The back page of the Daily News was perfect for the Babe, and the Babe was perfect for the back page of the Daily News. Marshall Hunt was determined to keep him there.
“When the Babe came down from Boston, we knew a lot about him,” Hunt said years later. “He’d been an amazing pitcher up there, a great hitter, really a good fielder…we knew the Babe. When we were in Boston, we always went down to the clubhouse. It’s not like now. You were welcome. The players came over and shaked your hand, even though you had kidded them badly the day before.
“Patterson was always looking around for some outstanding people in tennis, football, baseball that we could latch on to and sort of cultivate and have exclusive stuff on the guy, just because we could go to his apartment at night, take him fishing, hunting, anything. So Babe arrived in New York, and we recognized him as someone we could do business with.”
Hunt was one of those small, mischievous men with a twinkle in an eye that saw everything around him. He was always on the lookout for life. He appreciated a cocktail, a good meal, a late night. He was a respectable golfer, an avid fisherman. He was a perfect companion for the Babe.
There was no secret to the way he became close with his subject: he simply showed up. He went to the places where the other writers didn’t, the nonbaseball places where the Babe was happy to see a familiar face. Dinners and vaudeville shows. Prizefights and hospitals. He was around and the Babe noticed, and after a while they would go to these places together.
The trap was sprung. The common bond was fun. Hunt became a figure in the background in pictures, a member of the foursome watching as the subject teed off. Christy Walsh was in the foreground in formal shots. Hunt was in the background in the informal ones. The Babe had become a Daily News man.
Hunt was his serial biographer.
“We got along fine,” Hunt said. “I never had a cross word with the Big Baboon. He was no intellectual, you know, but he was an agreeable guy. He really liked baseball, and he liked people. And he tried to be agreeable.”
“Marsh is okay, but someday I hope that little runt misses a train,” the Babe said. “A guy has to have some privacy.”
The job for Hunt was a joy. Not only was he out in the desired hum, he was at its epicenter. He was bright and well read, curious and funny, and when he walked the same red carpet as the Babe, he was able to notice all the things that the big man missed. The code was in place, Hunt so careful of the boundaries that he asked editor Phil Payne to send other reporters to the scene when scandal arose and tough questions had to be asked, but he still tried to present the outrageousness of his subject’s life, the ceaseless, wonderful feast that was laid out, the unremitting excess. He was mesmerized by it.
The practice at the time was for the baseball clubs to pick up the expenses of the writers traveling with the club. The Yankees were no different. Hunt told Patterson that the News should pay his expenses. The Babe already was staying at a different hotel from the team on the road. With a carte blanche expense account, Hunt could join him. He could trail his man in all endeavors, not worrying about cost. Patterson agreed.
“No one ever questioned my expenses,” Hunt said. “It was publish or perish. If you got the stories, no one bothered you.”
The other writers mostly ended their coverage of the Babe at the end of the season, moving along to other sports, other subjects. Hunt would keep going. The Babe was a 12-month job. Hunt would move along to the barnstorming tours, to the vaudeville tours, to the off-season habitats of the great man. The stories were even better in the off-season. They mostly didn’t have to be shared. They belonged only to the Daily News.
Example: Hunt showed up at the farm in Sudbury unannounced. He simply said, “I wonder what the Babe’s doing?” and took a train from New York. He got off at a small station in Massachusetts in a blizzard, learned there was no such thing as a taxi, and found a man who would give him a ride to the farm in a hearse. He showed up at the Babe’s door in a hearse! The Babe let him in.
“There was all of this snow piled up in the back of the house,” Hunt said. “I thought it had been bulldozed into a pile. No. The Babe said he’d been trying to get his car, a big Packard, out of the backyard. He’d been driving the car back and forth, stuck, and built up the pile. He had burned out the clutch and was complaining about the cheap clutch. It wasn’t the cheap clutch. He’d just killed it.”
Hunt noticed a piano in the living room. The Babe said it had come with the farm. Hunt noticed some scratches on the top of the piano. The Babe said there was a reason. He had a cat that did a very good trick. Here…the Babe showed the trick.
