The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The newspapers had great fun with the large new numbers in the contract. It was estimated the Babe would make $4.33 a minute if he played all 154 games and each game lasted one hour and 45 minutes. If he kept at the 48-home-run pace of ’26, he would earn $1,458.33 per home run. Every day he would earn $454.54, enough for a trip to Europe…every week, $3,304.53, enough for a new auto…every month, $11,666.66, enough for a new home…every year, $70,000, enough to support 20 large families.

  The Babe Comes Home would open during the 1927 season. It was far from a hit, though it received some favorable reviews. The Babe liked it and later said that he saw it ten times in various cities. Another movie, made on the Warner Bros. lot at roughly the same time, opened in October 1927 with larger implications. It featured that other famous onetime St. Mary’s Industrial School resident, Al Jolson, and was called The Jazz Singer. A sound-synchronization system called Vitaphone allowed the actors to talk for the first time. Jolson delivered the famous first line of movie history: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” Within two years, the silent movie era was finished, and with it the careers of many of the actors who worked with the Babe, including Anna Q. Nilsson.

  The Babe’s career was another story. Three nights after he returned from Hollywood he was on a train from Penn Station to St. Petersburg and the start of spring training. He was off to the greatest season that any baseball team ever would have.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  G RAHAM MCNAMEE was on the air again. The same excited voice that described the strikeout of Tony Lazzeri by Alexander the Great and the failed stolen base attempt by the Babe to end the 1926 World Series was heard around the country on June 13, 1927. The location of the microphone was different this time.

  The first-place Yankees were playing the Cleveland Indians at the Stadium, but McNamee was at Pier A on the New York docks. The noise was even louder than it had been at the Series. Boat whistles and the sound of airplanes were added to the cheers, the roar of the people. Pandemonium, it seemed, made a fine radio background.

  “This is an exquisite parade of boats,” McNamee shouted. “There must be 150 or 200 of them coming up here to show Col. Charles Lindbergh what a New York welcome consists of…. The fireboats are sending up mountains of water high into the air…. I cannot hear my own voice….

  “This is the greatest thing in the history of the world to be given any one man…. The sky is full of airplanes…. Lindbergh is on deck…. He is without uniform…. He is standing on the deck of the approaching Malcolm…. There she docks…. The din is something terrific. Every steamer is blowing…. In every window in lower New York people are shouting.”

  The Babe had competition for the fickle hearts of America. They had been given, at least for the moment, to the boyish, 25-year-old son of a former congressman from Minnesota who sat down in the wicker seat of his tiny airplane on May 20 at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, took off into the morning mist, and didn’t leave that seat for 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 30 seconds, when he landed at the field at Le Bourget, outside Paris, France.

  No one-man endeavor by any human being, dead or alive, ever had been celebrated with more enthusiasm than the solo flight of Charles A. Lindbergh across the Atlantic Ocean. He had defied death and common sense to win a $25,000 prize established by hotel impresario Raymond Orteig. Unknown when he took off, the aviator was bigger than kings and presidents, actors and great thinkers, bigger than Babe Ruth, when he landed.

  “Colonel Lindbergh, New York City is yours,” the Babe’s old adviser on conduct, Jimmy Walker, now the mayor, said at City Hall. “I don’t give it to you; you won it.”

  The snowstorm of ticker tape was so dense in the parade through the city streets that Lindbergh’s open car had to be bailed out as it moved. He wondered if New York would have to print new phone books to replace the ones that had been torn apart. An estimated four million people cheered as he passed, beginning a succession of dinners, awards, medals, proclamations, and scrutiny that never would be matched. Eighteen hundred tons of confetti were cleaned from the New York streets. The Armistice in 1918 had been only 155 tons.

  Lindbergh was the Babe times two or three or four or maybe ten. The apparatus of fame developed in the rise of G. Herman Ruth and Jack Dempsey and Red Grange and swimmer Gertrude Ederle and other sports stars of the decade had been tuned and tested, waiting for the quiet and brave airman. It whirred into action. The offers that had come to the Babe—for books and movies and vaudeville tours, for endorsements and charity appearances—now came to Lindbergh with bigger numbers, more zeroes on the end.

