The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (12 page)

Three days of rainouts followed, sending the team to Washington for a three-game series before finally hitting Boston. This was where Barrow decided to deliver
his
message for the season. The Babe had slipped back into his late-night, all-night wanderings with the same ease with which he had regained his batting eye. Barrow thought that the first week of the season would be a good time to address this situation.

The Sox stayed at the Hotel Raleigh, and Barrow, as he sometimes did, took an after-midnight seat in the lobby to await the return of his players, notably the Babe. By 4:00
A
.
M
., still waiting for the Home Run King, everyone else tucked into bed, the manager decided to tuck himself into bed. Angry, needing sleep, he asked the night porter the next evening to knock at his door when Ruth came in, no matter what the time might be. A few bucks, folded together, ensured compliance. The knock came at six in the morning.

“That fellow just came in,” the porter reported.

Barrow put on his bathrobe and slippers and went to Ruth’s room. He had assigned Dan Howley, a coach, to keep Ruth under control, but Howley obviously had fared no better than all other assigned roommates. Barrow knocked. He could hear voices and could see through the transom that a light was on. The voices stopped and the light went out as soon as Barrow knocked.

He turned the doorknob. The door opened.

Ruth was in bed, cover pulled up, smoking a pipe. Howley had bolted for the bathroom. Barrow asked Ruth if he always smoked a pipe in the middle of the night. Ruth said he did, that he found it relaxing. Barrow walked to the bed, pulled back the covers. Ruth was still in his clothes, even wearing his shoes. Barrow said he would see him at the ballpark.

The confrontation did not go well at the park. Barrow dressed down Ruth in front of the team. Ruth threatened to punch Barrow in the nose. Barrow, 25 years older but the same size as Ruth, offered to lock the door, just the two of them. Ruth wordlessly declined by leaving with the rest of the team to practice.

Barrow suspended Ruth, didn’t let him play in the game, but that night on the train ride back to Boston the two men settled their differences. Ruth came to Barrow’s compartment, not only contrite but willing to explain why he acted the way he did. The explanation went back to St. Mary’s, back to his unsettled times at home. The conversation lasted for a while. Barrow was moved. The question was what he and his star would do next. Ruth had an idea.

“Manager,” Ruth said, “if I leave a note in your box every night when I come in, and I tell you what time I got home, will you let me play?”

Barrow said yes, starting a routine that was followed on the road for the rest of the season. Ruth left his notes, starting with the salutation “Dear Manager” or “Dear Eddie,” in the hotel mailbox every night. Barrow read them and threw them away. He said he never checked whether the notes were accurate or not. It was a good deal for both parties: Ruth was able to play; Barrow was able to go to bed.

The note writer, as it turned out, was the least of Barrow’s problems as the season progressed. His defending world champions fell apart in a hurry. (Maybe he should have had everyone write a note.) Joe Bush had thrown his arm out in an exhibition game against the Giants and never recovered. Herb Pennock was slow coming back from the rust of war. Sam Jones was hurt for three weeks. Carl Mays jumped the team. The pitching staff was a yearlong mess. A six-game losing streak in the middle of a 21-game road trip left the champs nine and a half games out by May 27, and they never were in the fight, finishing in sixth place, twenty and a half games behind the Chicago White Sox.

The only show to watch during all of this was Ruth, who was climbing the statistical ladder, breaking past home run barriers on the way. It was quite a show: he was like a long-distance runner out ahead of the pack, running against a stopwatch. The rest of the race didn’t matter. How far could he go? Fully tuned in to playing every day now, swinging hard every time at bat, he made the home run a new, loud art form.

The first marker put in front of him was Socks Seybold’s American League record of 16, set in 1902. He tied that on July 29 with a ninth-inning shot into the Fenway bleachers off Dutch Leonard. A wire service report suggested, “American League pitchers appear at a loss to stop him, the big pitcher and outfielder having made scoring drives off balls knee high and over his head alike.”

The next stop was the major league record of 24—the papers called it “the world record”—set by Buck Freeman of the Washington club in the National League in 1899. This was matched on September 8 with a bomb into the right-field pavilion at the Polo Grounds. Freeman, now an umpire in the American Association, was contacted in Toledo about the loss of his record.

“I was convinced several years ago that Ruth would at least equal my record, if not surpass it,” Freeman said. “I never could hit like Ruth. I could not take the swing the big fellow does because I haven’t the physique.”

