by Jane Leavy
Giasco would talk to Cannonball before the game about ensuring a good show: “Now look, you know why all these people are here. You know what they came to see. They’re out here to see Ruth hit home runs, right?”
“Right.”
“Now, when the Babe comes to bat, no funny business.”
“Got ya. Right down the pike.”
Ruth had faced Redding for the first time seven years earlier at Shibe Park in Philadelphia at the end of his first season with the Yankees, when both were at the height of their powers. Ruth went 2 for 4, “walloping the leather over the right-field wall into the Twentieth Street in the seventh inning,” Baltimore’s Afro-American reported.
The next time was in Red Bank, New Jersey, five years later in a barnstorming game between the Royal Giants and a local team featuring two ringers named Ruth and Gehrig. Giants second baseman Dick Seay, a rookie then, told Negro League historian John Holway: “Ninth inning. We had them by one run. A man got on, and Ruth was up. They said, ‘Walk Ruth,’ but he didn’t listen. He threw one to Ruth, tried to get it by him, and Ruth hit it into the next county, I think.”
They met again in 1926 in an exhibition game matching the Royal Giants against the Babe and eight of his Yankee teammates. Ruth got three hits, but his boys lost 3–1.
These intermittent confrontations played on uneven playing fields with uneven rosters offer a kind of historical amuse-bouche, a taste of what might have been had the best African American players been allowed to compete on an even playing field in major-league baseball. No matter how many home runs Ruth hit off Redding that afternoon—three!—on pitches that either were or were not grooved, nothing was going to change Ruth’s opinion, which he shared with the Pittsburgh Courier when Cannonball finally retired in 1933: “Cannonball Dick Redding could have graced the roster of any big-league club.”
The game was scheduled for 3:30 P.M., which left just enough time for a handshake and a photo at the State House with Governor A. Harry Moore, where 150 stenographers formed an impromptu receiving line, then off to the Knights of Columbus headquarters to change into uniforms.
Cameras and moving-picture machines waited for them on the steps of the capitol’s west wing.
“Meet Lou Gehrig, Gov,” Ruth said by way of introduction.
Gehrig blushed. “The kid don’t say much,” Ruth explained.
In the photo, Ruth stood front and center, clasping the governor’s hand. Gehrig, who was named the Most Valuable Player in the major leagues that very afternoon, was relegated to the side.
The caption identified the dapper gentleman standing behind Moore as “the business manager” of the Home Run Twins’ barnstorming tour. That was where Walsh wanted to be, occupying the role he had created for himself, unnamed but acknowledged, presiding over the fray. But he wasn’t the man in the picture. The editors got it wrong, a case of mistaken identity—which can happen when you’re the fella behind the Big Fella. Walsh made sure it wasn’t a regular occurrence.
Chapter 4
October 12 / Cityline
FANS' RUSH ON RUTH AGAIN HALTS GAME
RUTH’S ATTEMPT TO ATONE FOR DISAPPOINTMENT BY APPEARING IN BOX CAUSES STAMPEDE
—NEW YORK TIMES
INSTINCTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF MOB PSYCHOLOGY IS SECRET OF RUTH SUCCESS
—BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE
I
On Columbus Day, the 435th anniversary of the discovery of the New World, the outfield at Dexter Park was roped off in anticipation of a standing-room-only crowd. Banks and schools and the stock exchanges were closed. Max Rosner, Hungarian immigrant, former butcher and cigar roller, now owner of the ballpark and the team that inhabited it, knew to expect a big turnout. Rosner had been fielding teams at Dexter Park, the Brooklyn ballpark that wasn’t really in Brooklyn, since 1911.
Before Dexter Park became home to the Bushwicks, the semi-pro baseball team Rosner named for his Brooklyn neighborhood, and home to Nat Strong’s Brooklyn Royal Giants; before it became a playground for skeet and pigeon shooters; before the beer baron William Ulmer arrived to quench the thirst of picnickers who filled the taverns, hotels, ballrooms, and dance halls on the premises and bowled and rode the carousel in the amusement park where thoroughbreds once ran; before Union soldiers encamped on the grounds; before all that there was a racetrack at the intersection of Eldert Lane and Jamaica Avenue, just east of the Brooklyn city line in the borough of Queens, where racing was legalized (and betting tolerated) in 1821. On the map, they called the neighborhood Woodhaven. Regular people called it Cityline.
