The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  He could fish and hunt and play farmer. The winter could be as much fun as the summer. He found the kids of the neighborhood and tried skiing: hit a first jump, flew through the air, crashed back to earth, ripped his pants, and walked home with his butt sticking out. He found hockey: couldn’t skate, stuck in the goal, hurt his hip trying to make a save. Sent for Helen to bring him home. Told the kids to stop for hot chocolate at the house. He was a kid, and this was a place for kids. He brought out all the kids from a Roxbury orphanage, indulged them, sent them home with gloves and bats and balls.

  The cabin, a sign that read IHATETOQUITIT painted above the door by a previous resident, offered the closest approximation to a true domestic situation he’d ever had. He held parties—maybe pushed a piano onto the ice, where it sank, maybe didn’t—played whist, chopped down pine trees, took out his rifles and shot things that moved and things that didn’t. Bullfrogs were favorite targets. His favorite fish was the pickerel. He also caught bass, but hated to clean them.

  “Skinning a bass,” he said, “is like taking the heart out of an elephant.”

  A reporter and cameraman made the journey out to this retreat in the woods in the middle of January, and the Babe and a friend picked them up in a sleigh at the train stop near the Wayside Inn. Helen cooked a fried chicken dinner, and Babe gleefully showed off the place and his toys.

  He had a few shortcomings as a modern man of nature. Fishing through a hole in the ice, for instance, he caught nothing. The photographer, who was cold, found another fisherman who had caught a pickerel. The fish was frozen solid, but when attached to the Babe’s line and jiggled a bit, it still looked fearsome. Hunting…the Babe had a large collection of rifles and shotguns. Alas, his favorite gun was out of commission. The barrel had become jammed with ice and Babe had decided the best way to clean it out was to fire a round. The ice in the barrel was now gone, but the final six inches of the barrel also had been ripped apart by the explosion.

  And then there was the stove. The Babe’s idea for filling the Franklin stove in the middle of the living room was to chop down a tree when necessary. He wasn’t big on chopping up a bunch of wood and letting it dry and age. This meant that the wood usually was green and often didn’t burn right away.

  “This wood doesn’t heat very well,” he said at the latest example of this, “but you’ll bet I’ll fix it.”

  He grabbed a can of kerosene to pour onto the fire. The reporter and photographer edged toward the door to be able to escape the blast. The Babe told them to relax.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I never had any trouble with the kerosene…only twice. Once I put it in through the door of the stove and the cover blew off a little. Another time we had a real explosion. The cover hit the roof and came down close to my foot. That, however, was when I poured gasoline in by mistake.”

  The Babe reported that he was in fine shape and ready for the new season. The reporter reported that Helen made some fine fried chicken and that the Babe was a lucky man. No piano was mentioned, but the reporter did spot a pump organ and “an automatic music box.” He said the interior of the cabin was lit by Japanese lanterns and decorated with flags of all nations.

  Almost all nations. There was no flag for Germany.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A NEW CITY now lay less than 20 miles north of the Babe’s IHATETOQUITIT cottage in Sudbury. There had been no city when he left for spring training in 1917, simply 5,000 acres of woods and rolling Massachusetts farmland, no different from where he fished for pickerel and bass, but now there were 1,772 buildings and a population of over 10,000. From roughly the time he went into his one-third-inning meltdown in June, setting up Ernie Shore’s perfect game, until the Chicago White Sox won the World Series over the New York Giants in six games on October 15, the land had been cleared and the city had been built. It was a staggering achievement, employing the largest construction force in U.S. history.

  The name of the city was Camp Devens. The war was now serious.

  Across the country the rush to mobilize for the European conflict had turned frenzied and profound. An immediate need had been created for a military force that didn’t exist. Gen. John J. Pershing, looking at a standing army of 108,000, 17th-largest in the world, first asked for 1 million men, then nine days later revised his request, asking for 3 million. The draft call for April alone in 1918, not including the thousands of enlistments daily, was expected to reach 800,000 men between the ages of 21 and 30. They all needed places to lose weight, gain weight, learn how to salute, march, dress properly, and kill.

