The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  All of which was prelude to his at-bat in the fifth. Root was still on the mound. The score was tied, 4–4. Nobody was on base. Ruth came to the plate, and another lemon rolled his way. While the umpire disposed of the lemon, Ruth did more gesturing with the fans. He then settled in to face Root.

  The first pitch was a called strike. The players in the Cubs dugout were yelling, particularly pitcher Guy Bush, a native of Aberdeen, Mississippi, who was standing on the top step. Ruth looked toward Bush and the dugout and put up one finger, as if to say, “That’s just one strike.” Root then delivered two balls, followed by a second called strike. More yelling. Bush was out of the dugout, onto the grass, and yelling. Ruth held up two fingers this time as if to say, “That just two strikes.” He then pointed. Where he pointed is a question, but legend has it that he pointed to dead center field.

  Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett later said that Ruth said, “It only takes one to hit.” Gehrig, in the on-deck circle, said Ruth said to Root, “I’m going to knock the next one down your goddamned throat.” A pair of 16mm home movies discovered more than half a century later seemed to indicate that Ruth might have pointed at the Cubs bench and at Bush rather than dead center field (maybe Ruth wanted to knock the ball down Bush’s goddamned throat?), but both films were taken from angles that left room for doubt.

  Whatever happened, the next part was not debatable. Root threw a slow curve. Ruth slammed the baseball up and into the big, carrying wind, and the ball left the park somewhere between the scoreboard and the edge of the right-field bleachers, one of the longest and prettiest home runs in Wrigley history. He circled the bases as happy as he ever had been, saying, “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” and imparted wisdom to each of the Chicago infielders as he passed and raised four fingers at the Cubs bench as he rounded third and laughed and laughed all the way home. Four fingers. Four bases. Four games.

  When all the celebrating calmed down, Root took a fresh baseball and served it to Gehrig, who swung on the first pitch and hit a homer deep, deep to right, and the Yankees were off to a 7–5 win. The next day they won again, 13–6, to close out the Series in four games. Gehrig was the undeniable star of the show with three home runs and a .529 batting average, but it was the Ruth home run—“the Called Shot”—that was remembered.

  “It was a privilege to be present because it is not likely that the scene will ever be repeated in all its elements,” Westbrook Pegler wrote for the next morning’s Tribune Syndicate. “Many a hitter may make two home runs or possibly three in World Series play yet to come, but not the way Babe Ruth hit these two. Nor will you ever see an artist call his shot before hitting one of the longest drives ever made on the grounds, in a World Series game, laughing and mocking the enemy with two strikes gone.”

  Did he call his shot? Didn’t he? Though not mentioned in most immediate deadline accounts of the game, the moment would be gilded two and three and four days later, embellished, built into Johnny Sylvester deathwatch proportions. Then, years later, it would be debunked, seen as pure fable. Proof would be requested and questions asked of participants and bystanders, everything taken as seriously as if this were the examination of a final miracle needed from the Vatican for sainthood.

  The moment became quite overblown.

  “He shouted to his enemies,” Paul Gallico wrote two days later in the Daily News. “He pointed like a duelist to the spot where he expected to send his rapier home and then he sent it there. His second home run in the face of the razzing he was taking from the Cubs camp was a stroke of genius. He went so far out on his limb with his gestures and his repartee and his comportment at the plate that if he had missed he never would have been able to live it down. But the point is he didn’t miss.”

  Did it happen exactly that way? Probably not. Did it happen? The Babe always was predicting home runs. He had that itchy feeling that he was going to hit a home run for Lindbergh. He told Mark Roth, the traveling secretary, that he’d end the game so the team could make the train. He once told Ford Frick’s father, at an exhibition in Fort Wayne, Indiana, “You look like you want to get home for supper,” and hit a home run. In 1930 he hit three home runs against the Philadelphia A’s, then came to the plate the fourth time, batted right-handed for two strikes, then stepped across the plate and swung with a fury to strike out on the next pitch. What if he had connected? Where would that have gone down in the lore?