The Union Race Course was the first dirt track in the nation and home to Dexter, a four-legged nineteenth-century superstar known for setting records and defying convention. The big bay with four socks, a blaze on his nose, and a lot of flash was trained by the great Hiram Woodruff, who operated a hotel on the premises. Currier & Ives memorialized their feats in a series of lithographs: “The Celebrated Horse Dexter, ‘The King of the Turf,’” “Going to the Trot,” and “Coming from the Trot.” Daniel Webster had frequented the place; Oliver Wendell Holmes composed odes to its steeds.
Unlike the genial Babe, who drew people to him, Dexter’s disposition was “so wicked that he had to be gelded,” the New York Times noted in his obituary. Also, unlike the Babe, Dexter had objected to trivial exhibitions of prowess. One September day in 1869, between races at another Long Island course, Dexter had been called on to entertain the crowd. Breaking away from his young handler, he dashed across the field at world-record speed, crashing into the stable with such force that he split the doors and wrecked the sulky he was dragging behind him. He then proceeded to circle the mile-long track in 2:21.
According to legend, this son of Hambletonian was buried beneath an incline in the outfield of the ballpark that bore his name. Locals called it Horse Heaven.
By game time on the afternoon of October 12, there were five to six thousand people jockeying for position in Horse Heaven. The gates had opened at noon. When Ruth and Gehrig emerged from the dugout wearing their spanking new Bustin’ Babes and Larrupin’ Lous uniforms for the first time in competition, every seat in the sixty-five-hundred-seat concrete-and-steel grandstand was taken. The bleachers, with room for two thousand more fans, were packed. Even the old dance pavilions on the grounds were overflowing.
Newspapers variously estimated the crowd at between 20,000 and 26,000. It was the biggest crowd at Dexter Park since 60,000 spectators showed up for a match race at the old Union Course in 1823. Special ground rules would be needed.
Dexter Park was no bandbox. The outfield dimensions were major league: 430 feet in left field, 418 in left center, 431 in center field, 443 in right center, and 310 feet in right field. Beyond the left field wall lay Cypress Hills Cemetery, where Hiram Woodruff, Piet Mondrian, Mae West, and Jack Roosevelt Robinson would find their final resting places. Beyond the right field fence houses with front porches afforded a fine view of the action; their windows offered prime targets during batting practice. Rosner happily paid for the broken glass.
He and Strong offered something you couldn’t see in major-league ballparks—the best African American players of their time in competition against Rosner’s big-time semi-pro outfit—“Big League Baseball at Workingman’s Rates.” They made Dexter Park into a multi-sport venue, hosting football games and soccer matches and boxing cards. Just the night before, the cancellation of a fight between welterweights K. O. Phil Kaplan and Lew Chester resulted in a near riot requiring the intervention of thirty-five of New York’s Finest.
By the time batting practice ended, Tommy Holmes reported in the Eagle, the “standees and sittees on the greensward” were already straining against the ropes separating them from the outfielders trying to assume their positions. “Sorties beyond the limit prescribed by the gallant but insufficient police” began as soon as the umpire cried, “Play ball.”
Pitch by pitch, inning by inning, the mass inched forward, encroaching on the field, on the players, on batted balls,
drawn by the irresistible force stationed at first base for the Bustin’ Babes. Surveying the jostling mass of humanity, Holmes realized he was witnessing something new. Ruth exerted a magnetic pull. It was no longer enough to see him, Holmes observed. “They wanted to get within ‘touching’ distance of him.”
The day before, in Trenton, where the crowd was smaller—thirty-five hundred officially, plus another three thousand or so schoolboys—Ruth twice circled the bases with children clinging to his arms and wrapped around his legs. “Oh, you Babe! Oh, you Babe!” they cried.