He put the cat in a rocking chair. He waited for the cat to fall asleep, then brought out a shotgun and opened a window. He fired the shotgun out the window. The cat did one world-class leap from the rocking chair to the top of the piano, digging his claws into the finish as he landed. Wasn’t that a good trick?
“I have no idea how many times he did it,” Hunt said. “I don’t know if the cat jumped every time. He did it this time, though. Jesus, what a trajectory.”
Example: Hunt went bowling with the Babe. Off on a barnstorming tour, somewhere in the middle of America, killing time, he and the Babe found a dilapidated alley located on the second floor of a building on a steep hill.
“There were two lanes, both of which looked as though they had been used as a proving ground for Caterpillar tractors,” Hunt recalled years later in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The proprietor said we could bowl, but not until he found a pin boy. He departed on his errand, but not until he had propped open double doors at the head of the stairs.
“The Babe noticed that pins were standing up in one alley. He announced that he would take a practice roll, whereupon he picked up one of the three balls on the rails that appeared to be fairly round, but its surface suggested that perhaps an alligator had teethed on it.”
The Babe rolled. He slipped in his follow-through. The misshapen ball veered across the misshapen alley, went into the gutter, then jumped out again and began rolling across the floor. It reached the open double doors, went down the stairs, thumpeta-thumpeta, hit the street, and kept going down the hill. Gravity made it move faster and faster.
Hunt and the Babe followed. They walked all the way to where the ball finally stopped. They estimated the distance at 1,050 feet. The Babe thought he might have established a world record for the longest rolling of a bowling ball. Hunt thought he had a pretty good story for the readers of the Daily News.
Example: Ice fishing in upstate New York. The Babe was cold; the fish weren’t biting. It was time to go…
“We were preparing to leave when the Babe removed the backseat of his 12-cylinder Packard and lifted out a golf bag the diameter of a hot water tank,” Hunt said. “He pulled out a driver and extracted a ball and a wooden peg. He hammered the peg into frozen ground, perched a ball on the tee, only to see it blown off. He replaced it, stood erect, wound up in his inimitable fashion.
“As he swung at the ball, as only the Babe could swing at it, I thought I heard, above the sound of the gale, a distinct whistle—which could have been caused only by the shaft of a golf club slicing the air with incredible speed. There was a loud smack, and the ball, lofted into a howling tail wind, left our vicinity as though fired from a mortar.
“We saw the ball strike the ice, far out on the lake. It bounded and bounded, then we lost sight of it. My feeling was that the Dunlop, given an aerodynamical assist by nature, didn’t lose motion until it struck the opposite shore, perhaps a mile and one-half away.”
In the coming years, Hunt would travel with his man to cathouses and communion breakfasts, to the big games at the World Series and the small games on crabgrass fields in Indiana with local standouts brought together for a day of glory in the shadow of an exalted presence. He would check out the Babe’s women—“Always striving for accuracy, I must report that some of the Babe’s paramours for a day would really appeal only to a man who was just st
epping out of a prison after serving a 15-year sentence,” he said—and ride fast with him through the night. He would put two live flounder from the local market in his bathtub in a hotel in Boston and invite writers and ballplayers to his room for a fishing tournament. He would put pinpricks in the bottom of all the cups in a dispenser on the train and watch as people tried to control the leaking water while they tried to drink.
Hunt would drag the Babe to the Boston Symphony. (The Babe fell asleep.) He would try to drag him to the ballet. (The Babe canceled at the last moment.) In the roaring time that evolved, Hunt was part of the roar. He went to the plays, the parties, ate everything with a discerning palate. He sat at the table and sent back dispatches to his readers.
“Action?” he would ask much later. “Did you ever see 500 persons, clad in garments permitting great freedom of movement, do the Charleston, the music provided by a 65-piece orchestra, every member giving his all?”
On February 14, 1923, he took the Babe to the almost-completed Yankee Stadium for the first time. Four inches of snow covered the field. The moment was arranged just for the readers of the Daily News.
