling in as a spare center fielder in the game, measured the distance. He said the ball had traveled 428 feet.

  “The main topic of conversation is the work of Lefty Ruth and the prodigious hit he made in practice yesterday afternoon,” Pippen wrote in the Baltimore American. The rival Baltimore Sun had a two-column headline that read “Homer by Ruth Feature of Game.” Notable was the fact that his first headlines in professional baseball were for hitting, not pitching.

  In his free time, he still roared. He was one of the players duped in a little roulette wheel operation a local resident set up in a room in the Lafayette. He tried horseback riding. Since he never had ridden, the man at the stables gave him a Shetland pony for starters. Ruth rode the pony into the local drugstore, where his teammates were relaxing at the soda fountain. He said he wanted to buy two ice cream cones, one for himself and one for the horse. The owner said he didn’t serve horses. Then there was the bicycle. Ruth convinced a local kid to let him borrow his bicycle every day. He rode it tirelessly around the town. He rode quite fast.

  Jack Dunn and veteran catcher Ben Egan were standing at a street corner when Ruth came flying past, ran straight into the back of a hay wagon, was thrown six feet in the air, and landed on his back. Dunn ran to his newest acquisition and delivered some loud guidance.

  “You wanna go back to that school?” he shouted. “You behave yourself, you hear me? You’re a ballplayer—not a circus act.”

  Dunn had fallen in love with the kid. The exhibition games had started, and Ruth very much could pitch. He pitched well in scrimmages, a hard thrower with a workable curveball to back up his speed. He pitched well in relief against the Yankees. He pitched a complete game, a 6–2 win, against the Philadelphia Athletics, who had the best-hitting lineup in baseball. He also assuredly could hit. He could be fooled sometimes and look bad in striking out, but when he caught the ball, it traveled.

  Talent like this did not just show up, well sanded and finished. Talent was supposed to be wild, and time was needed to tame it. Here was a kid who came straight out of school and could beat the Athletics. This just didn’t happen.

  “Brother,” Dunn wrote to Brother Gilbert, “this fellow Ruth is the greatest young ballplayer who ever reported to a training camp.”

  “He’ll startle the baseball world,” the owner told the writers quietly, “if he isn’t a rummy or he isn’t a nut.”

  Spring training was short. Twenty-six days after he left, the boy from St. Mary’s was back in Baltimore. He was a secret no more. He was Babe Ruth. The newspapers said he was.

  His first purchase back in the city was an Indian motorcycle for $115. His first trip on the motorcycle was to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. His first fall off the motorcycle…well, there were a few of them before he reached St. Mary’s. The final one was in front of the school. Brother Matthias saw the whole thing. Ruth landed in a puddle next to some horse droppings.

  “Oh, too bad,” the brother said with a smile. “Now you’re wet and dirty.”

  Muttering about the city’s sanitation practices in regard to horse droppings, the returned world explorer went back inside the grounds looking much the same as he always did after a normal school day. He revved up his beast and proceeded to take his friends for rides, blasting around the streets with the kids from his past hanging on for dear life in his newly discovered present. Talk about satisfaction.

  He embarked on his postgraduate baseball degree as the Orioles played two weeks of local exhibitions, then moved into their International League season. Every day was a new lesson.

  He pitched the third of three exhibitions against John McGraw’s Giants, losing 3–2 in a classic moment of miscommunication. With one out in the ninth, a runner on first, the Orioles ahead 2–1, catcher Egan gave the prearranged clenched-fist sign for “a waste pitch,” a pitchout. He sensed a hit-and-run might be taking place. To Egan’s surprise, Ruth delivered a pitch over the dead center of the plate that was whacked by Red Murray over the left-field fence for a two-run homer and the victory.

  Egan was mad. Ruth was mad.

  He thought Egan had ordered a “waist” pitch. That was exactly where he delivered it, right at the waist. Didn’t the catcher know any better than that?

  (A similar story was told by Fred Parent abou
t “waist-waste” confusion in a game against the Buffalo Bisons. Parent said Bill Congalton hit that pitch for a triple. One of the stories is probably true. The pick here is Egan’s.)

  Ruth then pitched the second game of the season, a 6–0 shutout of the Bisons, and went to work in the regular rotation. He mixed startlingly good games with occasional stinkers, all part of learning. He hit well at times, but also had periods when he struggled. There were no Fayetteville homers. The best part was that he continued to take that big uppercut swing, and no one tried to change him.

