The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The Babe now had a playmate.

  The Yankees opened the 1926 season in Boston on April 14, a bone-cold, frozen day at Fenway Park with dignitaries shivering in their overcoats and 12,000 fans in the stands. This was the batting order:

  Mark Koenig, shortstop

  Earle Combs, center field

  Lou Gehrig, first base

  Babe Ruth, right field

  Bob Meusel, left field

  Tony Lazzeri, second base

  Joe Dugan, third base

  Pat Collins, catcher

  Bob Shawkey, pitcher

  Gehrig was far from the only change. Only Ruth, Meusel, and Joe Dugan, who had been picked up in the middle of the 1923 season, were left in the everyday lineup from the World Championship team of only three years earlier. First baseman Pipp, shortstop Everett Scott, center fielder Whitey Witt, and catcher Wally Schang all had been sent elsewhere. Second baseman Aaron Ward, whose hitting had been in steady decline and bottomed out at .246 a year earlier, was locked onto the bench.

  The reformed Ruth—okay, the semireformed, kind of reformed Ruth—was now a senior man in the operation. It was the start of his seventh season in pinstripes, and only the fading Shawkey had been around longer. Meusel had arrived at the same time as Ruth, but everyone else had been brought aboard to fill out a team picture that had the face of the Sultan of Swat in the middle.

  Koenig and Lazzeri were the biggest gambles. How many teams open a season with a rookie double-play combination? Koenig was a nervous, error-prone shortstop from San Francisco who had been obtained from St. Paul in the American Association in the middle of the ’25 season. He had replaced the light-hitting Wanninger, who had replaced Scott. Koenig had played 25 games at the end of the year, showing an impressive arm that could compensate for his other shortcomings. Lazzeri, at second, hopefully was a star in the making.

  He was a California version of “the next Babe Ruth,” a slender, deceptive power hitter also from San Francisco. Five feet 11, maybe 160 pounds, he had put together amazing numbers at Salt Lake City in the Pacific Coast League in 1925, hitting a record 60 home runs, knocking in a record 222 runs, and scoring a record 202 runs. The numbers were suspect because the PCL schedule ran for 200 games and the ball flew in a tiny park at high elevation in Salt Lake, but they couldn’t be ignored. His obvious strength came from working as a full-time boilermaker with his father from the time he was 15 years old.

  Ed Barrow had paid $55,000 plus three players for Lazzeri. The 22-year-old kid never had seen a big league game, never had been east of the Mississippi River. Would he be overwhelmed? A further complication was that he was epileptic. Some teams had stayed away from him for that reason, wondering what the effects of the disease would be. Other teams had stayed away because he was Italian, a minority not in favor with the white, old-line managers of the game. Was there room for an Italian epileptic? Everybody knew his condition and watched.

  “He’d be standing in front of the mirror, combing his hair,” Koenig said years later, describing Lazzeri’s epilepsy. “Suddenly the comb would fly out of his hand and hit the wall.

  “One morning in Chicago he had a fit in the clubhouse. He fell onto the ground and started foaming. I didn’t know what to do. I ran out the door without a stitch of clothing to get Hoyt, who was a mortician in the off-season. I figured he’d know something.”

  With Koenig, Lazzeri, and Gehrig in the lineup, three-fourths of the infield would be handled by virtual rookies. Third base also was a question. Dugan, a terrific fielder and a solid bat, was now 29 years old. He’d missed much of the ’25 season after knee surgery. Could he come back? His lifestyle was closest to the Babe’s. The same questions that surrounded the Babe surrounded him.

  The catcher, Pat Collins, had also been picked up from St. Paul. He had major league experience with the Browns, but they had shuffled him back to the minors. He mostly won the Yankees’ starting job by default. Huggins had slated defensive-minded, strong-throwing Benny Bengough from Buffalo for the spot, but Bengough showed up for spring training with a sore arm. He was strong-throwing Benny Bengough no more.

  The outfield was more than solid with Ruth, Meusel, and fleet Earle Combs in center. A college graduate and farmer from Kentucky, Combs had arrived in 1923, missed most of ’24 with a broken leg, and developed quietly in the midst of the chaos in ’25. He was a throwback to the John McGraw School of Baseball, graceful, pesky, a perfect setup man for Ruth and Meusel and Gehrig at the plate, a perfect defensive standout between two large-sized outfielders. He didn’t smoke, chew, spit, drink, or cuss. He read the Bible in his free time.