  This was the apogee in the age of new heroes. They were delivered to the front door now, these heroes, consumed like breakfast cereal. They weren’t long-ago characters of mythology or simple words on paper; their voices could be heard on the radio, their pictures could be seen in the paper, in the news shorts at the theater. They were personal, exciting friends of every family. In 1927 A.D., America chewed up heroes, swallowed them whole. This was a time for large and outrageous deeds. In a time of soaring possibility, everything seemed connected and wonderful. What would man do next? Look at Lindbergh.

  Money was being made, fortunes doubled and tripled at the clicking of a telegraph key from Wall Street. The Model T was being replaced by the Model A, and Henry Ford had 50,000 orders. A seven-mile tunnel had been opened through the Rockies. A seaway on the St. Lawrence River was planned. Laurel had met Hardy, and Mae West had a show on Broadway simply called Sex. No boundaries were impenetrable.

  What next?

  “Here is another band and then we have the Colonel, this darn nice boy, Lindbergh,” Graham McNamee reported, now moved to the Welt-Mignon Studios in Manhattan. “The police escort is passing…. Lindbergh is in the back of the automobile, bareheaded…. The crowd is going wild [cheers and whistles are heard]…Lindbergh has passed and approaches Central Park.”

  Three days later, the final stages of the New York celebration were held. After attending a dinner staged by William Randolph Hearst the previous night, where Charlie Chaplin was another guest, Lindbergh had flown to Washington to pick up his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. He flew back to New York and on little sleep was taken in the morning on a 22-mile parade route through almost a million people in Brooklyn. He then went to Roosevelt Field for a ceremony at the site where all of the excitement had begun. He was supposed to go next to Yankee Stadium, where the Bronx Bombers were playing the Browns.

  The plan was that he would arrive at 3:30 for the start of the game. One of the sweet moments surrounding his flight had happened at the Stadium when a crowd of 23,000, gathered for the light heavyweight title fight on May 20 between Jack Sharkey and Jim Malone, had observed a moment of silent prayer for the young man alone in the night over the Atlantic. A crowd of 15,000 now awaited his arrival.

  He was late.

  In a move that had no precedent, the umpires delayed the start of the game for 25 minutes. The Babe, waiting along with everyone else, predicted that he had a gift for Lindbergh.

  “I feel a homer coming,” he said. “My left ear itches. That’s a sure sign.”

  At 3:55, no Lindbergh, the umpires could wait no longer and started the game. In the bottom of the first inning, the Babe also could wait no longer. Down two strikes to Browns pitcher Tom Zachary, a 31-year-old veteran left-hander, he started to check his swing, then unloaded late to send the ball halfway up the bleachers in left-center field. It was his 22nd home run of the year.

  “I held back as long as I could, but it had to come,” the Babe said. “When you get one of those things in your system, it’s bound to come out.”

  Lou Gehrig, next at the plate, also must have had an itch in his ear. He too unloaded, a bit late, the ball traveling almost to the same place. It was his 15th of the year. Col. Lindbergh, alas, missed both blasts. His motorcade didn’t reach the Stadium until 5:30, and then he decided they should skip the visit and get back to the Hotel Brevoort, where he picked
up his $25,000 prize. That was followed by a dinner at the Hotel Roosevelt, where Charles A. Schwab was the featured speaker. The meeting between America’s heroes never took place.

  “I had been saving that homer for Lindbergh,” the Babe told reporters, “and then he doesn’t show up. I guess he thinks this is a twilight league.”

  Two days later, back in St. Louis, the aviator went to Sportsman’s Park. With 40,000 people in the stands, he walked in procession with Kenesaw Mountain Landis and National League president John Heydler to the flagpole in center field, where he raised the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1926 World Championship banner.

  So what could the Babe do? How could he recapture at least a piece of his audience? A two-paragraph filler in the Washington Post the morning after Lindbergh departed New York contained a possibility. The headline was “Babe Ruth Is Ahead of 1921 Homer Pace.” Deadlines had caused the writer of the article to miss Ruth’s latest home run, but the numbers were suitably prescient.