  Thirty-two cantonments, camps, had been built in this absolute hurry, 16 to train newly added forces, 16 for the National Guard. Camp Devens, which would handle all recruits from New England, was one of the largest. A construction force of 10,000 men worked at such a speed that it built 10.4 buildings per day, a new building every 40 minutes. Twenty portable sawmills churned out 300 billion board feet of lumber in the project, enough to build a foot-wide path from San Francisco to Paris.

  The entire country seemed to be running at the same electric pace. The War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch converted thousands of factories to the production of war essentials. Shipyards everywhere were busy around the clock. The stories about life in the trenches, about poison gas and artillery bombardments and unbelievable carnage, had been arriving from across the Atlantic since 1914. Now they had a greater urgency as more and more American names were listed among the casualties.

  As a train carrying the Babe, some sportswriters, and assorted members of the Red Sox spring training party left South Station on March 9 and headed west toward Albany and St. Louis and ultimately Hot Springs through the start of a blizzard, the apparatus of war had begun to function. A group of soldiers from Camp Devens was on the train, going home for the weekend. The Babe passed out some of his cigars, talked, and fooled around. (“Pretty, huh?” one of the soldiers said as the train went through the Berkshire Mountains. “This is nothing,” the Babe said. “The best scenery goes by when we’re sleeping.”) At each stop in the three-day trip, more soldiers, sailors, and air corps cadets would get on or get off. The camps were filling up everywhere. The lessons of combat were being taught.

  “The first live grenades were sent hurtling through the air at the bombing field, 150 of the new American type, and they kicked up quite a fuss,” Laurence L. Winship reported that week from Camp Devens in the Boston Globe.

  Lieutenant Fox of Ordnance Bureau at Washington came on to witness the throwing of the first grenades on the first bombing field in America.

  The first one was tossed out into No Man’s Land by Lt. Colonel C. A. Romeyn of the 302nd Infantry. “Whing! Whang!” Six seconds after it left his hand, a deafening explosion announced that it worked. The bits of steel came whinging, whanging back over the heads of colonels and majors and other officers crouched behind cement barricades.

  Straight up in the air and straight down and straight to the four corners of the winds, the jags and chunks of grenade scattered looking for something to hit. Some went 75 and 100 yards. The closeness of pieces which plunked into the ground near the fortified positions told officers of the reason for “heads down.”

  Spring training was for everyone this year.

  Baseball was not immune from the effects of the buildup. The first announcement of a draft in September 1917 had sent unmarried players in both leagues scurrying to their local reserve units or into other military-related factory jobs to avoid the general call-up. Rosters had been altered for every team in the big leagues by these enlistments and defections. Would there, could there, even be a baseball season?

  The Boston Marathon already had been canceled, a relay race between military units from Ashland to downtown Boston scheduled to take its place. The Indianapolis 500 and all auto races had been canceled. Horse racing had great problems shipping horses from track to track. Many intercollegiate sports, including Harvard and Yale football, already had been shut down. Baseball w
aited instead, to see what might come next.

  The Red Sox had lost 13 players, including player-manager Jack Barry. The members of the reserves, including Barry, had hoped for special furloughs to allow them to play the season. The request was denied. Barry now was stationed at the Boston Navy Yard along with Ernie Shore, Herb Pennock, Chick Shorten, Mike McNally, Jimmy Walsh, and Del Gainer. They all would play for the navy yard in a benefit game on May 5 at Braves Field against a Camp Devens team headed by 1917 Red Sox utility infielder Hal “Childe Harold” Janvrin. With Whitey Witt from the A’s and Rabbit Maranville and Arthur Rico from the Braves also in the lineup and 45,000 people in the stands, the navy yard would whip the visitors, 5–1.