It had taken him ten minutes to make it around the bases and at least that long for the police to clear the field. After his third home run off Dick Redding, an army of boys chased him into the dugout, where he fell, heaving and sweating, into the laps of sportswriters and Mayor Donnelly of Trenton, who was attending his first game in thirty years in hopes of persuading Ruth to return for a Halloween celebration.
“My God, they scared me stiff,” Ruth said, taking a minute to catch his breath and regain his equanimity. He wasn’t afraid for himself, he explained quickly. “I was afraid I would trample one of them—these spiked shoes would cut a kid’s shoes off.”
Two spectators were injured in the melee: Thomas Margino, fifteen, and Frank Carkowsky, forty-eight, were treated at St. Francis Hospital.
It was a feature of a new kind of celebrity sweeping the nation. Just a year earlier, seventy-five mourners were injured in the swollen mob—a hundred thousand strong—that gathered outside Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Parlor on Broadway after Rudolph Valentino’s death. Two women attempted suicide at the hospital where he died; two European fans succeeded in their attempts.
But the really extraordinary thing in Ruth’s case, Holmes realized, was his élan in the face of the onslaught. In fact, he appeared to welcome the claustrophobia of his particular fame. “It’s an old story in Babe Ruth’s life. He’s been mobbed before and learned years ago how to receive an over-enthusiastic crowd,” Holmes wrote. “Crowds can’t annoy the Babe. Nothing can annoy him down on the field. The mob may be with him in a manner to drive another ball player crazy, but the Babe never loses his good humor.”
He wondered just what it was Ruth had learned under the tutelage of the good brothers of St. Mary’s. He doubted they had offered classes in mass psychology or French, though he hailed Ruth’s “noblesse obliges.” “Somewhere and somehow, Babe has learned how to make people, whether individuals or in mass formation, like him. Instinctively, perhaps, the home-run king is a consummate showman and one who never fails to give his idolizing followers a real run for their dough.”
It was a seminal column, perhaps the first to explore in depth how Ruth and Walsh devised a new template for how to be famous in America. A happy confluence of factors—timing, technology, economics, personality, unprecedented skill, and the fierce determination to exploit it fully on and off the field—conspired to transform Ruth into what the New Yorker’s Roger Angell called “the model for modern celebrity.”
And he was uniquely qualified to fill the role just as he filled every ballpark in America. The boy who had created a life for himself at St. Mary’s already had plenty of practical experience in creating a public life and persona—a word that entered the lexicon of fame when he was a teenager.
When he left St. Mary’s in 1914 to enter the public realm, reporters made much of the fact that he had never ridden a bike or an elevator or eaten a steak. They missed the point. At St. Mary’s he had never gone to the bathroom without company, never slept in a room by himself. Being public was all he knew. It was his norm. And as a result, his daughter Julia would say decades later, he could not stand to be alone.
II
St. Mary’s Industrial School stood sentinel at the top of a gentle rise where Baltimore City ended and Baltimore County began. A large circular drive led to the front entrance and intruded on the avenue, forcing a deviation in its otherwise straight path, one indication of the power of the Church in the city and in the lives of the boys who crossed St. Mary’s threshold.
Victorian in attitude and architecture, the impregnable structure with a mansard roof and a 120-foot Empire tower, adorned with a 45-foot flagpole and crowned by a cross, was at odds with the pastoral setting that greeted George Ruth on June 13, 1902. The rural campus was three miles and a world away from his scruffy urban home. Occupying a hundred verdant acres donated to the archdiocese by Miss Emily Caton McTavish, granddaughter of Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the buildings, constructed with stone quarried from the surrounding fields, erupted from an otherwise placid landscape where cattle grazed, wheat defied a spring drought, and boys played baseball.
The dour gray granite building stood five stories high and 136 feet wide. It spoke to seriousness of purpose, a solidity that was both reassuring and intimidating—penal in affect. What one newly ordained member of the Xaverian Order, Brother Arcadius Alkonis, would remember about arriving there on his first night was the bars on the windows.