  The pitching was familiar, with the hard-throwing Hoyt, veteran Sam Jones, and Herb Pennock, Ruth’s friend, the master of three different curveballs, each one curvier than the last. The big pitching addition was Urban Shocker, picked up from the Browns in the deal involving Everett Scott. Shocker was another veteran, one of those grandfathered spitballers, very tough to hit. He also had a medical condition, a problem with a valve in his heart, so serious that he couldn’t lie down; he had to sleep sitting or standing every night. He would sit up for the entire trip in the Pullman cars. How long could he last?

  This was the basic team, pretty much built for the years ahead but playing in the present. The preseason prognosticators saw a lot of work here, hard and almost impossible work. The prognosticators did not prognosticate good things.

  “The Yankees are dawdling through the gestures of spring training in St. Petersburg, paying the least possible attention to Miller Huggins, who reciprocates their disinterest and pays the least possible attention to them,” Westbrook Pegler wrote. “They will start home a few weeks hence, about as well organized and disciplined as a panic.”

  “Despite reports to the contrary, the Yankees are not the worst ball club in the world,” Ford Frick wrote in the New York World in March from St. Petersburg. “They look a bit better than the Boston Red Sox or the Cleveland Indians. Over a long schedule they probably would finish ahead of Saskatoon and Medicine Hat. But finishing ahead of Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit and other American League clubs is quite another question.”

  Frick, who went on to praise the revitalized Ruth as “the one largest asset in a field of probable liabilities,” was joined in this thought by most other writers, even by Miller Huggins. The Yankees manager cautioned that the excitement around this team would come in two or three years.

  Then the games began.

  Sloppy at first, comical in two losses to the Boston Braves by 18–4 and 16–2 scores, the Yankees finished up their time in St. Petersburg by winning their final six exhibitions. They then went on the annual jaunt north, this time with the Brooklyn Robins, the forerunners to the Dodgers, and as the teams hit the now-familiar stops of the Babe’s tour of sickness a year earlier, Knoxville and Asheville and all the rest, a powerhouse grew daily in front of small-town eyes. Just like that. Koenig could play, and Lazzeri, indeed, could hit, and Dugan had recovered, and Gehrig certainly could hit, and Meusel and Combs and…Ruth was back! Every day Robins manager Uncle Wilbert Robinson rolled out an array of pitchers, and every day this new lineup pinned their ears back. Twelve games were played on the trip, ending with a game at the Stadium. Twelve games, all twelve, were won by the Yanks, ending with a 14–7 romp at the Stadium.

  “The 18 straight games the Yankees won during their exhibition campaign…have caused the experts to look a second time at the array Miller Huggins has assembled,” Richards Vidmer wrote in the Times. “At first it did not seem the Yankees would be even on the outside looking in; now it is highly probable they will be well on the inside of the first division.”

  “The Yankees have the greatest hitting team that has ever been assembled under one tent,” Wilbert Robinson said more forcefully at the end of his team’s succession of shellackings.

  The rebuilding process had taken exactly one spring.

  In the chilly opener at Fenway, the reconfigured Bombers from the Bronx outlast
ed the Red Sox, 12–11. At the end of April, they put together an eight-game winning streak to sit easily in first place with a 13–3 record. At the end of May, they put together a 16-game winning streak for a 30–9 record. They cruised through the season, withstanding a little late charge by the Indians in September, and won the pennant by three games. They won 91 games, lost 63.

  The Babe hit .372, had 47 home runs and 146 RBI, and caught a baseball dropped from an airplane that flew over Mitchell Field on Long Island. (It took seven attempts for the Babe to catch the ball. He was a dizzy, sweaty mess by the end.) Huggins told him to concentrate on catching baseballs hit by humans, not thrown out of airplanes. The king was back on his throne.

