“Oh, what a shot!” McNamee screamed. “Directly over second. The boys are all over him over there. One of the boys is riding on Ruth’s back. Oh, what a shot! Directly over second base, far into the bleachers out in center field, and almost on a line and then that dumbbell, where is he, who told me not to talk about Ruth! Oh boy! Not that I love Ruth, but oh how I love to see a shot like that! Wow…that is a mile and a half from here. You know what I mean.”
The Yankees won the fifth game in St. Louis, 3–2, in ten innings, which brought the Series back to New York with the home team only one win away from the World Championship. Alas, Grover Cleveland Alexander, the veteran Cardinals pitcher who was one of the few men in baseball known to not only drink more than Ruth but feel the effects less, masterfully shut down the Yanks, 10–2, to set up a winner-take-all seventh game at the Stadium.
On a cold, wet October day, wind gusting everywhere, Waite Hoyt went to the mound against Jesse Haines. Ruth put the Yankees ahead, 1–0, with a shot in the third, his fourth homer in the Series, and made a spectacular running, diving catch on the warning track against Bob O’Farrell. The Cardinals came back in the fourth with three unearned runs off Hoyt. It was one of those maddening rallies filled with a botched double-play ball by Koenig, a dropped ball in left by Meusel, and a pop fly by the Cards’ Tommy Thevenow that scored the final two runs.
“With a two-strikes-no-balls count, I threw him a curveball that was a foot outside the plate,” Hoyt said. “I was criticized for that later on, for allowing Thevenow to hit the ball with a count of two strikes and no balls. But the ball was a bad ball. It was a curveball, and it was about a foot off the plate, outside. Thevenow reached out, and he popped the ball over the head of Lazzeri.
“The ball never reached the outfield. It hit the mud and twisted around, and Lazzeri couldn’t find it, and the runs scored while he looked.”
The Yankees scored a run to come within 3–2 and then loaded the bases with two outs in the seventh. St. Louis manager Rogers Hornsby pulled Haines and brought Alexander out of the bullpen, a move that surprised everyone, especially Alexander. Forty years old, hungover after celebrating his game six win, maybe even still half-drunk, he came to the mound to face Lazzeri.
“Are you all right?” Hornsby asked as he gave Alexander the ball.
“I’m okay,” Alexander mumbled in reply. “But no warm-up pitches. I don’t want to give anything away.”
The first pitch, no warm-ups, was a called strike. On the second, Lazzeri swung and lifted a long fly to left that everyone thought was a grand-slam homer until a gust of wind sent it just foul. On the third pitch, Lazzeri expected another fastball. Alexander, known as Alexander the Great, threw a slow curve that was so low, according to the New York Times, that “a Singer midget couldn’t have hit it.” Lazzeri swung for strike three, the end of the rally.
Alexander retired the Yankees one-two-three in the eighth, then took care of the first two batters in the ninth. This set up a confrontation with Ruth. Working carefully, Alexander took the count to 3–2, then walked the Bam. Bob Meusel came to the plate, swung at a pitch, and Ruth tried to steal second.
And was thrown out. Easily.
It was—and probably still is—the weirdest end to a World Series. Ruth explained later that he had a hunch. The decision to steal was his decision. He didn’t think the Yankees would collect two hits in a row to bring him home. He tried to put himself in position to come home with one hit. It simply didn’t work out.
“Ruth is walked again for the fourth time today,” Graham McNamee told the country. “One strike on Bob Meusel. Going down to second!!! The game is over! Babe tried to steal second and is put out, catcher to second!”
The Series was done.
There was surprisingly little debate about Ruth’s bold decision. Miller Huggins defended his man.
“We needed an unexpected move,” the manager said. “Had Ruth made the steal, it would have been declared the smartest piece of baseball in the history of World Series play.”
The enduring Big Bam story from the World Series thus was not the attempted steal of second. It wasn’t even the three-home-run game or the four home runs in the Series or the .300 batting average or even the ten records he set. It was the story of Johnny Sylvester, the 11-year-old boy from Essex Falls, New Jersey, pulled from death’s grasp at the last moment by the heroics of a big lug half a continent away. Fact and myth and good PR, the new science, merged with marketing and America’s great love for pathos to create perfection. Johnny Sylvester and the Babe. This was the best story of them all.