  He called shots all the time. He loved to create situations. It was for other people to determine what they meant. Did he call a shot here? That probably never will be answered to every nitpicker’s satisfaction. He definitely created a situation. He challenged his entire environment, whipped up all parties, then made them shut up. The specifics might be hazy, but the general story was not wrong.

  Ruth himself gave different versions through the years of what happened that day, which did nothing to help historians. He said more than once that he absolutely pointed at the flagpole to indicate where he was going to hit the ball. He also said more than once that “only a damn fool” would do something like that. Rather than make the moment into the mythical event that it became, he seemed inclined to have fun with it.

  His best description probably came at a cocktail party held by sportswriter Grantland Rice in the spring of 1933. This was a dignified affair. The wife of Walter Lippmann, the famous political columnist, asked Ruth what happened with that famous home run in the 1932 Series. Rice printed the Home Run King’s answer in his 1955 autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, leaving blanks for words that can be quite easily filled in now.

  “It’s like this,” the Babe said, dressed in white and waving his cigar. “The Cubs had fucked my old teammate Mark Koenig by cutting him for only a measly fucken half share of the Series money.

  “Well, I’m riding the fuck out of the Cubs, telling ’em they’re the cheapest pack of fucken crumbums in the world. We’ve won the first two and now we’re in Chicago for the third game. Root is the Cubs’ pitcher. I pack one into the stands in the first inning, but in the fifth it’s tied, 4-to-4, when I’m up with nobody on. The Chicago fans are giving me hell.

  “Root’s still in there. He breezes the first two pitches by—both strikes! The mob’s tearing down Wrigley Field. I shake my fist after that first strike. After the second I point my bat at these bellerin’ bleachers—right where I aim to park the ball. Root throws it and I hit that fucken ball on the nose, right over the fence for two fucken runs.

  “‘How do you like those apples, you fucken bastard?’ I yell at Root as I run towards first. By the time I reach home I’m almost fallin’ down I’m laughin’ so fucken hard—and that’s how it happened.”

  The details, of course, were a bit messed up. The count was 2–2, not 0–2. The home run scored one run, not two. Perhaps some of the dialogue had been embellished. The spirit of the moment, though, was probably better preserved here than in all other descriptions by all historians and literary lions. Mrs. Lippmann soon grabbed her famous husband and they left the party in a hurry.

  “Why’d you use that language?” Rice asked Ruth.

  “What the hell, Grant,” Ruth replied. “You heard her ask me what happened. So I told her.”

  The best piece of empirical evidence that something out of the ordinary happened was delivered by Guy Bush the next day. He was the Cubs starter for what turned out to be the fourth and final game. With runners on first and second, nobody out, first inning, he drilled the Bambino with a fastball on his very first pitch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A DISCUSSION ABOUT Babe Ruth’s money took place in the third week of March 1933 at the Gold Dust Lodge, a shelter at 40 Corlears Street run by the Salvation Army to house and feed 2,000 homeless, destitute, and jobless men in New York City. The discussion started to get warm, pro and con—the Babe was the last Yankees holdout in St. Petersburg, fighting a major reduction in his $75,000 salary—and adjutant Andrew Laurie, director of the shelter, decided that maybe there should be a vote. If nothing e
lse, it would kill a little time.

  How much should Babe Ruth earn? More than half of the residents, 1,171 men, voted. The figure they decided was $48,999, an average of all the numbers submitted. One man said the Babe should make a million dollars a year. Another said he should make a dime, and yet another said he should work for free. Some suggested he should be paid by the home run, $1,000 per homer.

  It was mentioned that once upon a time (two years ago) the slugger had made $80,000 per year. A second vote was taken on whether any person in any job was worth $80,000 per year. This was close: 599 men said yes, and 572 said no.

