The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (14 page)

The Stadium of Athens was laid out by Lycurgus, the orator. Praxiteles and Phidas, the sculptors, were not above making statues of great athletes. Pindar wrote odes to them.

Any Bostonian who feels sad on the subject of Mr. George H. Ruth may remember Athens and then give full vent to his grief in public.

The Babe was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HE MARRIAGE
between the Babe and New York City had every chance to be perfect. He was built for the New York of 1920, and the New York of 1920 was built for him. He was a muscle man coming to a muscle city in a muscle time. The war was long done, everyone home, and the United States of America was second to no one, thank you very much. New York, New York, was the center of all that was fresh and new and without limit. Enormous buildings were beginning to grow out of the ground, fabulous concrete beanstalks that shut out the sun. Money was beginning to move, faster and faster, doubling and tripling, quadrupling itself, multiplying in the air. Engines were running everywhere. The streets were filled every day with more automobiles and more people of all description.

The Billy Sunday evangelists and their followers might have stuffed through the Eighteenth Amendment, but let those timid outlying souls live with it. The liquor never stopped flowing in New York City, where almost twice as many speakeasies soon replaced the bars that were closed. The night never stopped. Hemlines were being pulled up and stockings were being rolled down and women with short hair and high-fashion bobs were coming out to smoke cigarettes and dance. A faster, louder, outrageous syncopation was at work.

This was the beginning of what New York sportswriter Westbrook Pegler would call “the Era of Wonderful Nonsense” and Paul Gallico, another New York sportswriter, would say was a time when “we were like children who’d been let out of school.” What was more nonsensical than standing and cheering the flight of a round, white, horsehide-covered ball with red stitching on the sides? Who, of all the 86,079,000 inhabitants of the country counted in the 1920 census, ever had charged any harder at the sound of the recess bell than the boy from the Baltimore orphanage?

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye,” narrator Nick Carraway says in
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.”

“Do we not stand, in this northern port, at the farthest post of history and look out on the newest horizons?” author Edmund Wilson asked. “Do we not get the latest news and explore the extreme possibilities? Do we not, between the office and the night-club, in the excitement of winning and spending, and slightly poisoned by the absorption of bad alcohol, succeed in experiencing sensations which humanity has never known?”

“New York is a home run town,” Miller Huggins said.

If the Babe had stayed in Boston, no matter how many glorious feats he performed, no matter how many records and furniture store windows he broke with long drives over faraway fences, he would have been given a blue ribbon and a gold watch and celebrated as the owner of the prize turnips at the state fair. He would have been a good, great, interesting baseball player. To do the same things in New York not only would make him part of this giddy social upheaval; he would stand in front of the parade with marching boots and a big, 52-ounce baton and whistle. In a time of venial sin in a city of venial sin, the man of magnified venial sin would become the Sultan of Swat, the Caliph of Clout, the Wizard of Whack, the Rajah of Rap, the Wazir of Wham, the Mammoth of Maul, the Maharajah of Mash, the Bambino. The Bam. The Big Bam.

He had landed in the absolute right place.

He didn’t arrive in the city until February 28, the day of the Yankees’ departure for spring training to Jacksonville. A round of activities had kept him in Boston, including a dinner at the Hotel Brunswick and a basketball game for the Shawmut Athletic Club, in which he scored eight points in a 41–25 win.

He boomed into the club offices on 42nd Street, still tanned from California, animated, wearing a large leather coat and handing out cigars. The Colonels, meeting with Miller Huggins, had their first good look at their investment. He very much seemed to be the oversized character he was supposed to be. In the course of conversation, Huston tried to preach the virtues of moderation, much as Huggins had in California. It also didn’t work.

“Look at ya,” the Babe said. “Too fat and too old to have any fun.”

“That goes for him too,” he added, pointing to Ruppert.

“As for that shrimp,” the big man finalized, indicating Huggins, “he’s half-dead right now.”

The grand experiment had begun. Ten minutes before the departure of the
Florida Flyer
to Jacksonville, the big man appeared at the designated track at Pennsylvania Station in his big leather coat. He was followed by a porter pushing a cart loaded with suitcases and a new set of golf clubs picked up in California. A gathering crowd of gawkers came next, merging into a crowd of the curious who already were waiting.

It was a comic yet majestic scene, due to be repeated every time he took a train out of the city. He would turn to speak to the porter, or change direction on a whim, and the crowd would turn with him, people stepping on each other just to be closer, just to hear whatever he might say, see whatever he might do.

After this fast, first snapshot, he was off, playing cards with his new teammates for meal money and more before the train hit New Jersey. The implications of all of this interest—new town, new team, new position, new expectations—did not seem to faze him at all. He told reporters that he expected to hit 50 home runs. He said, “Deal,” and headed south with the same expectations everyone else had.

On the first day in Jacksonville, practice was optional, since Huggins hadn’t arrived, so the big man played golf. Sixteen players showed up at Southside Park to return to baseball, to get the muscles working again, but the Babe toured 18 holes at the Florida Country Club. Newspapers reported that he wore a silk shirt and white golf flannels and at one point threw his golf club high in the air to intercept a golf ball in midflight. Look! How many people could do that!

The Yankees team he joined had possibilities. The third-place finish of a year earlier had been put together by some veterans like shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker, first baseman Wally Pipp, and outfielders Ping Bodie and Duffy Lewis. A new kid, outfielder Bob Meusel, taller even than Ruth, was supposed to be another big addition this year from Vernon in the Pacific Coast League. Another kid, infielder Aaron Ward, soon would prove vital when Baker, whose wife had died in the off-season, decided to stay home for a year to raise his two children.