  The Red Sox of 1918 should have been blown apart by these losses, but Harry Frazee was one of the few owners in baseball to react positively to the situation. The American League was split into buyers and sellers. Frazee became one of the few buyers. His favorite seller was Connie Mack of the last-place A’s. Fearing low attendance and financial disaster, Mack shipped pitcher Joe Bush, catcher Wally Schang, and outfielder Amos Strunk to Frazee for three lesser players and $60,000 in December. In January the A’s owner added first baseman Stuffy McInnis to the pile.

  As camp opened in Hot Springs, right fielder Harry Hooper and shortstop Everett Scott were the only two remaining position players from the 1917 lineup, but the holes had been covered much better than could have been expected. Every team was struggling to find enough manpower, but the Red Sox were struggling less.

  To replace Barry in the dugout, Frazee made an interesting choice, picking 51-year-old Ed Barrow. A large, combative man, who stood 6-foot-2 with a prominent chin, no-nonsense eyebrows, and a no-nonsense tongue to match, Barrow had worked in virtually every aspect of and around organized baseball except for actually playing the game. He had been both a circulation manager and a city editor at newspapers in Des Moines. He had been a business partner with concessionaire Harry M. Stevens in Pittsburgh. He had been the manager of the Detroit Tigers in 1903 and 1904, the manager of minor league teams in Indianapolis and Toronto. He also had been the president of three different minor leagues.

  Frazee’s idea was that Barrow not only would handle the team on the field but also would help with business matters off the field. Frazee was in New York much of the time, and Red Sox secretary John J. Lane, who had handled much of the day-to-day business work, was another employee who now was at the Boston Navy Yard. Barrow was available because he had just resigned as president of the International League after the owners voted to cut his salary from $7,500 to $2,500. Frazee called him “Simon,” after Simon Legree, the pitiless slave owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The name pretty much summed up what Frazee thought should be Barrow’s overall job description.

  “He didn’t know much about baseball, very little about the fine points,” Harry Hooper said about the new manager. “But he was a disciplinarian. He was a very good disciplinarian.”

  Barrow, who would manage in the dugout in his business suit, had a list of problems to consider during training camp with his new team filled with new men. Not only did he have to fit the arrivals from Philadelphia into the lineup, but he had to find minor league retreads to fill other positions. No team in baseball had adequate depth, and players still were leaving every day to enlist. Nothing could be considered certain.

  It was in this juggling atmosphere that another tangential problem developed. Barrow’s best left-handed pitcher now wanted to play in the field. The thought had been floating around in the Babe’s mind almost from the beginning of his time in Boston, but now gathered momentum as he saw openings appear. If many of the best players were gone, why couldn’t he play first base? Why couldn’t he play in the outfield? Why couldn’t he play? He made his wishes known. Loudly.

  Barrow, with his manpower difficulties, was able to humor the big man a bit. He let Ruth play first base in intrasquad scrimmages, then let him play first in the exhibition opener against the Dodgers. Ruth responded in the game with two home runs in two at-bats in an 11–1 win, the second blast landing in the Arkansas Alligator Farm. He also handled six chances in the field without error.

  “That’s ten bucks in balls you’ve cost me,” owner Frazee shouted from the stands to his star pitcher after the second homer.

  “I can’t help it,” the star pitcher replied. “They ought to make these fucken parks bigger.”

  The argument had begun.

  Barrow was convinced that Ruth should stay a pitcher. Pitching was the soul of the game. Left-handed pitching was the hardest of all baseball talents to find. He let Ruth play a little more at first, a little in the outfield as the exhibition games rolled along, but let it be known that pitching was going to be Ruth’s job when the season arrived. Ruth let it be known that he liked to hit.

  Barrow hadn’t met Ruth until less than a month earlier, when Ruth signed his contract at the Red Sox offices. The manager had a full look now. He saw the same loud and confident man-child everyone else saw, roaring through every day as if there never would be another. Hot Springs was a wide-open resort town with casinos, brothels, and a racetrack on the edge of town. The Babe, unleashed from his winter of domesticity in Sudbury, was a perpetual conventioneer on the prowl.