  The 599 men who had said yes were then asked who they thought should receive $80,000 per year. Each man had one vote. The results were as follows:

  Any president of the United States (185 votes) Babe Ruth (140) President Franklin Roosevelt (97) Former Governor Al Smith (12) Former New York Mayor Joseph McKee and Jack Dempsey (5) Herbert Hoover (4) Henry Ford, Charles Schwab, and comedian Joe E. Brown (3)

  A number of candidates received one or two votes. Among the single vote getters were Albert Einstein, William Randolph Hearst, Gene Tunney, Tom Mix, Enrico Caruso, Thomas Edison, Walter Winchell, John D. Rockefeller, and Lou Gehrig. No women were mentioned.

  The average pre-Depression salary of the 1,171 voters had been $49 per week. The Salvation Army said the cost of keeping each man in the shelter with two meals per day was $1 per week.

  Two days after the vote, the Babe officially signed a contract in a ceremony in the St. Petersburg sun for $52,000 for the 1933 season, a $23,000 pay cut from 1932. He squealed, but not too loudly. This was 17 days after Roosevelt had declared a bank holiday as a last-gasp effort to save the remaining banks in the country. Kenesaw Mountain Landis had set a precedent for baseball, dropping his own salary $10,000 to $40,000 after lopping off $15,000 a year earlier. Virtually all of the Yankees had taken pay cuts. Lou Gehrig dropped $5,000 to $22,500.

  “I’ve had three ambitions,” the Babe said. “I’ve wanted to complete 20 years of baseball and I’ll do that this year. I’ve wanted to play in ten World Series and I realized that ambition last year. And I hope to boost my home run total to 700. I hope to do that by hitting at least 48 this year.”

  “You must hit 61 this year, Root, and give us a new record,” Col. Ruppert said.

  The twentieth season began.

  The Babe made a nice show of friskiness for a young Associated Press writer on the day before the opening game at the Stadium. Fresh out of the clubhouse shower, naked, vigorously drying his hair with a towel, the Bam proclaimed that he felt better than he had in five years. Take away a sore throat that had stuck around for five weeks, he was in great shape. He said he had become a runner in the spring, ran more miles than he ever had, trying to bring life back into his legs, and they felt ten years younger.

  “There,” he said, wiping his chest now with the towel. “Those guys are crazy again. I may be 39, and I may have slowed up some. I’m not trying to kid anybody, least of all myself. But through? Not by plenty, kid.”

  The writer scribbled down his words.

  “They say I won’t play 100 games,” the Babe continued. “Why, listen, I’ll play every single game this season. I’d have been in there all the time last year but for injuries and sickness. That’s part of the game. Everybody gets into tough luck streaks like that sometime or another.”

  The Babe kept talking as he dressed, all the way to his familiar camel’s hair coat and matching cap, all the way onto the street where Claire was waiting for him in the car. (“The missus,” he said. “All right, honey. I’m coming.”) The writer, whose name was Edward J. Neil, went back to the office, typed out all the positives for distribution on the wire across the country, but couldn’t keep out his overriding thought about meeting the Babe. Especially the naked Babe.

  “There is plenty of weight around his middle,” Edward J. Neil typed. “Enough so that in a baseball uniform he still looks as if he’d stuffed a watermelon under his shirt.”

  The great rush to metaphor and hyperbole to describe his exploits during the grand days was now focused on his age and size. He waddled and creaked and lumbered, an aging bull elephant left to roam in a right-field pasture. He huffed and puffed and still blew houses down, but simply not as many.

  The running, the exercise for the legs, didn’t work. They soon felt like lead. He pounded out his first home run off young Merritt Cain of the A’s in a 7–3 win in the third game of the year, but he was lost in the outfield, lost on the base paths. He simply couldn’t move like a young man anymore. He still could hit, but even at the plate he had problems.

  The longest home run drought of his career stretched from April 30 until May 23, when he told McCarthy, “I feel good. I think I’m going to bust one today,” and busted one into the right-field stands. There had been reports that his eyes were starting to fail, but he said the reports were “bunk.”

  In the midst of the drought, on May 19, he visited six orphans in Passaic, New Jersey. The orphans had made headlines as heroes when they signaled an engineer to avert the crash of an Erie Railroad train at a washed-out bridge near the Passaic Home and Orphan Asylum. The Babe brought bags of Babe Ruth caps and neckties and tickets for the next day’s game at the Stadium.