A final stop had been added too in the weeks leading up to number 24. Record books had been checked, and it was found that someone named Ned Williamson had hit 27 homers for the Chicago White Stockings in 1884. The fact was mentioned that baseball had been a much different game at that time—the batter, for instance, could request that the pitcher throw either a low ball or a high ball—and the right-field fence at Chicago’s Congress Street Grounds was a ridiculously close 215 feet, but a record was a record. The Babe might as well break that one too.

He did that in fine dramatic fashion on September 20, a day that had been staged just for him, “Babe Ruth Day” at Fenway, with over 30,000 people in attendance. He returned to the mound for the occasion, pitching the first game of a doubleheader against the first-place White Sox, who were on their way to the pennant. He had pitched in a regular turn in different stretches during the season due to the injuries and Mays’s defection, would finish with a 9–5 record and a 2.97 ERA, but this appearance was scheduled simply to be part of the day.

He struggled on the mound. When he was replaced in the sixth inning by Allan Russell, he moved to left field to finish the game. In the bottom of the ninth, one out, tie game, Ruth was fooled by a Lefty Williams curveball, but reached out with one hand on the bat and flicked it over the
left
-field wall and—the
Globe
reported—through an open window on Lansdowne Street. In one flick, he won the game, tied the weird record, and caused Lefty Williams to throw his glove in disgust into the outfield.

Between games, Ruth was honored with assorted gifts that included a diamond ring, a $600 certificate of deposit, cuff links, and a pair of baseball shoes, size 11. Helen, who stood with him and took each gift from him after each presentation, was given a traveling bag. In the second game, he probably should have broken the record with a shot that bounced into the bleachers (a home run under the rules at that time), but umpire Billy Evans ruled it a double.

The Massachusetts National Guard was at work for the day due to the bitter police strike taking place in Boston, and a sergeant from the Guard tried to help the Babe’s case. He had a detail collect signed statements from people sitting in the bleachers, all of whom said the ball was a home run. He presented the statements to Evans.

“You are, as I understand it, supposed to protect the public and me,” Evans told the sergeant. “It would be well for you to attend to your police duties and leave the umpiring to me.”

“You can’t talk to me that way,” the sergeant replied.

A lieutenant intervened. The hit remained a double.

The Babe broke the record four days later. He hit a mammoth home run at the Polo Grounds in the ninth inning off the Yanks’ Bob Shawkey, a shot that went over the roof of the stands and landed in a park called Manhattan Fields, the longest home run in Polo Grounds history. He finished with 29 homers, his final blast coming in the next-to-last game of the season at Washington.

He was the talk of baseball. He had hit a home run in every park in the American League, including the longest home runs ever seen in New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and Boston, not to mention Tampa, Florida. Fan mail had arrived in such piles that he now asked teammates and the Red Sox front office to handle it. He had opened the window to the future of the game while playing for a sad sixth-place team.

How sad? Harry Hooper, on the last western road trip, wrote an apology to Ed Barrow on stationery from the Hotel Winton in Cleveland. The season was a bust. “Having in view the many stories and rumors as to the cause of the present low standing of the Boston Am club: stories of dissension among the players and rumors of mismanagement; we the undersigned wish to correct an injustice to manager Ed Barrow,” Hooper wrote.

We feel that he has treated his players royally, in a manner that could not be improved upon. The poor success was caused by a combination of bad breaks. The failure of some of the regulars to perform up to their past standards, weak pitching and continued bad luck on the field has upset the expectations of the management and the critics. The players are in harmony amongst themselves and with the manager, and stories to the contrary are not true. We are for him to the last.

The letter was signed by 21 members of the team. Ninth in the list, between Wally Schang and Everett Scott, was G. H. Ruth. He apologized, even though he had put together a unique and remarkable season. Maybe it was habit…another note for Ed Barrow’s mailbox.

The Babe’s business side jumped into action as soon as the season ended. Actually, it jumped in a day before the season ended. Barrow gave him permission to skip the final game in Washington and play in a lucrative exhibition game in Baltimore—the start of a string of lucrative exhibitions.

Every day he seemed to be in another town, hitting another home run against another stitched-together opponent. One day he was in Portland, Maine, going 3-for-5 with a homer, but also being struck out by “Bissonette, a former pitcher at Westbrook Seminary.” The next day, all factories and stores closed at noon in Sanford, Maine, to see him hit a fifth-inning homer in a 4–3 win. Then there was a two-run homer in a 9–8 loss to the Comets in Lynn, Massachusetts. Then a homer in the sixth in Beverly, Massachusetts, to beat Marblehead. Then Troy, New York, where the next day’s headline announced, “Babe Fails to Get Home Run,” but he did go 3-for-4 with a triple. Then Rutland, Vermont…the longest ball ever hit in Rutland, Vermont.