“(SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES) ESSEX FALLS, N.J., OCT 7.—John Dale Sylvester, 11 years old, to whom physicians allotted thirty minutes of life when he was struck with blood poisoning last week, was pronounced well on the road to recovery this afternoon, after he had contentedly listened to radio returns of the Yankees’ defeat of the Cardinals.”
The story started small and grew out of control, like the tales of the rescue of the cocker spaniel that fell in the well, the Boy Scout who stops a robbery, the old-timer who regains his hearing after he falls off the ladder. Somewhere a push came along to convert the mundane into a national fascination. One step led to another.
The first step: Johnny, kicked by a horse, sustained some sort of injury and was confined to his bed. The injury was to the head or spine, according to the newspaper a man read. (Readers of the Times were told it was blood poisoning.) The severity of the injury also varied, from simple inconvenience to—as the Times said—30 minutes from the Grim Reaper.
Johnny loved baseball, loved Babe Ruth. His well-connected father, Horace C. Sylvester Jr., vice president of the National City Bank of New York, trying to cheer up the lad in any way possible, sent a wire to friends in St. Louis asking if they could obtain autographed baseballs from both the Yankees and Cardinals. The baseballs arrived by air mail, apparently accompanied by a note from the Babe that said he would hit a home run for Johnny. The great man then, of course, hit three in one game.
Eureka! Johnny’s condition improved. Doctors were “baffled” by how this had happened. Must have been the baseballs. Must have been a miracle. Must have been the Babe.
The second step: someone alerted the press. The hand of Christy Walsh, though never matched publicly for fingerprints, would lead any list of suspects.
The third step: madness. Tabloid chaos.
“Did Babe Ruth knock a homer?” asked Johnny in one typical account. “His father displayed the evening newspaper. ‘Babe Ruth Hits Three Homers’ was the big black type at the top of the first page. Johnny sighed and went to sleep, a baseball in each hand. When he woke up, the nurse took his temperature. It had gone down two degrees.”
Eureka.
Stories about the Babe and kids were sports page favorites. Walsh loved them. Writers loved them. People loved them. The basic thread always was that the Caliph of Clout, the Rajah of Rap, the Behemoth of Bangs loved kids and kids loved him because he was one of them. He was pictured often with kids. He appeared at events for kids. He sold a bunch of products to kids. There was a tale, once a year, maybe twice, maybe more, about some kind thing he did for some kid. The runaway from Kansas always went home to start life anew. The tyke in the wheelchair had a signed baseball and a new, bright outlook.
The messages always were sweet and uplifting, almost Sunday school homilies. St. Francis of Assisi didn’t love birds as much as the Babe loved kids. A layer of truth always existed—there was a kid and there was an interaction with the Babe—but the words always seemed like they were spread too thick and deep and too absolutely perfect.
“For every picture you see of the Babe in a hospital, he visits fifty without publicity,” New York Sun sportswriter Bill Slocum, one of Ruth’s ghosts, once wrote. “I know. I get him there. Every road trip it’ll happen three or four times…. I’ll be going to bed around 11 and I’ll meet the Babe…. He’ll say, ‘Bill, I promised some guy I’d go out to a hospital tomorrow morn
ing. Saint Something-or-Other hospital. Find out which one it is. I’ll meet you at eight o’clock here in the lobby.”
Was that the way it really was?
Fred Lieb, in his memoir Baseball As I Have Known It, gave a different Slocum opinion. He said Slocum always thought the Babe’s love for kids was “a sham and a put-on.” Lieb wrote the tale of Slocum, angry with Ruth, telling him this face-to-face. Lieb quoted Slocum: “You’re smart enough to know that your visits to sick and maimed kids square you with the club and the public for some of the rotten things you’ve done and all the trouble you’ve caused Miller Huggins.” Lieb then said, though, that he did believe that Ruth cared for kids.