  “I promise to hit a home run especially for you,” he said. “It will be one of the deepest regrets of my life if I don’t send one into the stands for you.”

  The best he could do was a liner that fell several feet short. This was a called shot—stop the presses—that didn’t materialize. There seemed to be a certain symbolism.

  Not that he didn’t have moments. Not that he couldn’t still draw a crowd. Five days after the drought ended, in a May 28 doubleheader against the White Sox at the Stadium that attracted 50,297, he homered and singled to lead the Yankees to a 2–1 win. In the nightcap, he homered twice more to lead a 9–7 win.

  Everything in 1933 was just hard, though, harder than in 1932. He benched himself for the first time in his career for the second game of a doubleheader in Detroit on June 25 after going 0-for-6 in the first game. He was in a 2-for-17 slump, another drought, and it was a hot day.

  “The heat is terrific and Babe just asked for a little respite,” Joe McCarthy explained.

  He didn’t run out ground balls anymore. He left most games early for his defensive replacements. He played a measured game with measured movements.

  “It’s the legs, kid, they’re what count,” he said. “I’ll last just as long as the old pins hold out. On the field, as you must have noticed, I take it easy if there isn’t much chance of my reaching first base on an infield hit. I must watch the pins carefully because a ‘charley horse’ or two will mean the end of me as an active player.”

  What else could he do? In December 1929, National League president John Heydler had showed up at the major league meetings in Chicago with a proposal he thought would add energy to the game, a proposal that would have been perfect for the 1933 Babe. Heydler had called it “ten-man baseball.”

  The tenth man in the suggested ten-man baseball would be a permanent pinch hitter for the pitcher. Every time the pitcher’s turn came to go to the plate, the tenth man would take his place. The pitcher never would hit. The tenth man never would play in the field. The game would be given a revolutionary, immediate injection of offense.

  “With the exception of two or three, practically all pitchers are weak hitters and weaker base runners,” Heydler, a former umpire and sportswriter, said. “When they come to bat, they literally put a drag on the game. No one expects them to do anything, and they literally suspend the action of the play.”

  Heydler had hoped the proposal would be put into action for the next season, 1930, by both leagues, but it found little support. Though traditionalist John McGraw surprisingly liked the idea, most baseball men had found it hilarious. The measure was tabled, never even brought to the floor for discussion.

  “With a rule like this,” Yankees scout Paul K
richell said derisively, “Babe Ruth could play until he’s 50.”

  Ten-man baseball, alas, was not in effect. Not yet.

  A fact that had to be remembered in all of this was that the Home Run King was not an old man in a real-world sense. In any other occupation, from tax accountant to construction worker, he would have been moving into his prime years at age 39. The baseball field was the only place where he was old.

  He still charged the night when opportunities arose. Claire didn’t make all the trips, and when she didn’t, the wet blanket of moderation was removed. He still liked a drink.

  “With the Babe, drinking helped him relax,” said John Drebinger of the Times, who would cover baseball for three more decades after the Babe left. “Physically, it in no way handicapped him. He could drink, gurgle it. He was fine. I’ve always said that if Mickey Mantle could have handled drinking like the Babe did, he would have broken all the records. Mickey just couldn’t drink. He’d take a few drinks and just get silly.”

  Drebinger, who always said his father had left him two legacies, a fiddle that he didn’t know how to play and a drinking education that he used extensively, sat with the Babe in a speakeasy in St. Louis during this time, just the two of them. The Babe got talking about his problem remembering names.

  “It’s damned embarrassing,” he said. “I can remember every ball ever pitched to me and what I hit and what I didn’t hit, but names don’t stick. A guy came in to pitch the other day, I’ve known him for ten years, and the fans are hollering down to me, ‘Who’s this guy?,’ and jeez, I yelled over to whatchamacallit in center field (that would be Earle Combs) and he didn’t remember.”

  Terrible.

  “The wife” (that would be Claire), “she’s raising hell. But I’m getting better, Joe” (that would be John Drebinger).