  The new life, the new team, all seemed to fit together for the big man in the summer of 1926. He had settled in and settled down. Not a lot, understand. The “mind of a 15-year-old” that Ban Johnson mentioned was still there, but this was the 15-year-old who finally had figured out that if he stayed after school every day he was going to miss a lot of fun. The concept of consequences had arrived and been acknowledged. Give up a little to gain more. That finally made sense.

  He moved back to the Ansonia, but spent more time at Claire’s apartment on West 79th Street than he did in his suite. The farm was sold in the middle of the season, a worry off his list. Helen and Dorothy, both in Boston, would visit his hotel when the Yankees played at Fenway Park, but mostly were out of the everyday equation. He still chased women with a hound-dog sense of urgency—teammates talked about how he and a waitress had disappeared behind a sand dune in the first weeks at St. Petersburg—and still ate and drank prodigious amounts, and still stayed up later than just about anybody else, but the frenzy of it all was missing. He had developed a better, modified pace. He even seemed to dress better, leaving some of the more flamboyant outfits in the closet. The dissipation mostly had dissipated.

  “After 1925, he was a good guy,” Waite Hoyt said. “The ballplayers thought the world of him. He was well regarded by the ballplayers.”

  He still had the obligatory court appearances in 1926. There was a mix-up in Massachusetts about unpaid state taxes. (He claimed he was a New York resident, not a Sudbury resident.) There was a speeding ticket, doing 33 miles per hour again on Riverside Drive, settled with a $25 fine, no jail time, because he had been clean for two years. There was even the obligatory fistfight with a teammate, this time with the rookie Koenig. Ruth badgered the shortstop about some errors during an exhibition in Baltimore. Koenig had heard enough and jumped the big man with a flurry of punches back in the dugout. Ruth then held Koenig’s arms back until other players intervened.

  None of these things seemed to matter as much. They were symbolic of nothing, over, done. Normal. The most startling difference of the new life was Ruth’s relationship with Huggins. The nicknames and the defiance were gone. The players who liked the little manager, who liked him very much, were the ones who listened to him. Ruth now listened to him.

  “Huggins was sort of a fatherly guy,” Waite Hoyt said. “He was sort of a baseball father and sort of a psychiatrist. He had a couch in his office, and I was on that couch more than I was on the field. I was always being lectured, because he always said to me, ‘You should lead the league every year with your stuff, should lead the league, but you don’t because you don’t concentrate. You have friends in the stands and you’re worrying whether your friends are there or not. You don’t concentrate.’ And it would go on for hours.”

  A moment came during the season when Huggins wanted to attack an umpire for some call. Ruth held him back. Hoyt loved that picture, remembered it for years. Ruth now worked with Huggins, and Huggins worked with Ruth. The father-psychiatrist had made his breakthrough.

  Instead of hiring a private detective to follow the slugger when the Yankees visited Chicago this year, Barrow and Huggins found a more subtle approach. Ruth came to the lobby of the Del Prado Hotel one night, dressed and perfumed, ready for a taste of Windy City decadence, and found Brother Matthias from long-ago St. Mary’s Industrial School sitting in a chair near the elevator.

  An international Eucharistic Congress was being held in the city, and the Yankees had paid the bill to bring the good brother west. He invited Ruth to dinner, and what could the big man say? They ate, the brother gave counsel about life and responsibility, and they were back at the hotel by 11 o’clock. Goodnight, George. Goodnight, Brother. Who could run the streets after a night with Brother Matthias?

  The net effect of everything—the better conditioning, the quieter life, all of it—was the wonderful season. In addition to the 47 homers, the .372 batting average, the Babe had 10 sacrifice bunts. He was part of team success. The nickname “Murderers’ Row” had been given to the Yankees’ lineup back in 1921, but never really stuck. It did now, and there was no doubt about who was the most efficient murderer.

  The Bam was first in the major leagues in home runs (47) by an incredible margin: Al Simmons was second in the American League with 19, and Hack Wilson was at the top of the NL with 21. (Lazzeri had 18, Gehrig 16.) He had the same kind of margin in RBI, his 145 far ahead of George Burns from Cleveland (114) in the AL and Jim Bottomley’s 120 in the NL. If his batting average had been five points higher, catching the .378 of Detroit’s Heinie Manush, he would have been a Triple Crown winner for all of baseball. He would have been the easy MVP if rules at the time didn’t state that a player could win the award only once. (Burns of the Indians was given the honor by default.)

