The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  On September 29, he took care of business quickly. In the first inning, down two strikes in the count, he caught Hod Lisenbee trying to sneak a curve past him for strike three and neatly deposited number 58 into the right-field bleachers. In the fifth, with the bases loaded, Senators manager Bucky Harris brought in a 25-year-old kid up from the New Haven Pilots named Paul Hopkins to face Ruth. This was Hopkins’s first appearance in a major league uniform, and the first batter he ever faced. When he looked toward the Yankees’ dugout to see who was coming, he thought, “Oh, my.” He also thought he could get Ruth out because he was 25 years old and he thought he could get anyone out.

  The rookie threw a succession of curveballs at the Bam and saw two of them turned into monstrous foul balls, one down either line. With the count at three and two, he threw what he thought was the best curveball of them all.

  “Real slow and over the outside of the plate,” Hopkins recalled for Sports Illustrated almost 70 years later. “It was so slow that Ruth started to swing and then hesitated. He hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he came through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second. Put everything behind it. I can still hear the crack of the bat. I can still see the swing.”

  Recounting the narrative in the next morning’s Daily News, Marshall Hunt wrote, “There was a moment of hushed expectancy as the count became three and two on the captain of the home run industry. There was that ominous sound of a heavy instrument, swung with vast force, meeting a pitched ball from the right arm of Master Hopkins. There was a shriek as the white pellet whistled its course into the right field bleachers, and as the mammoth character legged his way around the bases, pursuing his three comrades, there came a symphony of rejoicing from the clients such as these sagging ears have not heard in many a year.”

  The 60th almost followed on Ruth’s final at-bat of the day. He clocked another shot to right that was caught by rookie outfielder Red Barnes against the fence. Earlier in the game, he had tripled, the ball caroming off a railing and back into the field. He conceivably could have hit numbers 58, 59, 60, and 61 in the same afternoon.

  The Washington pitcher the next day was Tom Zachary, a hard thrower. Zachary was a Quaker and had served in a noncombatant division in the Red Cross during the war. He was one of the few players who had pitched under an assumed name in the big leagues, appearing in two games for the A’s in 1918 under the name Zach Walton in an attempt to keep his college eligibility. He might have wished he had appeared in this game as Zach Walton.

  In the eighth inning, the game tied at 2–2, and with Koenig on third, he faced Ruth for the fourth time of the afternoon. Ruth had walked once and singled twice, driving home the Yankees’ two runs. Zachary’s first pitch was a called strike. The second was high, a ball. The third was over the plate, a fastball. Ruth pulled it directly into the right-field stands, halfway to the top. Number 60 was done. Zachary threw his glove to the mound and complained to the umpire that the ball was foul. His words were blotted out by the noise from a small but exultant midweek crowd of 10,000. Number 60 was done.

  “While the crowd cheered and the Yankee players roared their greetings, the Babe made his triumphant, almost regal, tour of the paths,” the Times reported.

  He jogged around slowly, touched each bag firmly and carefully and when he imbedded his spikes in the rubber disk to record officially Homer 60, hats were tossed into the air, papers were torn up and tossed liberally and the spirit of celebration permeated the place.

  The Babe’s stroll out to his position was signal for a handkerchief salute in which all the bleacherites to the last man participated. Jovial Babe entered into the carnival spirit and punctuated his kingly strides with a succession of snappy military salutes.

  He had hit 17 home runs in the month of September, a record for any month. The 60th was his third home run of the season off poor Zachary, but he had hit four off both Rube Walberg of the A’s and Milt Gaston of the Browns. He had hit home runs in every park in the eight-team league, at least six homers against every team. He had 11 against his old friends the Red Sox, eight at Fenway Park. For all the talk about how Yankee Stadium had been designed for him, he had hit 32 of his shots on the road, 28 at home. He had pulled 39 of them into the right-field stands and hit only four to left. He had one inside-the-park homer, number 27, a shot to the flagpole in center field in Detroit.

