The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The afternoon of June 12 at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis described Ruth’s situation as well as anything. Williams hit his 15th homer, best in the majors, and the Browns won, 7–1, and Ruth…well, this was the way he was struggling.

  The Browns pitched a rookie, a 21-year-old left-hander named Hub Pruett, fresh from the University of Missouri, who quickly had been nicknamed Shucks for his unflappable nature. As a kid, Shucks had idolized Christy Mathewson, the master of the “fadeaway.” The pitch, later known as the screwball, was basically a curveball in reverse, thrown with an unnatural twist of the wrist and elbow. Mathewson was a right-hander, but Pruett figured the pitch would work for a left-hander too. Shucks, reaching the majors, had developed a pretty good screwball.

  Every hitter in history, no matter how successful, comes across a pitcher and a pitch he cannot handle. Shucks was that pitcher for Ruth. He had faced the Bambino in relief in May, struck him out with the screwball and walked him, and now as a starter struck him out three times and walked him once. In July, meeting again, Pruett would strike him out three more times. In August, bases loaded, nobody out, Ruth at the plate, Shucks would come out of the bullpen and strike him out again. In the first 12 times he faced Ruth, that was nine strikeouts, two walks, and a tapper back to the pitcher for an out.

  In September, Pruett already had developed a sore arm from throwing the pitch. He tried his one—and only—curveball against Ruth. Ruth deposited the ball into the right-field stands, crossed the plate, picked up a straw hat someone had thrown from the stands, and wore it with a smile back to the dugout. Everybody knew what the celebration meant.

  “At the ballpark during the year we passed each other without speaking,” Pruett, who finished with a career 29–48 record, said years later. “But every once in a while he would do something that would give me a kick. He would wink at me.”

  The three-strikeout game in June set the Yankees off on an eight-game losing streak, dropping them two and a half games behind the Browns. They were 13 and 16 since the return of Ruth and Meusel to the lineup. This was the great hero? He also drew a second suspension in the eighth successive loss for running in from left field to argue with umpire Bill Dineen over a play at second base. Dineen threw him out of the game, and that night Ban Johnson suspended him for three games because “my reports show that Ruth used vulgar and vicious language, calling Umpire Dineen one of the vilest names known.” (The mind searches, of course, to figure out what that name would be.)

  After batting practice the next day, Ruth approached the umpire again and made the situation worse. He told Dineen, “If you ever put me out of a game again, I’ll fix you so you will never umpire again, even if they put me out of baseball for life.” Dineen did not like this. Ruth also told him, “You’re yellow,” and challenged him to a fight. Dineen also did not like this. He took off his mask and started to go under the stands with Ruth, but was restrained by Cleveland Indians Tris Speaker and Steve O’Neill. Ban Johnson did not like any of this. He increased Ruth’s suspension to five games and said he would suspend Ruth for the entire summer if necessary.

  This at last brought the Bambino to contrition. He apologized to Dineen the next day in the umpires’ locker room, swore off on more arguments, and sat on a table and tried to figure out what was happening. Why had the picture on the wall been knocked sideways? He couldn’t understand.

  “Some persons are saying that I welcome the suspensions because it gives me an alibi for not equaling the home run record of last year,” he said. “This is ridiculous, as I realize that is impossible. Others claim I have a swelled head. My friends know different. I want to be in there every minute because I love to play baseball.”

  “It’s no use,” he continued on the field to a reporter, in between turns at the plate during batting practice. “They’re all after me. If I’m not wanted in organized baseball, all they have to do is tell me and I will step down and out.”

  He stepped into the cage, hit a couple of balls out of Dunn Field, stepped back out, and continued. Why was he being singled out? Everyone had yelled at Dineen. He stepped back into the cage, hit another shot over the wall. Stepped out, said all the breaks seemed to be going against the Yankees, but things would improve. Stepped back in, hit a ball that was as long as any home run ever seen at Dunn Field. Stepped out.

  “Tell my ‘friends’ about the four balls that have gone over the fence,” he finished, heading back to the dugout.