“The writer had invited the home run champion to inspect the new home of the Yanks,” Hunt wrote.
I had a curious desire to find out if the Babe could keep his eye on the ball after a quiet winter on his Massachusetts farm.
We sloshed out to a spot where Groundskeeper Phil Schenen will shortly pattern a nice new pitching mound. The Babe shed his fur-lined flogger and his imported skimmer and stepped nimbly to where the plate is to be. He was wearing a skillfully-tailored suit of blue serge.
Deponent never was a pitcher of any considerable parts. But the Babe stood there grinning broadly. After lengthy preparation, we launched a curve. It went wild. Poor control. But there was balm in two other sneaking curves and the Babe fanned wildly. Hence we say that we had something on the New England agricultural.
The fourth ball pitched hit the Babe’s bat in some uncanny manner and the sphere went bounding over the snow. And so did every ball thrown from then on.
“Sorry you ain’t pitching for the Browns,” laughed the Babe.
The stadium opened on April 18, 1923. The circulation of the New York Daily News had shot past the 600,000 mark in slightly more than three years, passing the circulation of the New York Journal. The News was now the best-selling paper not only in New York but in the entire country.
CHAPTER TWELVE
T HE NEW STADIUM was an amazement. It was a giant, three-decked wedding cake in the Bronx, a skyscraper in repose, covering the ten acres of land purchased from the Astor estate. The plan to enclose the field entirely had been altered to allow the structure to be built in 11 months and be ready for opening day. The bleachers now were on one level and open to the elements in center field, but that did not change the public reaction. The stadium was an instant hit.
“Once inside the grounds, the sweep of the big stand strikes the eye most forcibly,” the New York Times decided at first glance. “It throws its arms out to each side, the grandstand ending away over where the bleachers begin. In the center of the vast pile of steel and concrete is the green spread of grass and diamond, and fewer ball fields are greener.”
The nation was in the midst of a stadium-building boom. Harvard University had built the first prestressed concrete stadium in 1903, and Yale, in the ever-running battle of one-upsmanship with its rival, doubled the size of Harvard’s effort with the 80,000-seat Yale Bowl in 1908, but the end of the war had started the true building explosion. Games had gained a new importance. Physical training in the cantonments had brought many ordinary men to sport, to athletics, forced them to take part and enjoy physical competition for the first time in their workaday lives. The interest continued.
Every university in the country seemed to be trying to raise funds to build a new stadium. Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Ohio State…they all had new stadiums or stadiums under construction. In Los Angeles, the L.A. Coliseum was being built in an effort to attract the Olympics. In Chicago, a massive stadium, Soldier Field, was planned on the lake. The fact was pointed out in the Times that the Romans, the all-time lovers of sport, had constructed perhaps 10 to 15 larger stadiums and 100 smaller ones during their time of influence. The United States now not only had matched the Romans in stadiums, but had surpassed them in number and size. The Roman Colosseum, historians decided, held only 45,000 spectators. Bigger stadiums than that were being built every day.
Excluding the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Yankee Stadium initially was expected to be the biggest. Some plans suggested that as many as 100,000 people ultimately might be accommodated. (This never happened.) The Stadium also was different from all of the other contenders because it was a baseball park, the first major league park built in eight years. Football games and prizefights were expected to help pay the bills, and a running track around the field opened the possibility of large track meets, but the Yankees were the owners, and the Stadium was their home, and baseball was the game.
The Osborn Engineering Company of Cleveland, which had designed Fenway Park and Braves Field in Boston, was listed as the architect. No individual architect ever was named. The politically connected White Construction Company was the builder after the obligatory dance with Tammany Hall delayed the start of the project for almost a year. When the politicians finally agreed, Cromwell Avenue and a section of East 158th Street were swallowed up by the plan.
