The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

“Pretty young to be in the big league, aren’t you, kid?” the big man said, casually looking upward from his locker.

  “Yep,” Hoyt replied. “Same age you were when you came up, Babe.”

  Hoyt realized by the end of his sentence he was talking to the back of the black-ink head. The Babe had gone back to consider whatever world problems he was considering. There was only so much interest to be spent on some new arrival. The conversation was done. Hoyt, even years later, loved every millisecond of it. In the succeeding seasons, he would become both enemy and friend of Ruth. He never would become best friend—there never really was a best friend—but he would be around the table.

  “There was nothing like Ruth ever existed in this game of baseball,” he said. “I remember one time we were playing the White Sox in Boston in 1919, and he hit a home run off Lefty Williams over the left-field fence in the ninth inning and won the game. It was majestic. It soared. We watched it and wondered, ‘How can a guy hit a ball like that?’ It was to the opposite field and off a left-handed pitcher, and it was an incredible feat. That was the dead ball days, remember: the ball normally didn’t carry. We were playing a doubleheader, and that was the first game, and the White Sox did not go into the clubhouse between games. They stood out there and sat on our bench and talked about the magnificence of that home run.”

  The great hits fascinated Hoyt. The outrageous life fascinated Hoyt, the don’t-give-a-shit freedom of it, the nonstop, pell-mell charge into excess. How did a man drink so much and never get drunk? How could he keep juggling, 24 hours a day, so many balls in the air, never dropping one of them? The thread of humanity in the Babe fascinated Hoyt, his ability to be mostly nice to people, especially ordinary people, even though they arrived in long lines and constant bunches. The innate intelligence fascinated Hoyt, the supposedly dumb man doing a lot of not-so-dumb things. How did he do it? Where did everything come from? The puzzle of Babe Ruth never was dull, no matter how many times Hoyt picked up the pieces and stared at them.

  After games he would follow the crowd to the Babe’s suite. No matter what the town, the beer would be iced and the bottles would fill the bathtub. Take a beer. Watch. Watch everything.

  “First of all, we’d all take showers after the ball game, so we didn’t ever use the bathtub because we’d all be clean after the game,” Hoyt said. “Ruth would order a couple of cases of beer, and he’d have the tub filled with ice. This was before we went to the ballpark, and when we got back the beer was iced and cold, and he’d take the position in a chair over in the corner of the room, over on one side, and he was the King. Believe me, there were some nights there’d be 100, 150 people pass through that room. It’s a wonder he could play ball.”

  Hoyt became the keeper of anecdotes, the one who remembered best. This was only the beginning of the stories.

  The idea that the Babe was superhuman—promoted in word, song, and home run measurements everywhere now—was given a scientific imprimatur in the first weeks of September. If the everyday observer couldn’t believe his eyes, ears, or the newspaper reports, a couple of psychologists from Columbia University named Albert Johansen and Joseph Holmes were ready to take the stand.

  Hugh Fullerton, a sportswriter who had been at the forefront of exposing the Black Sox business, dragged the Babe to the psychologists’ laboratory directly after a game in the Polo Grounds. The Big Bam was still in uniform, fresh from yet another home run, as he submitted to three hours of tests. No mention was made of compensation. The hand of Christy Walsh no doubt was involved.

  “Tonight you go to college with me,” Fullerton said he told the Babe. “You’re going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret.”

  “Who wants to know it?” the Babe replied.

  “I want to know it. And so do several thousand fans. We want to know why it is that one man has achieved a unique batting skill like yours—just why you can slam the ball as nobody else in the world can.”

  Psychological testing, relatively new, had gained a measure of popular acceptance during the world war. The U.S. Army had used two well-known intelligence tests, the Alpha for men who could read, the Beta for men who couldn’t, to help decide who was or wasn’t officer material and what fields best suited each enlistee. Inflated claims of great success had been published. It seemed natural that the Babe should be tested.