The pace of the camp was casual. The Brooklyn Dodgers also trained in Jacksonville, on the other side of the city at Barrs Field, and practiced twice a day. Huggins, a manager who was not a disciplinarian and never had a curfew, worked his team only once every day. This left ample time for golf and hijinks, two areas pursued with great interest.

The Babe quickly established a man-of-mystery routine for hijinks that would continue for all of his time with the Yankees. Evening would come and he would disappear. Helen was back in Massachusetts, and he would cut through the lobby of the Hotel Burbridge, dapper and clean, flamboyantly fashionable, and step into a waiting car or a cab and be gone, off to whatever delights awaited. The other players were left to more modest frivolities around the hotel.

From the start, he lived a different life from all of them. The Yankees, who handed out $5 per day meal money, at one point had to change the policy to $5 credit at the hotel restaurant. The players were eating cheap hot dogs every day, saving the rest of the money for other things, then appearing at the ballpark weak and uninspired. The Babe lived on another economic and social level.

“He was a peculiar character,” pitcher Waite Hoyt would say in future years. “If I may be so bold to say, so frank to say, Ruth reminded me of…we used to compare him to an Airedale dog or a sheep hound or something. He went around visiting girlfriends, and then he would come home. He would come and the family would, like a dog, pat him. He’d been out all night carousing, and then he would come home to a respectable family, and the family would pat the dog on the head, and the family would say what a nice dog Rover is.”

Ping Bodie, nominally his roommate in Jacksonville, delivered the famous answer when asked what kind of guy the Babe was. Bodie said (the quote repeated various times in various ways), “I don’t know. I don’t room with Babe Ruth. I room with his suitcase.”

A second ritual of the spring also was established: the Babe was a slow starter at the plate. Every year it would take a while before the internal mechanisms that measured speed and distance were matched to the external reactions of body mass and power. Every spring there would be a great speculation if maybe, just maybe, the big man’s great trick had been lost or squandered through a winter of neglect. (His bats arrived late this time from Boston in Jacksonville. Was he having problems because he didn’t have his favorite bats? It was a story.) Every spring, no matter what, the trick eventually would return.

The first big blast didn’t come until March 19, 17 days after he arrived. The assembled sportswriters had been waiting for so long that when Ruth clocked a simple batting practice pitch from Mario DeVitalis over the center-field fence toward the St. John River, everyone in the press box became a little giddy. A couple of writers hustled out with a tape measure and figured the ball had traveled 478 feet. The fence was 428 feet, and the ball had traveled 50 feet more. Even though the Babe said it was the farthest he ever had hit a baseball except for the shot a year earlier in Tampa, even though it was the longest home run ever recorded in Jacksonville, those statements were not big enough. Exaggeration came into easy play.

“Ruth hit the ball over the centerfield fence at the Yankees’ training yard in South Jacksonville,” Damon Runyon wrote in the
New York American,
making fun of the shouting. “Yes, sir, clean, over, right over. My what a swat it was. My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! Plumb over.”

The Yankees advertised all exhibition games as an appearance of “Babe Ruth, the Home Run King,” but he hit only one shot during a game in all of the time in Florida. That came on April 1 off Dodgers pitcher Al Mamaux in the first inning of a 6–2 win, and the
Times
gurgled that “no other man in baseball could have lifted a ball that far. The pellet cleared the center field fence.”

More time was spent in discussion about the possibility of more home runs than was spent actually watching home runs. A change in the rules, outlawing trick pitches like the emery ball, the shine ball, and the spitball, had been made for the new season, giving the batter a projected advantage. No longer would he have to see the doctored balls, with their lopsided dynamics, spinning and dancing and dropping in ways that challenged conventional laws of physics. Huggins was one of the few baseball voices against the change (“When they prohibit a pitcher from using his noodle to develop freak deliveries they are killing the pitcher’s initiative”), but it generally was thought his team would be the greatest beneficiary.

Another change had occurred with the baseball itself. Nobody knew the facts behind the change—that manufacturers now used a better grade of Australian wool and had developed new machines that wound the yarn tighter—but everyone knew that the ball seemed to fly better. Or said they knew. The “dead ball” era was done. Hit the new baseball, and it felt like solid against solid, bat against the kitchen table. Hit the old baseball and it felt like bat against living room sofa.

Ruth made some on-field headlines in the third week of March when he hurried into the stands to confront a smallish spectator who kept calling him “a big piece of cheese,” then hurried out faster when the spectator pulled a knife, but mostly the stories of the spring relied heavily on invention and imagination. Some of the writers tried to promote an eating contest between Ruth, humorist Irwin S. Cobb, and outfielder Sam Vick, a noted trencherman, but that never took place. Runyon bought an alligator that he named Aloysius Dorgan and interviewed at length. Ping Bodie, whose real name was Francesco Pezzolo (he changed the name because it sounded too ethnic), jumped the team for a stretch in a salary dispute, then came back.

At the end of camp, the club went south for a three-game series with the Cincinnati Reds. The first two games were in Miami, the third at the Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach. The idea for that game was to put on a show for the rich and privileged guests, a little something to watch in the afternoon before another grand dinner. The makeshift field had been roped off on a cricket grounds normally used by Caribbean workers at the hotel. This caused certain irregularities, the most glaring of which was a palm tree situated in the middle of center field.

The Yankees’ traveling party, freed from the dull perimeters of Jacksonville, had taken full advantage of Miami’s nightlife. Some members even had found time for a quick trip to Bimini. The Reds, more than welcome hosts, held a dinner the night before the Palm Beach game on one of the Florida Keys, a raucous affair that involved a boat for transportation. Two sportswriters fell off the boat on the way home. Ping Bodie was carried off. The Babe returned under his own power, but with a fine liquid evening under his belt.