His most interesting stop was in Attleboro, Massachusetts. A manufacturing town near the Rhode Island border, Attleboro for years had played an annual best-of-five series against rival North Attleboro. These were town teams playing for town pride—typical stuff. This year the stakes became a bit higher.

After Attleboro lost the first game, the millionaire owner of one local jewelry firm gave manager Dan O’Connell a bunch of cash and told him to “get some better ballplayers.” O’Connell got the Babe and Carl Mays and fellow major leaguers Heinie Zimmerman and Dave Bancroft.

The North Attleboro team somehow heard about this, and a millionaire jewelry store owner in North Attleboro gave Frank Kelly even more cash to get even more ballplayers. He wound up with Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Eddie Collins, Bob Shawkey, Harry Hooper, and Frankie Frisch.

The memories of who played in which game have become murky with the years, but by the time the deciding fifth game arrived, the event was being called “the Little World Series” and gamblers and prostitutes had arrived from as far away as Chicago. Attleboro won, 6–3, on a homer by Bobby Roth, the Babe did nothing special, and a party was held after the game that became grand local legend.

On October 24, the Babe and Helen and Johnny Igoe, the business manager, who also was a Boston druggist, boarded a train for Los Angeles. A number of exhibitions had been scheduled up and down California at $500 apiece, plus expenses, and the Babe was excited. He never had been past St. Louis, so this was an adventure. “Indefinite” was his stated time of return.

Before he departed, he placed a ticking package on Harry Frazee’s front step. He turned in his two Red Sox uniforms at Fenway Park and said he probably was done with the team “unless Frazee comes through good.” He explained that his idea of “good” was $20,000 a year.

“I will not play with the Red Sox unless I get $20,000,” he said. “I feel I made a bad move last year when I signed a three-year contract to play for $30,000. The Boston club realized much on my value, and I think I am entitled to twice as much as my contract calls for.”

To him, he was taking the first steps in the familiar dance. He would crack the hickory nut again. One step, two steps, he would stay in California for the entire winter. He would threaten to quit baseball for the movies. He would ponder a boxing career, training with Kid McCoy. He and Helen would live in a couple of $50-a-day bungalows and meet the celebrated figures of the celebrated town. He figured that the serious dancing wouldn’t come until the spring.

“I have several propositions in hand, many of which will pay me over $10,000 a year,” the Babe declared from the land of sun and palm trees.

Little did he know that Harry Frazee wasn’t in the mood to dance this time. There would be a new set of partners by the time the Colossus returned.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HE OWNERS
of the New York Yankees were known in the newspapers as “the two Colonels.” It was a tidy phrase, but misleading. Though Col. Jake Ruppert and Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston shared the title, the team, and sometimes overlapping portions of New York nightlife, they were two quite different men.

Col. Ruppert, age 53, was a member of the New York aristocracy, born into wealth, a member of all of the city’s clubs of privilege, the head of the family brewing company, the owner of racehorses and show dogs, a former four-time congressman from the 15th District on the East Side, a lifelong millionaire bachelor who always explained his marital state with the saying “he travels fastest who travels alone.” His rank had been handed to him in the silk-stocking Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard.

Col. Huston, 54, whose name sounded far more regal, actually came from Cincinnati, the civil engineer son of a civil engineer. A captain in the Spanish-American War, he stayed in Cuba for ten years after the war ended and made a lot of money in a project to dredge and improve the harbors in Havana and other port cities. After moving to New York with that money and looking for investment and excitement, he reenlisted in the army in 1917 for the world war and was promoted to lieutenant colonel while building roads and railways under heavy shell fire behind the British lines in France.

Ruppert was a prince of fashion, groomed and immaculate, and spoke with a Germanic accent even though he had been raised in the family mansion at the corner of 93rd Street and Fifth Avenue. He now lived in a 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and had a country estate in Garrison, New York, that featured one of the largest privately owned art collections and libraries in the world plus a menagerie of exotic animals. He was a bit of an exotic animal himself: when the automobile first arrived in the city, he was one of the first drivers, a dashing figure in his linen duster and goggles. He directed a corps of servants that included a butler, maid, valet, cook, and laundress and owned a famous yacht named the
Albatross.
Huston, on the other hand, was rumpled and round, called people by their first names, had a big voice and a big laugh and a fondness for the product that came from Ruppert’s brewery. He was married, with a son and two daughters, and owned a 30,000-acre farm in Georgia, where he had built a lavish—many said garish—mansion based on the Petit Trianon of Versailles.