  He was first fitted with a pneumatic tube around his chest that was connected to a pressure device, handed a bat attached to wires that ran to a Hipp chronoscope, and then asked to swing. He was handed a rod and asked to place it inside a succession of holes as many times as possible in a designated amount of time. He was shown a sequence of dots and letters and shapes and asked to remember them. He was asked to tap a metal plate with an electric stylus as fast as possible.

  In all of these activities, he was animated and absorbed. These were games, competition. He was interested. He also was very good at these games. Or so it seemed.

  “The tests revealed the fact that Ruth is 90 per cent efficient compared with a human average of 60 per cent,” the sportswriter Fullerton reported in his Popular Science Monthly article. “That his eyes are about 12 per cent faster than those of the average human being. That his ears function at least 10 per cent faster than those of the ordinary man. That his nerves are steadier than those of 499 out of 500 persons. That in attention and quickness of perception he rated one and a half times the human average. That in intelligence, as demonstrated by the quickness and accuracy of understanding, he is approximately 10 per cent above normal.”

  The headline on Fullerton’s story was “Why Babe Ruth Is Greatest Home-Run Hitter.” The New York Times, reporting the tests on Sunday, September 11, on the front page, had a headline that said, “Ruth Supernormal, So He Hits Home Runs.” The results in the lab seemed to confirm the results in the Polo Grounds.

  A Bowdoin College professor, Alfred H. Fuchs, would question a lot of the methodology in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 77 years later. He would point out that the control group for the tests was mostly telephone and telegraph operators, not elite athletes. He would point out that the conclusions reached by Fullerton, not the two psychologists, tended to make them more dramatic. He would not debate the basic conclusion.

  Was Babe Ruth good? Well, yes, he was. He was even good for psychology.

  “The report that Ruth performed in superior fashion on psychological tests may have accomplished more at the time to validate psychological tests in the popular mind than the tests themselves did to demonstrate Ruth’s demonstrated superiority in the batter’s box,” Fuchs wrote.

  The two most interesting observations from the test were buried in Fullerton’s text. First, it was determined that Ruth swung with the most power and could make the ball travel farthest when it was thrown to the low, outside corner of the plate. Second, he did not breathe during his entire swing. The psychologists said that if he kept breathing while he swung, he could generate more power. This was a frightening prospect.

  Working without the pneumatic tube and the wires to his bat and the Hipp chronometer or whatever it was, the Babe was doing quite well outside the laboratory too. He banged out his 25th homer on July 15, the 138th of his career, which made him baseball’s all-time leading home run hitter at the age of 26. He fell behind his 1920 “pace” in early August, but whacked two on August 8 to get back on track. In a sidelight, an exhibition game in Cincinnati, he whacked the first ball pitched to him over the center-field fence, which never had been done, then came back later in the game to knock a ball into the right-field bleachers, which also never had been done.

  There was no more talk of a “fluke” about this home run business. F. C. Lane, in Baseball magazine, talked instead about the amazing change his favorite game was witnessing.

  “Every owner of the 16 big league clubs is united with his manager in the prayer that somehow, somewhere, he can dig up a player who can remotely parallel Babe Ruth,” Lane wrote. “Babe has not
only smashed all records, he has smashed the long-accepted system of things in the batting world and on the ruins of that system, he has erected another system, or rather lack of system, whose dominant quality is brute force.”

  Ruth clouted the record-tying number 54 on September 9 in Philadelphia with—stop if you’ve heard this before—the longest home run in the history of Shibe Park. On September 16, “the Caliph of Crash,” with the “whiz of an ashen club,” smoked number 55 in the first game of a doubleheader romp over the St. Louis Browns. The day was filled with home runs, but Ruth’s stood out like “an antelope in a field of ants” (all quotations courtesy of the New York Times).

  To finish off the pennant race on September 26, he hit numbers 57 and 58 in an 8–7 victory over the Indians, a third and final win in a crucial four-game series. “The titanic figure of Babe Ruth stood out in the triumph as the Leviathan would stand out in a flock of harbor tugs” (again, the Times). He cranked number 59 on the final day of the season, falling one short of the number both he and Dunninger had predicted. He led the league in home runs, RBI, total bases, slugging percentage, and runs scored. He finished third in batting average at .378 behind Harry Heilmann’s .394 and Ty Cobb’s .389.