  His three bats had become characters in the drama and in the press were named Black Betsy, Big Bertha, and Beautiful Bella. They were black, blond, and red. He used Black Betsy to hit number 59, Beautiful Bella for 60. The weight of the bats varied with the press accounts, some of which declared each weighed 52 ounces. Ruth actually never used a bat heavier than 42 ounces, and as his career progressed, he went to lighter and lighter bats.

  Ruth, in the clubhouse, said, “Sixty! Let’s see some son of a bitch try to top that one!” but there was no grand celebration. The Yankees had one more game left with the Senators the next day, and the feeling was that he would hit one, two, or three more to close the show. He didn’t. Gehrig hit a final home run to close with 47, and the Yankees recorded their 110th win against 42 losses to capture the pennant by 19 games, but Ruth went hitless in three appearances. Sixty was the new number on the wall. The record of records. This was his flight across the Atlantic.

  “A child of destiny is George Herman,” Paul Gallico wrote in the Daily News.

  He moves in his orbit like a planet. He sneaked up inevitably on his own home run record. One moment we found him engaged in a home run race with young Gehrig, in which he seemed to be getting the worst of it, and in the next he had passed the fifty mark with enough games left to accomplish his lifetime ambition.

  I even recall writing pieces about these two and saying how Gehrig would soon break Ruth’s cherished record, and feeling kind of sorry for this old man having this youngster come along and steal all his thunder, and now look at the old has-been.

  The World Series seemed to be nothing more than a curtain call for the Yankees and Ruth after what they had done during the season. It was finished in four straight games, the opposing Pittsburgh Pirates overwhelmed from the first batting practice when the Yankees lineup, especially Ruth, hit baseballs to strange places around and outside Forbes Field. Ruth had the only two home runs in the Series and was a factor in all four wins. He set nine Series records, all of them career records, most simply extensions of his previous records.

  The Christy Walsh syndicate was at its best for the event, one Pittsburgh paper running ghostwritten articles by the Babe, Miller Huggins, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, Paul Waner, Rogers Hornsby, Honus Wagner, and Pirates manager Donie Bush. Another paper, at the risk of being overwhelmed, replied with articles by Pirates pitcher Vic Aldridge and boasted that Aldridge actually was writing the words himself. Lee Meadows, ten-year-old son of the Pirates pitcher of the same name, also was part of a ghostwriting enterprise. As an eight-year-old, he had “written” articles when the Pirates were in the Series two years earlier.

  “Has his writing improved in two years?” someone asked the boy’s ghost.

  “Whenever I point out some play in the ball game and ask for some significant impressions,” the ghost replied, “young Master Meadows would say, ‘I wish I had some peanuts,’ or, ‘Why don’t you buy me a hot dog?’”

  Walsh had Ruth and Gehrig on the barnstorming road immediately to capitalize on the Series interest. They were scheduled the very next day to play a doubleheader in the Bronx but were rained out. Then they were off (okay, only as far as Brooklyn for the first stop) for 21 games, 9 states, 20 cities. They wouldn’t stop until they hit the West Coast, “the Batterin’ Babes” in blue uniforms, “the Larrupin’ Lous” in white.

  An afternoon in Asbury Park, New Jersey, early in the tour was typical. The entire Asbury Park police force was called out to control a crowd of over 7,000. The game against the Brooklyn Royal Colored Giants was an hour late in getting started as
the Babe waited at the Berkeley Carteret Hotel until a certified check was delivered from the promoter; then it was played in chaos.

  Small boys wandered the field at will, walking out to Ruth to request his autograph or running to grab loose baseballs. Deal Lake was at the edge of the field, no fences in the way, and baseballs, fair and foul, found their way to the water. Ruth played the entire game with a fountain pen in hand or pocket to accommodate the autograph seekers. He carried boys off the field. He tried to steal one time, but the ball escaped from the catcher and was grabbed by a boy who was faster than the catcher. Gone. When Gehrig hit a homer in the eighth into Deal Lake, that was the disappearance of the 36th and final baseball. End of game.

  On the tour, 13 of the 21 games ended before the ninth inning owing to some occurrence. Ruth, for the record, had 20 home runs. Gehrig had 16. They played, Christy Walsh claimed, to a combined audience of 220,000 people.