Five hundred men fashioned 2,000 tons of structural steel, 1,000 tons of reinforcing steel, and 30,000 yards of concrete (made from 45,000 barrels of cement, 30,000 yards of gravel, and 15,000 yards of sand) into the final structure. Trucks brought 116,000 square feet of sod from Long Island to cover the field. Two million board feet of lumber were used for the bleachers.
The dimensions of the park favored power hitters down the lines, especially left-handed hitters, with a low and cozy right-field wall, but the park also featured a deep center-field expanse that helped pitchers with good control. The official capacity, which wouldn’t be determined until an audit later in the season, was 62,000, but on opening day, April 18, 1923, Col. Ruppert released the attendance number of 74,200, which was quickly accepted. A later estimate was that 70,000 people, including standees, were inside on the cold, blustery day. Another estimated 25,000 were outside, shut out when all tickets were sold and the final gates in the bleachers were closed and padlocked a half-hour before game time.
Two entrepreneurs, 38-year-old Abraham Cohen of Brooklyn and 35-year-old Sebastian Calabrese of East 27th Street, were the first arrested Yankee Stadium ticket scalpers. Cohen was charged with trying to sell his $1.10 grandstand ticket for $1.25, Calabrese for asking $1.50. They faced fines of $500 and a possible year in jail.
The business of baseball had hit a new frontier. And there was no doubt about who had brought it there.
The Stadium was a grand monument to the drawing powers of the resident right fielder. (Did the Romans ever build a stadium simply to show off the talents of one gladiator? And if they did, did they—as the Yankees did—situate the playing surface so the late-afternoon sun always would be behind their star attraction, not shining in his eyes?) An argument could be made that Cols. Ruppert and Huston probably would have built a stadium at some point—they certainly had the capital to do so—but would it have been built as soon and as large? Ruth was the one who drew the large crowds to the Polo Grounds, invoking the jealousy of Giants owner Charles Stoneham, who asked the Yankees to leave. Ruth was the one who promised to bring the big crowds with him to whatever new park was built, no matter the size. Ruth was the one who at last had given the second-class Yankees first-class style and pizzazz.
Over 150 typists gathered at the grand opening, and it was Fred Lieb of the World who tapped out the words that stuck, immediately calling the Stadium “the House That Ruth Built.” From the moment the big man walked onto the field and posed for pictures
with Little Ray Kelly, now five, the place belonged to him. Any doubt about that fact ended when he was singled out during the pregame festivities. Gov. Al Smith threw out the first ball to catcher Wally Schang, and John Philip Sousa himself led the 7th Regiment Band in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Babe was presented with a carrying case that contained a large bat, presumably to give him an idea of what he was supposed to do in the new ballpark.
His much-ballyhooed return to the farm in Sudbury during the off-season had put him in the best physical condition he’d enjoyed since he was a pitcher with the Red Sox. He’d been spotted only three times in New York since the close of the 1922 season, all short visits, two of them for medical treatment on the finger he’d injured during the Series. An influenza attack at the end of his three weeks at the healing tubs of Hot Springs had ensured that his weight was as low as it ever had been in the big leagues, 202 pounds, when he reported late to training camp in New Orleans. He seemed primed for a return to the glories of 1920 and ’21 except for one discomforting fact: he didn’t hit well during much of the spring.
Huggins had cornered him on a train and warned that maybe 1922 hadn’t been an aberration, that maybe he was done, finished. Ruth said nothing in reply. Questions were asked in the newspapers about whether his eyesight was beginning to fail at age 29 (actually 28). Westbrook Pegler, four days before the Stadium opened, had another thought. Maybe the good life wasn’t so good for George Herman.
“They are beginning to wonder if too much probity isn’t a dangerous thing,” Pegler wrote for the Tribune syndicate.
The Babe has been a model young fellow for all winter and spring, but daily his hitting gets more awful. They recollect wistfully that one time he landed in Detroit in the throes of passing personal reform and didn’t get a hit in three days. They recollect that on the night of the third day, the Babe suspended the pious regime, went to a party, appeared at the ball park the next day with an undersized skull containing an oversized headache, and lashed out two of his best home runs.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 21