  All of this set up the biggest sporting event in the history of New York City, the World Series between the New York Yankees and the National League champion New York Giants. Since this was the first Series in the Yankees’ 19-year history, this was uncharted excitement. New against Old. Renter against Landlord. Ruth against McGraw. Brawn against Brains. The mind of any Leviathan in any flock of tugboats reeled at the many confrontations.

  The Yankees, informed a year earlier by Giants management in the crush of Babe-o-mania that they should eventually look elsewhere for a permanent home, already had obtained land in the Bronx for a new stadium that would open in 1923. The Series would be their best-of-nine-games chance to make a lot of statements, to show that they were the team of the future, the look of the future. The newspapers had invented a nickname, “Murderers’ Row,” for their lineup. All of New York was paying attention.

  “With the Yankees much depends on whether Ruth is in a pummeling mood,” Grantland Rice wrote in the New York Tribune. “Some say the Yanks are banking too heavily on one man and this is no small talking point in favor of the Giants. If Ruth is poling ’em—great for the Yankees. But suppose he isn’t?”

  The interest was so high, the publicity so great, that as many as 10,000 seats at the Polo Grounds were empty. People had stayed home for fear they never could get seats. This did not mean they did not pay attention. A throng estimated at 15,000 gathered around the New York Times building to watch updates and stopped traffic on Broadway, and a crowd of 10,000 at Madison Square Garden paid to see a mechanical simulation, little pieces moved around the board. The speculation about how hard tickets would be to obtain, how much scalpers would charge, simply had scared people from going to the actual game.

  The Babe, in the first game, was a buzz of activity. He walked, paced, shouted, swung at the first pitch he saw, and singled. He was so antsy that Huggins let him coach third base. The Yankees were 3–0 winners as Carl Mays’s submarine ball befuddled the Giants and Mike McNally stole home. The Babe, noisy as he was, was quiet at the bat. The single was his only hit of the day.

  He was “covering” the game and the Series for a string of newspapers in the fevered beginnings of the Christy Walsh ghost syndicate. McGraw also was “covering.” Ring Lardner, sportswriter and humorist, was on the job as well, writing as himself. He noted the Babe’s literary efforts:

  At the risk of advertising a rival author, I will say that the Babe is turning out a daily article which appears in a whole lot of papers and if you don’t read it you are missing practically all the inside stuff. Like for inst his write-up of the first game opened up with these words:

  “When I sent Mike McNally home in the fifth inning it was taking a big chance.”

  The word “it” probably refers to McNally and the play spoke of is the one where Mike stole home and if Babe hadn’t of been writing, we wouldn’t of known that it was him that thought up the play.

  McGraw decided in the second game the best way to handle Ruth simply was to walk him. The Babe walked three straight times. Frustrated with the third walk in the fifth inning, he immediately stole second, then stole third. The steal of third ultimately decided the Series.

  While the Polo Grounds crowd cheered such a display of speed from a big man, Ruth was looking at a cut on his left elbow that he had sustained while sliding into the bag. The Yankees won the game, again by a 3–0 score, to take a 2–0 lead in the Series, but the cut quickly became infected. Ruth opened it again with another slide in the next game, a 13–5 loss. A day of rain intervened, but the cut did not heal. Ruth had the injury lanced, but the procedure did not help.

  He played in the fourth game, heavily taped, and had a single and his first World Series home run in a 4–2 loss that evened the Series. He also played in the fifth game, a 3–1 Yankees win, and started the winning rally with a bunt that surprised everyone, scoring from first on Bob Meusel’s double. It was obvious, though, that he was done. He had played with a tube hanging from the wound to drain the pus. He was so exhausted from running the bases that time had to be called so he could recover and go back to left field. His doctor soon ruled him out of the Series.