  He found the casinos and the racetrack, Oaklawn Park, irresistible. He always had a tip on a horse, a scam that would make everyone wealthy. (“Bellboy” was the tip one day in the lobby of the Hotel Majestic. Leading. Broke down in the stretch. Finished last.) He was always moving, doing, heading to something next.

  “He had no regard for money, none,” Harry Hooper said. “The first year he was with the Red Sox, he lost more money in Hot Springs than he would make all year. That’s a fact. Not that it was only him. John I. Taylor owned the team when I first came to Boston. His family owned the Globe. He had to sell a pitcher once just to get out of Hot Springs. That’s how much money he lost.”

  The Babe’s pitching obviously wasn’t affected by any of this as he took his regular turn for Barrow and did well in what was shaping up to be a solid rotation, with Ruth, Carl Mays, Joe Bush, and Dutch Leonard. His hitting, well, that wasn’t affected either.

  A pair of exhibition games a week apart against the Dodgers had been scheduled at Camp Pike, 53 miles outside Hot Springs. Camp Pike was another of the cantonments, another instant city created in the middle of an agrarian nowhere. One million board feet of lumber had arrived every day on trains 100 cars long from six sawmills when construction was at its height. The baseball field was built in 15 days in what used to be an apple orchard, 7,000 trees cut down, the land leveled, grass planted.

  Heading toward the grand opening of the field on March 23, Ruth was the main entertainment as the Sox made the three-hour trip. He sang assorted songs to his confined teammates:

  Molly, my Molly—my Molly, my dear,

  If it wasn’t for Molly, I wouldn’t be here;

  Write me a letter, send it by mail—

  Shoot it to me at the old city jail.

  The game was rained out, but not until batting practice had been held. Ruth was the entertainment here too, driving five shots over the new right-field fence. The soldiers in attendance went wild, and when the Red Sox and Dodgers returned seven days later for a final game in Arkansas before making the long trip north, the show was remembered. Ruth wasn’t playing, but the soldiers chanted for him to appear.

  Barrow relented, putting him on the mound in the fifth inning. In the eighth, after Sam Agnew had just homered to left, Ruth stepped to the plate and homered to right. The soldiers went wild again. In the bottom of the ninth, tie game, Ruth singled sharply over the center fielder’s head, sending home George Whiteman from third for the 4–3 win.

  The riddle of the spring became even more vexing as this part of the spring ended: what do you do when your best hitter is your best pitcher? Barrow would restrict the Babe to pitching on the exhibition grind homeward, but the “pitcher” had finished his time in Hot Springs with nine
hits, including four homers, in 21 at-bats. The war was changing lives and situations everywhere. Had it changed the life and situation of the 23-year-old man now called “the Colossus” by sportswriter Burt Whitman of the Boston Herald?

  The noise from the soldiers at Camp Pike was another argument in the affirmative. They liked, most of all, to see him hit.

  Barrow knew his limitations. That made him smart right there. He knew that he wasn’t any kind of a baseball strategist, so he hired someone else to do that part of the job. His first choice, Johnny Evers (of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play fame), was a bit too intense, riding the players, wanting to win every inning of every game, driving everyone crazy. The second choice, veteran Heinie Wagner, good guy, also didn’t work out. The job fell to 30-year-old Harry Hooper.

  Hooper, as the season opened with the Babe pitching a 10–3 win over the Yankees at the Polo Grounds, was on the Babe’s side. Hooper also believed that hitting every day—the way the Babe hit—was more important than pitching every fourth day. He loved the way the Babe swung at a baseball, free and easy, rhythm and power. Hooper had been interested since the first time he ever saw him swing, first year on the team.

  “We played an exhibition in some small town out near Brockton,” Hooper said. “Before the game, he took a bunch of balls and went with another guy out to the outfield, and the guy pitched and Babe just started swinging. I remember noticing how well he hit.”

  The Babe had a permanent red mark on his chest, something that looked like a woman’s stretch mark, only it was on the chest. The mark was hard to miss in the locker room. Hooper asked him one day how he’d got it.

  “Swung too hard,” the Babe said.