  The Orioles went on the road, and more adventures arrived in a kaleidoscope whirl. He was in Buffalo and Rochester, Toronto and Montreal, Jersey City and Newark. New towns, new country, new language. (Just the picture of him walking around Montreal is a smile.) The Orioles who had survived the final roster cuts were a veteran group, with only Dunn’s son, Jack Jr., close to Ruth’s age. Ruth played cards, was included in a clique of Baltimore-born players, but also spent a lot of time in his own travels.

  A perfect story from Creamer’s book found him sitting on the curb outside the Forrest Hotel on West 49th Street in New York at two in the morning. Outfielder George Twombley, coming home, saw him there.

  “What are you doing?” Twombley asked.

  “I’m waiting for a girl,” Ruth replied.

  “What girl?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just waiting. The boys at reform school said if you’re in New York and you want a woman, all you have to do is wait for a streetwalker to come along.”

  “Maybe you should go to bed.”

  The team Dunn had put together was very good. On July 4, 1914, it was in first place in the International League with a 47–22 record. Ruth had a 14–6 record and was hitting long shots when he connected with the ball, which wasn’t too often. Alas, nobody in Baltimore had noticed or cared. The total number of local people who had seen Babe Ruth perform in his debut year was under 5,000.

  A new restaurant in the neighborhood had taken all of the old restaurant’s business. Directly across the street from the Orioles’ home at Back River Park was Terrapin Park, the newly built home of the new Baltimore Terrapins of the new Federal League. The citizens of Baltimore, chagrined that the once-proud Orioles had been dropped from the major leagues in 1903 for lack of support (the franchise shifted to New York, a sign that Baltimore had fallen to second-class status), saw the new league as an answer. They thought the Federal League would evolve into a third major league and the Terrapins would be a proud member. The day Ruth confronted the “waist-waste” problem, 28,000 people were across the street watching the Terrapins. Fewer than 1,000 watched him battle the fabled Giants. He later pitched a shutout against Rochester with only 11 paid customers in the stands. Even the vendors had gone across the street to work the more profitable crowd in the park that had been built in slightly more than three months, paint still drying as it opened.

  Dunn estimated he was losing $1,000 per day. He was a baseball businessman, not a rich man. He had put up his life’s savings, plus a $10,000 loan from Philadelphia Athletics owner Connie Mack, to buy the team. This cash drain could not continue. Faced with bankruptcy, he took a solid business approach: he decided to sell off his assets. His assets were his players.

  One of the first he tried to sell, alas, was his discovery from St. Mary’s. In Newark for a Sunday doubleheader, Dunn invited Mack to come up from Philadelphia to take another look at the kid who had beaten the A’s in spring training. Dunn started the kid in the first game, but the kid was shaky, gone by the fourth inning. No matter. Dunn started him again in the second game. The kid pitched a 1–0 shutout.

  “He’s everything you say he is,” Mack told Dunn at the end. “In fact, he’s worth more money than you’re asking. But…”

  Mack also had financial problems and at the end of the year would sell off his own stars. Dunn had to look elsewhere.

  He had an offer from the Cincinnati Reds for a package including Ruth, and John McGraw had expressed interest, but Dunn wound up doing business with the Red Sox. Owner Joe Lannin had advanced Dunn $3,000 to make a payroll, which didn’t hurt negotiations. The Red Sox also were in Washington for a July 4 doubleheader, a stroke of good timing.

  At the Ebbett House Hotel in Washington, Dunn and Lannin hammered out the cash deal. The announced price was $25,000 for Babe Ruth, Ben Egan, and Ernie Shore, another young pitcher who had joined the Orioles in June after graduating from Guilford College. In later years, later stories, the price was dropped to $12,500 or $8,500 plus the cancellation of the loan.

  “Ring up three sales on the cash register,” Dunn sadly told a friend. “I’m no longer a retailer.”

  He hurried back to Baltimore to catch the end of the Orioles’ game with Montreal. He called Ruth, Egan, and Shore to his office when the game finished. He gave them the news that they were going to the big leagues, to the Red Sox. Egan and Shore were excited. Ruth was dumbfounded. Dunn asked him to stay in the office after the other two players left.

  The owner explained his situation, that he had no choice. He told Ruth, whom he’d given a raise to $350 a month when the season started, that the figure now was $500 and that when he hit Boston that would jump to $625. He said the major leagues were the place to be, the place where the big money resided.