  “To play while the arm is in its present condition would be to invite a spread of the infection,” Dr. Edward King declared. “We have ordered Ruth that under no condition shall he attempt to play ball tomorrow.”

  Barred from coaching third, unable even to drive his car, Ruth was driven to the park and watched games six and seven in the stands. The Yankees lost both of them. During game six, Christy Walsh showed him a newspaper article by veteran sportswriter Joe Vila of the New York Sun that said Ruth’s injury wasn’t serious and such reports should be taken with “a grain of salt.” Ruth, furious, found Vila and rolled up his sleeve and told him to “take a picture of that and put it in your newspaper.” Vila declined.

  Ruth did suit up for the eighth game in what turned out to be the final best-of-nine series in major league history, the wound wrapped in gauze, his left arm below the bandage blue with blood poisoning and swollen to twice its normal size. He pinch-hit in the ninth inning, but grounded out to first, and the Giants won the game, 1–0, and the Series, five games to three. Done.

  “The last day of the World Series showed the awful effects of reform on murderers’ row,” Westbrook Pegler wrote for the United News syndicate.

  They were murderers no longer. They were just ballplayers, playing strategy out of the manual, their old, slugging, slaughtering ways forgot.

  They were trying to win on pitching alone, like a successful axe murderer turning to such subtle tools as the poisoned needle, Oriental incense or mental suggestion. They were pathetic.”

  The irony was that if the concluding games had been held only a week later, the lead murderer would have been fine, healed, able to play. He announced that he would play, in fact, embarking on a barnstorming exhibition that would last right up until November 1.

  And then the fun began.

  CHAPTER TEN

  T HE PLAN was to do a barnstorming tour in two parts. The first part was a succession of visits to cold, industrial hamlets around the Northeast. The second part was a visit to Oklahoma, a warmer sequence of oil and cow towns starting with a game in Oklahoma City. The fee for all this would be as much as $30,000, more than George Herman Ruth had gathered for laying out those 59 home runs and sending all of New York City into a tizzy for the World Series.

  The schedule began almost immediately. The man who had appeared with the bandaged left arm in the ninth inning on October 13 would be the leader of the “Babe Ruth All-Stars” in Buffalo two days later. He said, “I heal quick. I always heal quick.” Carl Mays, Wally Schang, Bob Meusel, and reserve pitchers Bill Piercy and Tom Sheehan from the Yankees roster would accompany him,
with the rest of the all-stars recruited from the Buffalo area.

  Barnstorming tours were a standard practice, a chance for the players to make supplemental money, a chance for the outlying fans to put faces and bodies with the names they had read about all year in the newspapers. Ruth obviously had done a tour every year since fame had arrived at his locker. Today Utica, tomorrow Havana, no problem.

  Now, as he prepared to leave for Buffalo the day after the Series, hangovers strewn around the Hotel Commodore with last night’s dinner jackets after the Yankees’ breakup party hosted by the Colonels, he was told he couldn’t go. This tour would be illegal under section 8B of article 4 of the Major League Code. If there were any questions, he would have to deal with Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the recently ordained commissioner of baseball.

  “Law-abiding baseball men have no fear that the laws of the game will not be enforced,” the Judge said ominously in perfect legalese. “The law of gravitation is still in force and what goes up must come down.”

  The rule stated that players from the two teams competing in the World Series could not play games elsewhere. Anyone from any team that finished lower in the standings was free to tour as much as possible, but the Series participants were banned. The intent of the rule was to keep the players on the two teams from restaging the Series on their own, town to town, cheapening the event that had just concluded and confusing fans about who was really the world’s champion. With only six players from the Yankees on Ruth’s All-Stars, one of them not even on the Series roster, there didn’t seem to be much chance of confusion here, but Landis was firm on his decision that a rule was a rule.

  Ruth was firm on his decision to play the games.

  “We are going to play baseball until November 1,” he said, “and Judge Landis is not going to stop us…. I am out to earn an honest dollar and at the same time give baseball fans an opportunity to see the big players in action.”