  “Ruth’s 21 circuit drives for 53 games give him an average of .389 per game,” the article said. “Thus by playing at this average in the remaining 101 games, his total home runs will be 60, or one better than the 59 four-baggers credited to him in 1921.”

  Take on the impossible. Yes. Of course. The idea of hitting 60 home runs had changed for both the Babe and the public in the five seasons since he hit the 59 in ’21. In the first couple of springs after he set that record, the Caliph had predicted that 60 clouts would arrive almost momentarily, a simple matter of time. In the last couple of springs, he had been much more reserved. He hadn’t hit 50 again, much less come close to 60. He wondered openly if he had made a mistake in putting a mark so high on the wall so early in his career.

  The quest for 60 or more home runs, somewhat like flying across the Atlantic or climbing some impossible mountain like Everest or crossing any frontier of physical performance, needed a combination of good health, proper circumstance, and luck. A situation had to arise, with conditions just right and the pieces all in their proper places.

  A situation like the one where the Babe now found himself.

  In the third month of the season, with more than three months to go, the Yankees already had won the American League pennant. The young and uncertain lineup that had surprised everyone a year earlier now was tested and true and had acquired a tobacco-chewing swagger. No lineup in baseball history ever had been as fearsome, top to bottom, presenting a stress that wore opposing pitchers down with each passing inning. “Five o’clock lightning” was the term the writers had found for the late-inning destruction that awaited the poor souls working on the mound. The Yankees had sprinted to an eleven-and-a-half-game lead by the Fourth of July, and no one was going to stop them. The Yankees knew this. Everyone else knew this.

  At the third spot in the batting order, Ruth couldn’t have resided in a better place to hit home runs. Combs had become the ideal leadoff man, always on base, taking away the pitchers’ big windups, putting each hurler into the stretch position. Koenig was a perfect second man, almost as pesky and proficient as Combs. When Ruth came to the plate, more often than not, trouble already had begun. And just as important, trouble waited behind him.

  In spring training, Huggins had adjusted his lineup. A year earlier, Gehrig had batted number three, Ruth number four, and Bob Meusel number five. During the season, the manager had changed the order to Ruth third, Meusel fourth, and Gehrig fifth. Now, for 1927, it became Ruth third, Gehrig fourth, and Meusel fifth. Gehrig had moved into position to protect Ruth, a backup force to be feared. Walk Ruth? A pitcher knew then he would have to face Gehrig with a man on first.

  The nice boy from Columbia had matured as a player. He still lived with his mother and father in an apartment on Eighth Avenue, still went home most nights after games in New York, still was nervous in the presence of women, but he had become almost as fearsome at the plate as the Babe. In the closing weeks of June, he went on a home run spree. He edged closer and closer to Ruth—he took a big jump on June 23 when he became the first man ever to hit three homers in a game at Fenway Park—and tied the big man on June 29 at 24.

  The Babe now had a rabbit.

  “[Gehrig] is traveling fast enough to give point to the words of Ruth the other night, when he said that Columbia Lou is the only man that would beat the Babe’s record of 59,” James Harrison of the Times wrote after the three-homer game. “That’s the Babe’s prediction and he’s going to stick to it, and the way Gehrig smacked them today it looked as if G. Herman is the seventh son of a seventh son.”

  Never before had Ruth had competition in the home run race. When he was healthy or not suspended, the field always belonged only to him. Now, not only did he have a challenge, but it came from the man directly behind him in the lineup, from the quiet figure under the next showerhead after the game. This was a deluxe and unexpected plot development for the public: a two-man marathon of strength and endurance that would play for the rest of the summer without the distractions of a pennant race.

  The day after the student caught the master, the student pounded out number 25 in the second inning to claim the lead. In the fourth, the master struck back with his own 25th, a shot to the right-field bleachers at Fenway. On July 2, now in Washington, the student whacked number 26 to forge ahead again. On July 3, the master came back, hitting the longest home run ever seen at Griffith Stadium. Tied again.