  The season was played out in this same discordant key. The Yankees won the pennant, of course, rallying, winning two out of three in a big series in St. Louis in the middle of September and then going on a six-game win streak to outlast the Browns by a game, and Ruth finished with 35 home runs, four behind Ken Williams and two behind Tilly Walker of the A’s—not bad for four-fifths of a season—but nothing came easy. One brushfire, just about to be extinguished, seemed to ignite another.

  This edition of the team—ten different players on the roster from the 1921 pennant winners—was filled with contentious veterans, devotees of the speakeasy and the racetrack in their off-hours, no-nonsense hardball players on the field. They didn’t pay much attention to manager Miller Huggins, didn’t pay much attention to anyone.

  The Colonels went so far as to hire a private detective to follow the team around on the road and report back on what he learned. Using the name of Kelly, he quickly infiltrated the after-dark scene, became friends with the players by buying them shirts and neckties and whatever, and they brought him to a ham and cabbage dinner Ruth had arranged at a brewery in Joliet, Illinois. Somewhere in the night, Kelly posed everyone for a famous beer-filled photograph—smile!—which he brought back to the Colonels as exhibit A, the star right fielder directly in the middle.

  Huggins confronted the players involved, one by one, in his hotel room in Washington. Ruth was the last visitor. Huggins asked Ruth why he always was moving, running, staying up late, finding himself in all of these situations.

  “I didn’t have a thing till I was 18 years old, not a bite,” Ruth replied, as introspective as anything he ever said. “Now it’s bustin’ out all over.”

  He then went downstairs and told Whitey Witt in the lobby that if he ever found Kelly, he’d kill him.

  No fines were given. No suspensions were levied. Kenesaw Mountain Landis did journey to Boston to talk to both the Yankees and Red Sox, gathered in the same room, about the perils of gambling, drink, bad friends, and staying up late.

  “Seeing a glorious sunrise is all right if you get up in the morning to watch it,” the wrath of God said, “but waiting up all night to see it is the rankest kind of folly, which has no place in the life of an athlete.”

  Yawn.

  “Those of you who are innocent of this practice of betting on horse races need not reproach yourselves, nor consider my remarks as personal,” the commissioner continued. “But there are some who are doing this thing, and to these I wish to say that they have not been unobserved and that the practice must cease or I will gather them in as surely as the sun rises in the morning.”

  Double yawn.

  Fights were another feature of the season. Ruth had a fight with Wally Pipp, or rather Wally Pipp whacked Ruth in the dugout after Ruth criticized his fielding. Braggo Roth and Aaron Ward had a fight one day later. Al DeVormer, an eccentric backup catcher, had fights with Carl Mays and Fred Hofmann. Waite Hoyt wanted to fight Huggins. Ruth, oh, yes, was suspended again for using a vile and vicious word, maybe the same word, maybe not, this time to umpire Tom Connolly. The suspension was for three days, accompanied by another apology, a vow never to be thrown out of a game again. The format was familiar.

  The result of all of this—or, perhaps, despite all of this—was that the Yankees had another date with the Giants in a second Subway Series. The format had been shortened to best-of-seven, a Judge Landis demand, but the matchups of old and new, brains and brawn, etc., were the same. The Giants had clinched their pennant early and appeared to be more r
ested. The Yankees, well, they had the Babe. The betting was evenly divided.

  One difference this time was that the games were on radio, broadcast through an eastern network of an estimated five million people from WJZ in Newark, WGY in Schenectady, and WBZ in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, did the play-by-play to what the NewYork Times called “an invisible audience.” It was noted that the invisible audience could even hear the cheering in the background at the Polo Grounds.

  Another difference this time was that the Giants killed the Yankees in four straight games. All of the sins of the season came back. The Yankees were pitiful. Miller Huggins forever thought Carl Mays and Joe Bush both threw games on purpose, a charge never verified. It was that kind of performance.

