The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (18 page)

“True, he couldn’t be elected president,” the
L.A. Times
declared. “His popularity would defeat him; for to put him in the White House would be to take him out of baseball.”

The Babe, heroic as he might have been, also continued to make his obligatory motor vehicle headlines. The fact that he now was driving a maroon 12-cylinder Packard that looked like a rocket ship and sounded like a fuel-burning calliope brought a certain interest from law authorities. The players called the car “the Ghost of Riverside Drive.” He would pull up at the clubhouse, half the time missing a stolen radiator cap, steam and water shooting into the sky. He was as inconspicuous as a brass band.

Stopped for speeding in April—doing 27 mph up Broadway—he appeared contritely before Magistrate Fredrick House in traffic court, pleaded guilty, and was fined $25. Everybody laughed. Stopped again in June—this time doing 26 mph on Riverside Drive in the early hours of the morning—the reception was not as pleasant when he stood before Magistrate House again. The magistrate fined him $100 and sentenced him to a day in jail.

“Mr. Ruth, you were before me on April 27 on a similar charge,” Magistrate House said. “I am sorry to see you back here, for I told you that you would have to answer as well as any other person. I find that anyone coming before me on April 27 and then again on June 8 is not showing proper respect for the law.”

The day in jail began immediately. The Bambino was not prepared for this.

He was fingerprinted and found himself in a cell with three chauffeurs, all convicted on the same charge. They were even worse repeat offenders than the Babe and had been sentenced to five days in jail. A fourth chauffeur, Chester Williams, also sentenced to a single day, also was in the cell. He later reported on the activity. He said that a game of craps was started quickly by the other three chauffeurs. The Babe was not a participant. Neither was Chester Williams.

“They seen that I had some money on me when I was going to pay my fine, and they wanted me to shoot with them,” Williams said. “They didn’t have 50 cents between them, and they wanted me to go up against that with my roll of bills. I told them nothing doing. Then they abused me something terrible. They pinched me and kicked me and called me names. There were some roughs in the cell, I can tell you. Mr. Ruth was the only gentleman among them.”

A single day in jail did not last 24 hours for any prisoner. Under court rules, the day ended at 4:00
P
.
M
. Ruth was sentenced at 11:30, so actually he had to serve only four and a half hours. The Yankees were playing the Indians at 3:30 at the Polo Grounds, so his goal was to leave the Mulberry Street jail and hurry to the game.

The dice-rolling chauffeurs were taken to the Tombs at 1:30, and he and Williams were left alone. Ruth mostly stayed in a corner of the cell because he had spotted a photographer on a third-floor fire escape across the street, trying to get a picture that captured both baseball star and prison bars in the same frame. He and Williams could hear the photographer’s boss giving instructions.

“Do you see anything?” the boss shouted from the street.

“I see a shadow,” the photographer replied.

“Snap the shadow,” the boss said.

Ruth was allowed to have his Yankees uniform and lunch brought to the jail. He ate the lunch and put on the uniform inside the cell. He then put on his street clothes over the uniform. He told Williams, “I’m going to run like hell to get to the game. Keeping you this late makes a speeder out of you.” At 4:00, he started running. He was released, cut through 20 photographers, two movie cameras, and an estimated crowd of 1,000 on the street, jumped into the Packard, described by the Associated Press as “a maroon torpedo,” started the engine, sent the crowd scampering, and hurried uptown.

Magistrate House remarked that the King of Home Runs was the second king he had put in jail for speeding in a week. He also had sentenced Frisco Rooney, the King of Jazz, the first famous dancer of the Jazz Age, to a day in jail. The theater where Frisco was appearing had protested that he would miss the matinee. Magistrate House said rules were rules. The Babe was lucky. His matinee started later.

Reporters tried to follow him to the Polo Grounds, but he lost them in Central Park. It was estimated that he covered nine miles in 19 minutes, which meant he had to be speeding again. He was on the field at 4:40 and walked to lead off the sixth inning. He then stole second, but died on the base paths. He batted again in the eighth, but grounded out. The Yanks scored twice in the ninth to win the game.

He then drove home.

Events like this caused the newest pitcher, the 21-year-old Hoyt, heading toward a 19–13 season, to stare at Ruth, to study him. Everybody on the Yankees—probably everybody who ever saw him—stared at Ruth sometimes, but Hoyt never would stop. He was fascinated with the big man. He felt a force, a strength emanating from Ruth, a predestination to greatness, that he never had felt from any other ballplayer, or any other person. He would struggle for a lifetime to put it all into words and was contemptuous of anyone else who tried, feeling that all attempts fell shallow and short.

“The first time I ever saw Babe Ruth was in the Red Sox clubhouse in July of 1919,” he said years later. “I’d just come to the team. He’s sitting there, and he didn’t look like a monster nor anything, but he had black curly hair that dripped down over his forehead like there was spilled ink on his forehead, and he was utterly unbelievable.”

Ed Barrow, who took the new pitcher around the room, made the introductions. The new kid…meet Babe. Babe…meet the new kid. Typical stuff.

“Pretty young to be in the big league, aren’t you, kid?” the big man said, casually looking upward from his locker.

“Yep,” Hoyt replied. “Same age you were when you came up, Babe.”