  And so it went. One edged ahead, the other climbed back. They were never separated by more than two home runs, a number that could be made up on one doubleheader day. They were characters on a big Parcheesi board, moving back and forth—captivating stuff. A fan had better than a 50 percent chance to go to a Yankees game and see one or the other of the two strong men hit a home run. Maybe both.

  Christy Walsh quickly moved onto the scene and signed Gehrig to his burgeoning group of ghosted clients. The promoter tried to frame a public picture of buddies and friends, Gehrig and Ruth, a couple of the Three Musketeers off on a home run lark. Although it might have worked when sent across the country, it fell flat with people who knew the situation. These really weren’t buddies or great friends. Off the field, they lived far different lives, as different as different could be. An attempt to give Gehrig a sports-page nickname, “Buster,” to match against “Babe” went nowhere. Gehrig wasn’t a Buster. And Babe unquestionably was a Babe.

  “Can Falstaff be playmates with Volstead?” one headline asked. That was the true matchup.

  “They were on the bench recently,” Rud Rennie wrote in the New York Herald, describing the two men. “Ruth squirting tobacco juice and advising the other team’s catcher, who had just missed a foul ball, to look on the ground for it; Gehrig at the other end explaining to a friend how he speared eels at night. A group of photographers approached the dugout and said they wanted a picture of Lou and the Babe. They asked Lou. ‘It’s all right with me,’ said Lou, ‘if it’s all right with the Babe.’”

  The deference always did exist. The master always was the master. Gehrig, good as he was, always looked at Ruth with a certain wonder, studying him to see how a star should act. The baseball was easy for Gehrig, but the rest of this star stuff seemed incredibly hard.

  The competition went straight into September. The two men were tied at 44 homers apiece as they reported for a doubleheader in Boston against the God-awful Red Sox. In the fifth inning of the first game, Tony Welzer on the mound for the Sox, Gehrig unloaded a shot into the right-field bleachers to take the lead at 45 in what now was called everywhere “the Great American Home Run Derby.” In the sixth, Ruth came back at him. With two men on base, Welzer tried a change of pace on the Bam. The Bam was waiting for it. He ran up on the ball and—in the Times—“dealt the sphere a fearful blow,” sending it into the center-field bleachers, a shot instantly considered the longest homer in Fenway history. The two men were tied at 45.

  In the next inning, poor Welzer still on the mound, Ruth connected again. This was a tall fly ball that sneaked
into the stands close to the right-field foul pole. Ruth 46, Gehrig 45. Finally, in the seventh inning of the nightcap, Ruth broke up Charlie Russell’s shutout with another fly ball down the right-field line that snuck into the stands. Gehrig, the next batter, followed with a shot to left-center, longer and harder hit than Ruth’s homer, that stayed in the park for a triple.

  And yet somehow, just like that, the chase was done.

  Gehrig, like any good rabbit, now peeled off to the side. He would hit only two home runs for the rest of the season, ceding the stage to the well-paid leading man. He had done his job as a credible Volstead, but now Falstaff had all the speaking lines. The battle became a chase between the big man and his younger self, wholly as fascinating as the battle against his teammate. The Babe was seven games behind his 1921 pace at the end of his work on September 6. He had 22 games remaining in which to hit 13 home runs.

  This seemed almost impossible. Then again, he hit two more the next day at Fenway, numbers 48 and 49, to close out the Yankees’ road schedule. Maybe it wasn’t impossible. All of the action for the rest of the year would be at the Stadium. John Kieran of the Times was moved to poetry by the chase.

  With vim and verve he has walloped the curve from Texas to Duluth,

  Which is no small task, and I beg to ask: Was there ever a guy like Ruth?

  As each succeeding series passed, the big man whacked away at the numbers, getting one home run against the Browns, two against the Indians, two more against the White Sox, two against the Tigers, but then he stalled with only one against the A’s. When he hit the final three-game series of the season against the Senators, he needed three home runs in three days to reach 60. Two, of course, would tie the record.