  Ruth said he didn’t care about the money; he wanted to stay close to home. This was what he knew. This was where his friends were. He still was playing baseball at St. Mary’s sometimes on the same days he played for the Orioles. His team was in first place at both St. Mary’s and in the International League. Boston? He had never been to Boston. He didn’t know anything about Boston. With the Red Sox on the road, his departure delayed, Ruth still kept playing left field for the Orioles every day until it was time to go to Boston. Dunn wished him good luck.

  On July 10, he was on an overnight train with Shore and Egan to his new home. Bill Wickes, the secretary for the Orioles, traveled with them. His job was to make sure that no agent from the Federal League offered them a contract on the trip.

  In rapid succession, according to legend, Ruth stepped off the Federal Express at Back Bay station in Boston at 10:00 A.M. on July 11, 1914, said good-bye to the bodyguard, went across Dartmouth Street with Ernie Shore, ordered a breakfast of ham and eggs at Landers Coffee Shop from the 16-year-old waitress he soon would marry, stopped off at the Red Sox offices on Devonshire Street, went to Fenway Park, was fitted for a uniform, was told he was going to start that afternoon against the Cleveland Naps, then pitched seven innings to record his first major league win, 4–3. Presumably, he then ate another good meal, unpacked his suitcase at the Brunswick Hotel, and slept very well that night.

  The ham-and-eggs meeting with his future bride might be shaky—other accounts suggest it took place on another day or perhaps in another situation—but the rest is true. He had an eventful arrival in the capital of Massachusetts.

  A picture in the Boston Globe taken before the game, under the caption “New Red Sox Players from Baltimore,” shows him staring at the camera with the solemn disposition of a Supreme Court justice considering an important case. Egan, who would never play a game for the Red Sox and was soon dealt to the Naps, is laughing. Shore, 6-foot-4, lanky, has a small smile. Ruth indeed looks like a young man who has just been told he is going to start his first major league game.

  Behind the plate for the game was 31-year-old player-manager Bill Carrigan. A Holy Cross graduate from Lewiston, Maine, quiet and firm, he was the perfect candidate to catch the new arrival. His friend Fred Parent had advised him from Baltimore to catch Ruth, who needed more guidance, and to have Forrest Cady, another catcher, work with Shore, who was a more finished product. Parent predicted immediate success for Shore and long-term success for Ruth.

  “If I remember, Babe was crude in spots,” Carrigan said years later, describing Ruth’s debut to Boston Record sportswriter Joe Cashman. “Every so often he served up a fat pitch or bad pitch when he shouldn’t have.
But he showed a lot of baseball savvy. He picked a runner off third base. He also cut off a throw from the outfield and threw a runner out at second. Anybody could see he’d quickly develop into a standout with a little more experience. He had a barrel of stuff, his speed was blinding, and his ball was alive.”

  The cutoff play came in the first inning of his first major league game. Naps leadoff hitter Jack Graney singled, then went to second on a ground ball. Shoeless Joe Jackson, the third batter, singled in front of Tris Speaker in center field. Speaker, who had a wonderful arm, fielded the ball and threw toward home. Jackson made the turn at first and started to head for second.

  Ruth, 19 years old, saw in an instant that (a) Graney had pulled up at third in fear of Speaker’s arm and (b) Jackson had made the turn. He cut off the throw and rifled the ball to second. Jackson stopped, retreated to first, and was followed by a throw from second. Graney made a break for home. First baseman Dick Hoblitzel threw to Carrigan, nailing Graney at the plate.

  This was cerebral defensive baseball executed at a high level. It was part of what mistakenly in years to come would be called Ruth’s “great baseball instincts,” a term that always would make him sound like some idiot savant, some animal of nature. (“He never throws to the wrong base” would be a common remark.) The truth was that this was what he had learned, what he knew, from all of those games at St. Mary’s. He had practiced this. He knew it.

  “The Red Sox pulled off a clever play in the first when Graney lost a fine chance for scoring,” baseball writer Tim Murane said in the next day’s Globe. “Ruth was strong in the play.”

  Shore pitched the next day and threw a two-hitter, beating the Naps 2–1. Ruth had a second start a week later against the Detroit Tigers and was knocked out in three innings. Shore had a second start and beat the St. Louis Browns 6–2, giving up seven hits and striking out five. He also won the one open spot in the Red Sox rotation.