  Back together in New York, the two sluggers went to the Army–Notre Dame game at the Stadium, guests of Knute Rockne, another Walsh client. During the winter, Ruth went to North Carolina to hunt birds, visited Herb Pennock’s house in Pennsylvania to hunt foxes, wearing the red coat and everything, spent a bunch of time with Claire and little or none with Helen, and settled into workouts with Artie McGovern after the first of the year. Artie boasted that his man was “five to ten years younger” than when he had first met him.

  The world was just lovely.

  An odd interview awaited the Home Run King when he reached St. Petersburg on February 26, 1928—traveling with Gehrig and three rookies on the Florida Express from Penn Station—to begin his toils anew. Carl Sandburg, America’s foremost poet, was at the Mason Hotel. While he waited, he told Westbrook Pegler he once had been a ballplayer until he stepped on a broken bottle, badly slashing his foot and ending his career. He didn’t have much use for baseball now. He said he planned to ask Ruth a series of questions about current events, about world matters, about life.

  Pegler smelled the obvious setup. He asked Sandburg what the point of those questions would be.

  “I didn’t exactly get the answer,” Pegler reported. “It was something about moron hero worship and dusting off an idol.”

  The meeting took place on a sunny Florida day. The poet, a tall and slender man, too young to have developed his trademark white hair, delivered his sequence of spinning, curving questions. The Babe, the boy from St. Mary’s Industrial School, was predictably handcuffed. The results were published in the Chicago Daily News under the byline “By Carl Sandburg, Noted American Poet.”

  SANDBURG: If some boys asked you what books to read, what would you tell them?

  RUTH: I never get that. They never ask me that question. They ask me how to play ball.

  SANDBURG: If you were to name two or three books you like a lot, what would they be?

  RUTH: I don’t know. I like books with excitement, dramatic murders.

  SANDBURG: At least a million hot ball fans in the country, admirers of yours, believe in the Bible and Shakespeare as the two greatest books ever written, and some of them would like to know if there are any special parts of these books that are favorites of yours.

  RUTH: A ballplayer doesn’t have time to read. And it isn’t good for the eyes. A ballplayer lasts only as long as his legs and eyes. He can’t take any chances on his eyes.

  (Pause.)

  RUTH: If somebody reads a book to me I get more out of it. I memorize nearly all of it. When I read it myself I forget it.

  SANDBURG: You have met President Coolidge, haven’t you?

  RUTH: Oh, yes.

  SANDBURG: If some boys asked you for a model of a man to follow through life, would you tell them that President Coolidge was pretty good?

  RUTH: Well, I always liked President Harding.

  SANDBURG: If some boys asked you which of all the Presidents of the United States was the best model to follow is there any one you would tell them?

  RUTH: President Wilson was always a great friend of mine.

  SANDBURG: Is there any one character in history you are particularly interested in, such as Lincoln, Washington, Napoleon?

  RUTH: I’ve never seen any of them.

  SANDBURG: Some people say brunettes have always been more dangerous women than blondes. How do you look at it?

  RUTH: It depends on the personality.

  SANDBURG: What’s your favorite flower?

  RUTH: I don’t care about flowers.

  SANDBURG: What’s your favorite horse?

  RUTH: Oh, I quit that. I quit playing the horses a long time ago.

  SANDBURG: There’s a lawyer, Clarence Darrow, staying at the hotel there that some people call the Babe Ruth of lawyers.

  RUTH: Yes, I met him yesterday. We were talking.

  SANDBURG: Have you followed any of Clarence Darrow’s big cases when the newspapers were printing so much about them?

  (Pause.)

  RUTH: I just bought a piece of property this morning—$32,000 it was—$200 a front foot. We’re thinking about forming what they call a corporation, capital $165,000.

  Sandburg thanked the Babe at the end. He said he hoped, as a ballplayer, Ruth’s legs and eyes wouldn’t give out for many years. That was his dry, final, easy shot.

  “Can you imagine the gall of the fellow?” Pegler asked in the Chicago Tribune.