The two men were thrown together in an arranged marriage. Each much rather would have bought the New York Giants, the glamour team of the city, the team of John McGraw and Christy Mathewson and championships. Ruppert, in fact, had tried and failed in attempts to buy the team in both 1903 and 1912. He often told the story about how he once practiced with the Giants in his teens and learned by taking only one of catcher Buck Ewing’s bullet throws to second base, feeling the sting in his hand, wondering if any bones had been broken, that he would never be a major league baseball player. Huston, mad with his new money, mad with his new life, also had loved baseball as a boy and tried to buy into the game several times with his mad money, most recently with the Chicago Cubs in 1913. (Ruppert was offered the Cubs but declined, saying he wouldn’t be interested in “anything so far from Broadway.”)

When the Yankees, the very poor relations of New York sport, came up for sale at the end of the 1914 season, a friend in Cincinnati, Bill Fleischmann, casually suggested to Ruppert that he join with Huston to buy the team. Ruppert hadn’t seen the team play more than four or five times, mostly to take a look at American League stars like Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson, but he was interested. He contacted Huston. The two men didn’t know each other, didn’t meet until they started talking about the deal, but both knew McGraw of the Giants and both loved baseball. This love—and money—brought them together.

On December 31, 1914, at the Hotel Wolcott, they bought the Yankees for $450,000. Ruppert brought a certified check and an attorney to handle his half of the transaction. Huston came alone and reached into his pocket for a large roll of money and counted out 225 thousand-dollar bills.

“For $450,000,” Ruppert said later in the Germanic accent, “we got an orphan ball club without a home of its own, without players of outstanding ability, without prestige.”

By December 1919, the partnership had survived five somewhat acrimonious seasons, the Colonels arguing with each other about almost everything, and the team had shown some progress. There were no championships, but the Yankees had finished a respectable third in 1919. The Colonels’ money had allowed them to pry away a player here, a player there, from teams that had considerably fewer resources.

Two of their deals had been made with the Red Sox. At the end of the 1918 season, they had picked up pitchers Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard and outfielder Duffy Lewis, all back from the war, for four players and $15,000. In the middle of the 1919 season, they had added pitcher Carl Mays for pitchers Allan Russell and Bob McGraw and $40,000.

The Mays deal was controversial. A troubled and disliked figure on the Red Sox, Mays became upset when his teammates made some errors behind him and put him in the hole, 4–0, in the second inning of a game against the White Sox in Chicago. When catcher Wally Schang, trying to throw out a runner trying to steal second, inadvertently hit Mays in the back of the head with the ball, that was the final perceived indignity. Mays finished the inning, batted in the bottom half, walked, didn’t score, came back to the dugout, went straight to the clubhouse, and said he never would play for the Red Sox again. He went home.

Manager Ed Barrow prepared to suspend the pitcher, but Red Sox owner Harry Frazee told him to wait. Frazee said he could trade Mays to the Yankees. And he did.

It was an easy deal to make because he was a friend of Col. Huston’s and friendly enough with Col. Ruppert. He was, after all, another New York guy, a resident of Park Avenue, another fast runner on the Manhattan social map. Like Huston, Frazee was a self-made man, having started his theater career by working in the box office and as an usher at the local theater in Peoria, Illinois, when he was 16 years old. He was on the road a year later as an advance man for a touring production. He slowly graduated into producing his own shows around the country and finally landed on Broadway. He had toured the country promoting a performance involving boxers Jim Jeffries and Jim Corbett. He had been part of the promotion for the fight between Jack Johnson and Jess Willard in Havana.

He teamed with silent partners Hugh Ward and G. M. Anderson in 1917 to buy the Red Sox. The price was $400,000, half of that in a down payment, the rest in notes to Lannin that the partners thought could be repaid from gate receipts and profits from the team. Boston fans worried about the arrival of out-of-town owners, wondered if they would have the proper commitment to winning, but grew to appreciate Frazee’s efforts. An attempt at purchasing Walter Johnson from the Washington Senators in the first weeks on the job gave him some instant credibility. His actions in quickly replacing the players who went to the war, leading to the 1918 pennant, further helped his image.

The Mays deal was a reminder of where he lived. It wound up binding him closer together with the Colonels of New York. They had been part of a three-team coalition (Charles Comiskey and the White Sox were the third partner) in assorted battles with American League president Ban Johnson. The Mays deal became a large battle. Johnson ruled the trade invalid and ordered Mays back to the Red Sox. The Colonels and Frazee resisted. Mays joined the Yankees and not only pitched but pitched well, finishing with a 9–3 record in the second half of the season. Johnson refused to distribute the money the Yankees had won for finishing third.