  Bush did almost certainly groove a pitch to George Kelly in the final game. In the eighth inning, two outs, runners on second and third, Yanks ahead, 3–2, Huggins ordered the right-handed Bush to walk the left-handed Ross Youngs and pitch to right-handed George Kelly. Bush disagreed with the decision.

  “What for, you stupid [vile and vicious name]?” he shouted at Huggins loud enough for the entire, packed stadium to hear.

  He walked Youngs. He served a meatball to Kelly. Kelly rifled the meatball into center field. The Giants took the lead, added another run, and five minutes later were champions of the world.

  Ruth was especially pitiful. McGraw instructed his pitchers to serve the Bambino a consistent diet of junk balls, low and inside. The Bambino was as helpless against this diet as he was against the screwballs of young Hub Pruett. He never saw one fastball in the strike zone. He finished with only a double and a single in 17 at-bats. The Giants didn’t even bother to walk him, issuing only two bases on balls.

  The frustration of it all hit Ruth at the end of the third game. The Giants had been riding him from the bench, bringing back that word “nigger” from St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. They used the word as both noun and adjective, teaming it with (as Ban Johnson would say) every vile and vicious name imaginable, calling him a “so-and-so nigger” and also “a nigger so-and-so.” Ruth had heard enough.

  Taking Bob Meusel with him after the 3–0 loss, he went to the Giants’ clubhouse. He first challenged reserve infielder Johnny Rawlings, the loudest voice on the bench. Then pitcher Jess Barnes became involved. Then Earl Smith, catcher.

  “What’d he call you?” Smith asked.

  “He called me a nigger,” the Babe said.

  “That’s nothing,” Smith said.

  Ruth became aware that several sportswriters had been drawn to the confrontation. McGraw also had joined the scene and ordered him out of the clubhouse. The edge came off Ruth’s anger. He joked with a couple of the Giants. He left with a request rather than a demand.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t mind being called a [submit vile and vicious name] or a [submit another vile and vicious name] or things like that. I expect that. Just lay off the personal stuff.”

  The strange season was done.

  In the off-season, Christy Walsh wanted to repair the damage that was done. It didn’t take an expert in this new public relations stuff to recognize that the Babe’s image had taken a few good blows. He hadn’t awed and amazed people, missing as many games as he did. He had come off as a combustible character, selfish, sometimes out of control, a bear that didn’t react well when baited. The goal was to bring him back to the big, lovable galoot who had captured America’s imagination in the first place.

  Walsh knew that perception was more important than truth. He always told his ghostwriters not to strive to write the way their athlete talked, but to try to write the way the public thought the athlete talked. There was a difference. The character in the public mind was more important than the real character.

  During the 1922 season, Ruth had two moments when he was an obvious big, lovable galoot. The first was when he bought the farm in Sudbury. The idea of him, the ultimate city kid, going off to raise chickens and turnips brought an immediate smile. The second moment was when he divulged that he was a father. He had a baby girl! Not only that, the baby girl was 16 months old!

  The news came out of the fog of his marriage in strange circumstances. While the Babe was on the road in Cleveland on September 20, Helen showed up at the Polo Grounds for a Giants game with the baby and a nurse. Reporters inquired. Helen answered. She said the baby, named Dorothy, had been born very small, two and a half pounds, and had lived in an incubator, then with a nurse before recently coming home to the Ansonia Hotel. The Babe hadn’t wanted news of the baby released until they knew she was completely healthy.

  Contacted in Cleveland, the Babe admitted he was a father. He said the baby had been born on February 2 at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Helen, alas, had said the baby was born on June 7 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. What was the deal?

  “I guess she knows,” Babe said.

  “You know he’s never good with names or dates,” Helen said.

  All this was confusing. Most guesses were that the baby had been adopted, but neither adoption records nor birth records ever were found anywhere. The truth—or another version of the truth—would not come out until more than 60 years later, when Dorothy would be told that she was in fact Ruth’s natural daughter, born to a lover and taken from the lover to live with Helen and the Babe.

  Whatever the case, he was now a dad, available for all of those dad photo opportunities. He was a big, lovable galoot of a dad.