  The interview certainly did what Sandburg wanted it to do, finding the many holes in the Bambino’s education, but Sandburg’s air of intellectual superiority left the reader looking for a companion piece: what would happen if the Noted American Poet went over to the ballpark and tried to hit Lefty Grove, say, for half an hour? The Babe was the Babe. He had never pretended to be anything else. That was the beauty of him.

  America didn’t care if Huckleberry Finn didn’t know anything about flowers. He’d hit 60 home runs.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  T HE BABE WROTE a book in 1928. (Take that, Carl Sandburg.) Okay, maybe he didn’t actually write the book. Maybe Ford Frick of the New York Evening World wrote it, but it was titled Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball, and the listed author was George Herman Ruth, and it was quite good.

  Frick/Ruth told a lot of stories, made some observations, used some words that one of the two collaborators probably didn’t know. The subjects ran from hunting to bunting, the different pieces of George Herman’s life. One of the best little vignettes was a description of the world champions in transit, Murderers’ Row on the train:

  In one section, a card game is in session, Meusel and Bengough, [Dutch] Ruether, Koenig and Lazzeri are playing “black jack.” They have their coats off, their collars discarded and their shirts open at the neck. They’re kidding and laughing over the game…. Down the car a bit, Hoyt sits reading a book. Further on, the fussy foursome is busy at bridge. That’s Gehrig, [Don] Miller, [Mike] Gazella and myself.

  Shocker is reading the newspapers and his berth is messed up with a dozen sports pages, torn from as many different papers. Now and then he makes some discovery and pauses to discuss baseball with Pennock, who is writing letters across the aisle…. Through the open door of the drawing room, you can see Huggins, smoking his pipe and talking with [Charlie] O’Leary and [Art] Fletcher, his assistants.

  This was the life of the world champions.

  The train was their portable fraternity house, membership open to an exclusive few men who knew absolutely what to do with a well-thrown baseball. They clattered through the small towns of their individual pasts, zip, a bell ringing, a barrier dropped across all roads. They stayed in the best hotels, ate in the best restaurants. Dressed in suits that became better with each jump in pay, they traveled the seven-city circuit of 77 road games on a 154-game schedule, plus exhibitions, plus spring training, plus the World Series itself, preceded by press clippings, notable if not famous, caught in a sophisticated environment most of them never even had known existed. They sang songs and won ball games and learned which fork went with which course at dinner. Wai
te Hoyt had said it first: “It’s great to be young and a Yankee.” Well, that was right.

  It was magic.

  “You’d have players come up to New York from the sorriest little towns,” Marshall Hunt said. “I mean they were born on a farm, probably the whole income $125 a year. Then they got to playing on a Sunday school team, then a town team, and then they got into a small league, and of course, when they hit, there the scouts would be looking at them, and if they were good, they’d wind up here…. It always fascinated me that this fellow that came from that horrible side hill farm with that smelly outhouse, very little to eat, some kind of pork, corn, and pretty soon he’s getting $22,000 a year and wearing Brooks Brothers clothing and conducting himself real well.

  “All the time these players would be with the Yankees or any other major league club they would be quite credible fellows. You could take them anywhere. They read the papers a little bit. They didn’t crucify the king’s English…. I mean, this rise—I don’t think you see it or have it brought to your attention as much in the steel industry, even in the movies, as you do in baseball.”

  Trips would start and end in big-city palaces of transportation, heels of shined shoes clacking across the marble floors of Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station toward an overnight to Boston, the Orange Blossom Special to Florida, a long jaunt all the way to St. Louis. Action was everywhere. People. Bustle. Style. An estimated 47 million travelers would move through Grand Central in 1928, everybody going or coming, busy. The idea of airplanes as commercial carriers was only beginning to dawn. The long automobile or bus trip was a bouncing, punishing aggravation. The train was the way to travel. Seven cities to visit in the American League.

  “To go from New York to Philadelphia, driving a car, you started by taking the ferry to Hoboken or someplace,” Hunt said. “Then you’d drive over cobblestones for stretches. Then you’d get behind a hay wagon. Couldn’t move. It would take a good five hours to reach Philadelphia. You’d be hard-pressed, driving from New York to Boston or Washington, to make that trip in a day.”