Truth no doubt lived at an address in the middle. Kids loved Ruth. That was fact. He was a perpetual department store Santa. They followed him, mobbed him, reinvented him in their minds at home every night while they stared at his picture. He, in turn, did his job quite well. He made the stops, delivered the appropriate “ho-ho-ho’s.”
Though negative anecdotes seeped out in later years—he spit on this kid, kicked this other one, etc.—he certainly did not hate children. He listened with some animation to their words. He signed the autographs. He went to a lot of hospitals, orphanages, and Boy Scout jamborees. Put in the proper situation, he was good with his juvenile public. He simply wasn’t as good as the newspapers made him out to be. No human being could be that good.
Christy Walsh or maybe a reporter—and it had to be someone, because the newspapers had been alerted and sent photographers—convinced him to visit young Johnny Sylvester two days after the Series ended. Ruth was playing an exhibition that day anyway at Bradley Beach, New Jersey, against the Brooklyn Royal Colored Giants and was supposed to be honored at a reception there before the game. The stop made sense, even if he would be late for the reception.
He walked into Johnny’s room and flashbulbs popped, and he asked how Johnny was doing and made small talk, and the reporters scribbled and the wheels of commerce moved. (“Nice looking brother you have there,” the Babe said. “That’s my sister,” Johnny replied.) The scene was a postcard to the public, due to be reproduced in many saccharine variations for years.
“Supposing that while you were sick a baseball came from Babe Ruth himself because his name was on it and he promised to hit a home run for you in the World Series, a private home run and all, and then he hit three of them,” Paul Gallico wrote in the Daily News the next day.
I say just supposing. That’s all dreams are anyway—supposing. And then supposing one day mother came in all excited and said, “Johnny there’s someone here to see you,” and in walked Babe Ruth right out of the newspapers except he didn’t have his baseball suit on and he came over to your bed and held out his hand to shake and said, “Hello, Johnny; how do you feel now?” What would you do? What would you say? What would the fellows say? Not just someone dressed up like Ruth, mind you, but Babe Ruth himself, and he’d left a baseball game and a lot of people with silk hats and medals and things waiting for him while he called on you because he heard you were sick and needed him…. Life has no greater beauty to offer than that our dreams shall, at some time or other, acquire even a faint tinge of reality.
Two sportswriters, John Drebinger and Frank Graham, years later told about a meeting on an elevator between Ruth and a stranger, a man who shook Ruth’s hand, introduced himself as Johnny Sylvester’s uncle, and thanked the slugger for being such a help. The man left and Ruth said, “Now who the hell is Johnny Sylvester?” It didn’t matter. He always was bad with names. The story was the story.
Votive candles now flickered again under the picture of the man who a year ago had been seen as an overweight, overpaid, out-of-shape adulterer. The new science of public relations seemed to work quite well.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
M ARSHALL HUNT put together his ultimate “Babe and Me” exclusive in the first two months of 1927. The Babe was in Hollywood making a movie called The Babe Comes Home, and he secured for Hunt a low-paying but heavily privileged role as “a technical adviser.” Hunt convinced the Daily News that he should do a series on the whole thing, an easy bit of salesmanship, and headed west. He arrived two days into production while the crew was filming at a small amusement park at Venice Beach.
“Stop the camera!” the Babe shouted in mock horror when Hunt appeared. “This guy is everywhere!”
Unlike the Babe’s first venture into the movies, when the check ultimately bounced, this was a big-time operation for First National Pictures, the leading studio of the day. The director was Tim Wilde, who had directed many of Harold Lloyd’s comedies. The co-star was Anna Q. Nilsson, a bona-fide leading lady.
A native of Ystad, Sweden, she was the first of many Scandinavian beauties to capture Hollywood with their startling good looks. She had arrived in the town in 1910, 22 years old, and found immediate work as a model. The modeling led to movies, and she cranked them out, 84 films between 1911 and 1917 alone, her Swedish accent no problem in the age of silent film.
An accident while riding a horse in 1925, however, threatened her career. Thrown by the horse, she landed against a stone wall and was paralyzed for a year. She returned to Sweden, where she worked her way back through physical therapy to a point where she could walk and move again. The Babe Comes Home was part of her comeback.