  As the Yankees went into the 1926 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, he was again the center of all attention. The sportswriters saw the Series as a matchup of the Cardinals’ overall strength against the Yankees’ hitting, which translated into the Babe. How would the Babe do? That would determine the outcome. The sportswriters made the Yankees favorites.

  “We’ll beat ’em,” the big man said as he “elbowed his way through the crowd of small boys and men who met the Yankee Special” at Penn Station in one report. “There’ll be nothing to it.”

  A newly formed organization, the National Broadcasting Company, which had purchased New York station WEAF during the season, broadcast the games on a 25-station radio network across the country and into Canada. This was the first true, easy-to-hear broadcast of the event. It was estimated that more than 15 million people would listen, an idea so staggering that the Times reported after the first game “in a fraction of a second the thrill of each exciting incident ran from coast to coast and probably from below the Mexican border to points around Hudson Bay.”

  The play-by-play announcer was 38-year-old Graham McNamee, whose excited portrayals of the action would set a standard for sports broadcasting. An out-of-work salesman and part-time baritone singer, he was on jury duty at federal court for $3 a day in 1923 when he walked into the nearby WEAF studios at 195 Broadway during his lunch break. He was hired immediately for a job that required him to “open and close pianos for artistes, answer telephone calls, escort unaccompanied young ladies home after programs, sing operatic and religious selections and do some announcing.” The “do some announcing” part became the most important.

  He and partner Phil Carlin eventually did a six-hour show every afternoon—with an hour out for dinner—and they also covered the political conventions and sports events of the day. His voice became so familiar and accepted by America that recordings of it were analyzed in laboratories to pick up the cadence and frequencies to teach to young announcers.

  The Times ran full-page summaries of his broadcast of every Series game. Sport as entertainment had never come close to reaching this kind of audience. The mind reeled at the thought of farmers in lowa, ranchers in Texas sitting down and being part of each Series moment as it happened.

  “We are just about to go on,” McNamee told the country as the Series began. “The umpire is behind the plate now putting on his mask and adjusting his chest protector. The diamond and ground and everything look beautiful. The dark brown chocolate color of
the base line and the beautiful ground is wonderful. Around the edges is a running track and still around that is an embankment of green….”

  The House That Ruth Built sat right there, perfect, in front of everyone. The white of the home uniforms and the gray of the visitors’ could be seen in faraway living rooms. McNamee would describe the color of ladies’ hats, the passing of advertising airplanes, the chill of the air or the warmth of the sun, the exhaustion felt at the seventh-inning stretch. Magic. Now he described the Babe, coming to the plate for the first time in the home half of the first inning:

  Babe Ruth at bat. He is taking his usual hand, a tremendous adulation from the New York crowd. Babe bats lefthanded with his right foot tremendously extended toward the plate. A slow ball, too low—ball one. Another ball, outside and low—two balls for the Babe. Ruth, one out and a man on first, Combs. Babe gets a tremendous slice at the ball, and he throws that entire body of his onto the right leg and pivots with it. Again, a little low, over the pan, but a little for three balls, no strikes on Babe Ruth.

  The Babe is quieter at the plate than he usually is. He usually is rather nervous and moves around quite a bit, you know, but today he is very quiet. Four balls. The Babe has been passed. (Yelling and shouting.)

  The Series that America heard evolved into a classic. The teams split the first two games, then went to St. Louis, where the Cardinals won the third. In the fourth game, Ruth exploded. He hit home runs in his first two at-bats, walked in the next, then hit his third homer in the sixth as the Yankees took a 10–5 win to tie the best-of-seven Series at two home games apiece.

  Three home runs in a game was not only a Series record but seemed to border on the unbelievable. Each shot was longer than the last, the final one bouncing in the center-field bleachers and skipping out of Sportsman’s Park. Newspapers around the country the next day printed large pictures of the park with dotted lines and arrows following the path of the three balls. One newspaper even printed a large picture of Yankee Stadium and dotted lines to show where the balls would have gone if hit in New York. The man who described the final blast probably had the emotion right.