  Christy Walsh decided to focus on these domestic changes—the farm, the daughter—in rebuilding the Babe’s image. He also devised what would become a staple of repaired public relations: the apology. When the Babe returned from a desultory barnstorming trip across the Midwest—the rules had been changed against Landis’s protest to make this allowable now—he immediately telephoned the Yankees offices and described how the winter was going to be devoted to the simple life of chopping wood, hunting, hiking, and losing 25 pounds. He also said he had hit 20 homers in 17 games across Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

  “Wait a minute,” he said in this report from his new domesticity. “The baby’s fallen out of the chair.”

  Walsh plotted out a far more public moment. He arranged a dinner on November 15 at the midtown Elks Club in New York. The theme was “Back to the Farm,” a good-bye to Ruth before he left for Sudbury. Walsh invited the city’s sportswriters, plus assorted politicians and Broadway notables. Attendance was good, a large papier-mâché cow stood atop the head table, and the show was memorable.

  State Sen. James J. Walker, later to become the gadfly mayor of New York, then the embattled mayor of New York, was the star attraction. At the end of an evening of pleasant speeches extolling the Babe, he rose and cut the Babe to pieces. A man publicly known to stay up late and take a drink had advice for a man publicly known to stay up later and take more drinks.

  “Babe Ruth is not only a great athlete, but also a great fool,” Walker began. “His employer, Col. Jacob Ruppert, makes millions of gallons of beer, and Ruth is of the opinion that he can drink it faster than the Colonel and his large corps of brew masters can make it. Well…you can’t! Nobody can.”

  The room became very quiet. The rest of the speech, as reported by Gene Fowler in his biography of Walker, Beau James, followed:

  You are making a bigger salary than anyone ever received as a ballplayer. But the bigger the salary, the bigger the fool you have become.

  Here sit some 40 sportswriters and big officials of baseball, our national sport. These men, your friends, know what you have done, even if you don’t. They are sad and dejected. Why? I’ll tell you. You have let them down!

  But worst of all, worst of all, you have let down the kids of America. Everywhere in America, on every vacant lot where kids play baseball, and in the hospitals too, where crippled children dream of movement forever denied their thin and warped little bodies, they think of you, their hero; they look up to you,
worship you. And then what happens? You carouse and abuse your great body and it is exactly as though Santa Claus himself suddenly were to take off his beard to reveal the features of a villain. The kids have seen their idol shattered and their dreams broken.

  Fowler’s report had the Babe sobbing by now. Other reports—sports-writer Fred Lieb’s, for one—did not remember any sobbing. Walker, in Fowler’s report, placed his hand on the Babe’s shoulder.

  “If we did not love you, Babe, and if I myself did not love you sincerely, I would not tell you these things,” Walker said. “Will you not, for the kids of America, solemnly mend your ways? Will you not give back to those kids their great idol?”

  Fowler had the Babe reply in tears.

  “So help me, Jim, I will!” Ruth said. “I’ll go back to my farm in Sudbury and get in shape.”

  He soon left with Walsh and this firm purpose to repent. The gathered sportswriters left with filled notebooks. They might have had some cynicism, some doubt about whether what they had seen was true, half-true, or completely staged, but words were words and these were good ones.

  The writers too wanted the old Babe to return.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  N EW YORK had 18 daily newspapers when the Babe arrived in 1920. Though the competition for readers and distribution wasn’t as deadly as it was in Chicago, where murders and sabotage were commonplace in the circulation wars in the first decade of the new century, the fight for the daily two cents from 5.6 million New Yorkers was serious and ferocious. The Babe was an answered prayer for everyone concerned.

  The Evening Journal, a William Randolph Hearst paper, was the circulation leader at around 600,000. The Times, the World, and the American each averaged slightly over 300,000, while the Sun and the Herald each was around 200,000, followed by the rest of the pack. Sports occupied 10 to 15 percent of the average news hole in all of these papers, even in the Times, and the Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, filled that space better than any athlete who ever had come along.