A round of injunctions and restraining orders was issued, everything winding up in court. Johnson in the process was forced to make the embarrassing admission that he not only was the league president but also owned a considerable interest in the Cleveland Indians. The Yankees and Red Sox won the battle, the trade was allowed to stand, and Johnson’s power diminished as the third-place money was awarded, but the battle lines deepened. Frazee and the Colonels shared the same bunker.

That made a deal for Babe Ruth much easier to be arranged. The accepted version of how it happened when it happened was that the Colonels asked manager Miller Huggins what he needed to contend for a championship in 1920. Huggins replied, “Get me Babe Ruth.” The Colonels then sent Huggins to Frazee to sound out the possibilities. The manager came back and said Ruth was available for $125,000, the largest price ever paid for a baseball player. The Colonels gulped—especially Ruppert—and made the deal.

Frazee’s explanation was that he didn’t want to deal with the “eccentricities” of his star player anymore. He said that Ruth’s salary demands were far out of line, especially with two years to run on an existing contract, and that his behavior was a detriment to team morale. The club would be better off without him, a true team instead of ballplayers eclipsed by a petulant star. The money would free up possibilities to sign other, more team-oriented stars.

Missing in the story was the obvious friendship between the principals involved. Frazee eventually would be called “the Corporal” by at least one writer in New York. Another writer would say that Frazee, Ruppert, and Huston were “as close as three fingers on the same hand.” Would Huggins have to act as an intermediary in this kind of relationship? Also missing, not public knowledge until ten months later, was the fact that a $300,000 personal loan from Ruppert to Frazee was a major part of the deal, with Fenway Park used as collateral by the Boston owner.

A much easier scenario can be imagined. Frazee and Huston were not only friends but Broadway drinking buddies, traveling the same glad round of restaurants and parties. Huston was the drinking patron of the New York sportswriters, buying rounds at the bar, always good for a colorful quote. He was called “the Iron Hat” in the papers, an inside nickname that referred not only to his ever-present derby hat but also to his construction background. Frazee, rapidly heading toward the same bulky size as Huston, was known as a heavy drinker.

“Harry Frazee never drew a sober breath in his life, but he was a hell of a producer,” lyricist Irving Caesar, who helped write “Tea for Two” and other songs for Frazee’s musical productions, once said. “He made more sense drunk than most men do sober.”

Alcohol was the machine oil of the time in the baseball industry, despite the approach of Prohibition. Drinking was everywhere. Ban Johnson was an obvious drunk. Ruppert, as president of the United States Brewers Association, had argued against the coming law, claiming that beer was “a liquid food, a healthful beverage, and in no way injurious to the system.” Frazee and Huston were definite believers in that philosophy.

Deals and decisions in the game routinely were made late at night after much consumption of liquid food. Would it be outlandish to consider that was the case here? The idea that the consumption of liquid food by friends, combined with conversation about personal problems and possible solutions (like a $300,000 loan), resulted in the trade of a notable, home run–hitting consumer of liquid food would seem to have great logic.

The deal was completed in secrecy, the papers signed on December 26. Nothing appeared in the newspapers until January 6. The timing was interesting too. Everything was completed in the midst of holiday parties, the most active time on the social circuit.

The deal could be toasted legally before the new law on liquid food took effect on January 16, 1920.

Part of the delay in announcing that the Babe was a Yankee was the stipulation that the Colonels wanted to be sure that the Babe wanted to be a Yankee. He was still on the West Coast with Helen, enjoying the sun and churning out more palm tree quotes for the salary squabble he did not know he already had won. The Colonels dispatched manager Huggins to Los Angeles to inform the big man that the deal had been made and to talk him into acceptance.

Huggins was one of the prime focuses of conflict between the Colonels. Huston didn’t like him, didn’t want him as manager. Ruppert had hired him in 1918 on the advice of Ban Johnson while Huston was in France during the war. Huston had argued across the Atlantic Ocean for Uncle Wilbert Robinson, who was “more his style in character and architecture,”
New York Times
columnist John Kieran said. Ruppert nevertheless hired Huggins, whom he didn’t really know, then stuck his heels in deep and defended his decision.

Huggins was a small, frail man, roughly 5-foot-2 and 120 pounds, a pipe smoker and a thinker. He had made himself a successful major league second baseman with the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals through ingenuity and industry. He scrunched down at the plate, offering a tiny strike zone, and led the National League in walks four times. He was a base stealer, a pest. Looking for an advantage, he made himself into a switch-hitter. A natural right-hander, he concentrated in the off-season on doing everything left-handed, from eating and drinking to opening doors and chopping wood. He was a rarity in the game, an educated man who had graduated from law school at the University of Cincinnati in 1902 before he started his baseball career.