It was generally known that she was not happy with the casting. The Babe was a late selection for an unnamed script that had been written. The original plan was for an actor to play the role of the slugger. Then someone had the idea to recruit the Babe himself and tweak the story. Anna Q. didn’t want to be paired with a baseball player, even if he was the most famous baseball player of all. There was little relationship between the star and co-star. The movie was made in parts, and Anna Q. and the Babe had only a few scenes together.
The plot was boy meets girl, sports version. Babe played a character named Babe Dugan, star slugger of the Los Angeles Angels. Nilsson played Vernie, the washerwoman who had to clean all of Babe Dugan’s dirty, tobacco-stained uniforms. By chance they meet, fall in love on a roller coaster, and soon plan to be married. Vernie has only one request: Babe has to stop chewing tobacco. He complies but, alas, finds that his hitting suffers when his routine changes. He is headed to bat in the big moment of the big game, of course, struggling, when he looks into the stands and sees Vernie, who, of course, takes pity and throws him a plug of chewing tobacco. Ta-da. Representatives of the American tobacco industry presumably would stand and cheer along with Vernie as he resumes masticating and spitting and blasts the ball out of the park.
Marshall Hunt started typing.
“The scene is Wrigley Field, a baseball enclosure in these remote precincts, and the time is the present,” Hunt wrote. “George Herman Ruth, an athlete of considerable fame, a director, his five assistants, a general supervisor and his assistants, a guardian of the script and her assistant, a chief electrician and minor electricians, a corps of property men (the property consisting of two baseballs and a dozen uniforms), a score or more of ex pugilists, pretzel molders, barbers, tightrope walkers and second story men posing as ballplayers, all are discovered in the act of creating a moving picture in which Mr. Ruth and Anna Q. Nilsson will be featured. The picture is yet an infant without a name.”
For the next 20 days, the stories continued. Hunt took great delight in describing the former boxers cast as baseball players, the director’s sketchy knowledge of baseball, the Babe’s ham-handed walk through moviemaking. This was the perfect out-of-context way to have fun and present the ungainliness, the humanity, of the character of George Herman Ruth.
No moment was too small to overlook. The Babe is wearing makeup! He tries a number 6, the same foundation used by stars like Ramon Navarro and John Gilbert, but finds it is too white, too light. Number 5 is the ticket, a ruddier, sunburned look. The Babe is looking at rushes! That har-har-har is from the big man himself. He thinks he is hilarious. The rain arrives! The filming is done indoors. The Bab
e wins the game and has to kiss the girl! He kisses the girl! Hunt covered it all with great enthusiasm.
“Does Mr. Ruth express his love with fawning looks, with sickly grins, with puppy-like grimaces?” Hunt wrote about the Babe’s big love scene. “He does not! There is nothing Westphalian about the wooing of the Babe. His features register tender affection as he first embraces the flaxen button cruncher. And in the final fadeout, there is warmth, intensity of passion burning in the optics of a man who would do murder to an umpire during the summer. And when lips meet lips, the connubial seal, there is a sizzling sound—hot lips! Hot dog! Alacazam!”
The circulation of the Daily News had rocketed past one million in the first weeks of 1926 and would approach 1,250,000 by the end of 1927. It had doubled the circulation of its nearest competitor, the New York Journal, and captured the attention of the common man. An advertising campaign started in 1923 called “Tell It to Sweeney” focused on what the paper thought was its audience: the working-class families of the big city, the first and second generations of immigrants. Don’t tell the story to the Stuyvesants and the bluebloods, tell it to Sweeney. The bluebloods had the New York Times and the other papers. Sweeney had the News.
Sweeney loved all the pictures. Sweeney loved the stories of crime and political shenanigans. Sweeney loved the comics. Sweeney loved the movies and sports. Sweeney loved the Babe. The News—through Hunt—was more than happy to present the Babe.
“The Babe Breaks Pet Bat in Hollywood” (headline): “You will recall that for years the Bambino treasured a pet bat,” Hunt wrote. “He guarded it zealously. No other player ever used it. The bat was one with which he knocked three home runs in one World Series game. That bat enabled him to break a dozen records in the last series between the Yankees and Cards.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 29