Newly installed electric lights in the common rooms illuminated the austerity of the place. The crystal chandeliers added to brighten the premises failed to dilute its bleakness. To enter St. Mary’s was to surrender freedom and light.
George Ruth never shared his first impressions of St. Mary’s with his family. He never spoke about what it was like to go from being one of two surviving children in a family defined by loss to being one of the many, what it was to go to bed that night wondering when or if he’d see that family again. He never said what it was like to sleep in ordered rows and dress in matching clothes, to share sinks and stalls in a communal washroom, to surrender to a system predicated on uniformity and routine.
It couldn’t have been easy. Even then he had within him the makings of distinction. He couldn’t help standing out. He was younger than he knew, his mother having confused the year of his birth, but bigger than everyone else, an awkward, gawky, hollow-cheeked boy with a toothy grin presumably not much in evidence that day, a grin that always looked as if he had happiness clenched between his teeth.
“If you ever wanted to see a bone out of joint or one of nature’s misfits, you should have seen him,” Brother Gilbert told sportswriter Frank Graham.
His ears stuck out. Like handles on a loving cup, one writer said. His hair stuck up. His nostrils spread wide. His lips were as full as the rest of him would become. He was dark complected, having inherited his olive skin from his mother’s side of the family. In the rough tongue of the playground, he quickly acquired a nickname: Nigger Lips, or Nig, for short.
The only account of the day he arrived was the one young Westbrook Pegler had confected out of thin air in a New York City apartment. By the time he got around to admitting twenty-five years later that he had made it all up, the myth had morphed into bedrock.
Pegler imagined a boy escorted to the institution by his father, not a beat cop. He imagined that boy awash in tears and his unrequited pleas to go home. He imagined a family that didn’t exist and a magical savior who appeared deus ex machina at his bedside that first night, offering the salvation of baseball.
I was a pretty homesick kid along sundown. I could see the family gathered about the table for supper and my chair empty, and I was wondering whether they missed me as much as I missed them. . . .
I went to bed in the strange dormitory feeling as though I had been sold out by my best friends.
“What’s the matter, Babe?”
I looked up from my pillow in the darkness there, to see a great six-foot-six man standing over me. He said it in a whisper because he knew that one kid would be sensitive about having the others know him to be homesick. . . .
Anyway, he told me he was coach of the ball club and advised me to come out and try for a place on the team. I knew I was going to like this kindly, understanding big friend. But I couldn’t foresee, of course, that he was going to coach me along into the big leagues and make [me] the home run champion.
/> III
On August 17, 1866, four members of the Congregation of St. Francis Xavier, a Belgian lay teaching order, arrived in southwest Baltimore to find a hundred acres of untamed woodlands with a single, unfinished wooden shanty abandoned by Federal troops. They had been invited by Archbishop Martin Spalding to build a school for boys orphaned during the Civil War.
The brothers were industrious. They cleared the land and tilled the soil, hoping for a self-sufficiency that would never be achieved. They built dormitories where the boys would learn to do without privacy, and classrooms where they would learn their ABCs and perfect their handwriting—a skill that would serve George Ruth well.
By the time he arrived, the brothers had added a hennery, a piggery, and two libraries. They had acquired musical instruments and paraded members of the nationally recognized St. Mary’s band in Johnny Reb uniforms in front of a brigade of ’61 veterans in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.
In 1902, they built three new greenhouses so that they could cultivate and sell carnations and chrysanthemums all year round. They constructed a new 110-foot-long stone barn big enough to house fifty-six steers. Four years later, they added ten more steers and a four-story concrete building for manual training, where George Ruth learned to become a tailor. The window looked down on home plate.
St. Mary’s was one of nine orphanages and two reformatories created by the Catholic Church in Baltimore between 1850 and 1890. It was unique among the religious institutions created to care for what Baltimore industrialist Alex Brown called “the broken wreckage of industrial society,” because it was funded by Baltimore City and the state of Maryland. Founded by the archbishop as a refuge for Catholic boys who faced bias in public institutions, St. Mary’s became a nondenominational public charity eight years later, when it was incorporated by the city and state as a place to settle vagrant and homeless boys.