Hoyt realized by the end of his sentence he was talking to the back of the black-ink head. The Babe had gone back to consider whatever world problems he was considering. There was only so much interest to be spent on some new arrival. The conversation was done. Hoyt, even years later, loved every millisecond of it. In the succeeding seasons, he would become both enemy and friend of Ruth. He never would become best friend—there never really was a best friend—but he would be around the table.

“There was nothing like Ruth ever existed in this game of baseball,” he said. “I remember one time we were playing the White Sox in Boston in 1919, and he hit a home run off Lefty Williams over the left-field fence in the ninth inning and won the game. It was majestic. It soared. We watched it and wondered, ‘How can a guy hit a ball like that?’ It was to the opposite field and off a left-handed pitcher, and it was an incredible feat. That was the dead ball days, remember: the ball normally didn’t carry. We were playing a doubleheader, and that was the first game, and the White Sox did not go into the clubhouse between games. They stood out there and sat on our bench and talked about the magnificence of that home run.”

The great hits fascinated Hoyt. The outrageous life fascinated Hoyt, the don’t-give-a-shit freedom of it, the nonstop, pell-mell charge into excess. How did a man drink so much and never get drunk? How could he keep juggling, 24 hours a day, so many balls in the air, never dropping one of them? The thread of humanity in the Babe fascinated Hoyt, his ability to be mostly nice to people, especially ordinary people, even though they arrived in long lines and constant bunches. The innate intelligence fascinated Hoyt, the supposedly dumb man doing a lot of not-so-dumb things. How did he do it? Where did everything come from? The puzzle of Babe Ruth never was dull, no matter how many times Hoyt picked up the pieces and stared at them.

After games he would follow the crowd to the Babe’s suite. No matter what the town, the beer would be iced and the bottles would fill the bathtub. Take a beer. Watch. Watch everything.

“First of all, we’d all take showers after the ball game, so we didn’t ever use the bathtub because we’d all be clean after the game,” Hoyt said. “Ruth would order a couple of cases of beer, and he’d have the tub filled with ice. This was before we went to the ballpark, and when we got back the beer was iced and cold, and he’d take the position in a chair over in the corner of the room, over on one side, and he was the King. Believe me, there were some nights there’d be 100, 150 people pass through that room. It’s a wonder he could play ball.”

Hoyt became the keeper of anecdotes, the one who remembered best. This was only the beginning of the stories.

The idea that the Babe was superhuman—promoted in word, song, and home run measurements everywhere now—was given a scientific imprimatur in the first weeks of September. If the everyday observer couldn’t believe his eyes, ears, or the newspaper reports, a couple of psychologists from Columbia University named Albert Johansen and Joseph Holmes were ready to take the stand.

Hugh Fullerton, a sportswriter who had been at the forefront of exposing the Black Sox business, dragged the Babe to the psychologists’ laboratory directly after a game in the Polo Grounds. The Big Bam was still in uniform, fresh from yet another home run, as he submitted to three hours of tests. No mention was made of compensation. The hand of Christy Walsh no doubt was involved.

“Tonight you go to college with me,” Fullerton said he told the Babe. “You’re going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret.”

“Who wants to know it?” the Babe replied.

“I want to know it. And so do several thousand fans. We want to know why it is that one man has achieved a unique batting skill like yours—just why
you
can slam the ball as nobody else in the world can.”

Psychological testing, relatively new, had gained a measure of popular acceptance during the world war. The U.S. Army had used two well-known intelligence tests, the Alpha for men who could read, the Beta for men who couldn’t, to help decide who was or wasn’t officer material and what fields best suited each enlistee. Inflated claims of great success had been published. It seemed natural that the Babe should be tested.

He was first fitted with a pneumatic tube around his chest that was connected to a pressure device, handed a bat attached to wires that ran to a Hipp chronoscope, and then asked to swing. He was handed a rod and asked to place it inside a succession of holes as many times as possible in a designated amount of time. He was shown a sequence of dots and letters and shapes and asked to remember them. He was asked to tap a metal plate with an electric stylus as fast as possible.

In all of these activities, he was animated and absorbed. These were games, competition. He was interested. He also was very good at these games. Or so it seemed.

“The tests revealed the fact that Ruth is 90 per cent efficient compared with a human average of 60 per cent,” the sportswriter Fullerton reported in his
Popular Science Monthly
article. “That his eyes are about 12 per cent faster than those of the average human being. That his ears function at least 10 per cent faster than those of the ordinary man. That his nerves are steadier than those of 499 out of 500 persons. That in attention and quickness of perception he rated one and a half times the human average. That in intelligence, as demonstrated by the quickness and accuracy of understanding, he is approximately 10 per cent above normal.”

The headline on Fullerton’s story was “Why Babe Ruth Is Greatest Home-Run Hitter.” The
New York Times
, reporting the tests on Sunday, September 11, on the front page, had a headline that said, “Ruth Supernormal, So He Hits Home Runs.” The results in the lab seemed to confirm the results in the Polo Grounds.

A Bowdoin College professor, Alfred H. Fuchs, would question a lot of the methodology in the
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
77 years later. He would point out that the control group for the tests was mostly telephone and telegraph operators, not elite athletes. He would point out that the conclusions reached by Fullerton, not the two psychologists, tended to make them more dramatic. He would not debate the basic conclusion.

Was Babe Ruth good? Well, yes, he was. He was even good for psychology.

“The report that Ruth performed in superior fashion on psychological tests may have accomplished more at the time to validate psychological tests in the popular mind than the tests themselves did to demonstrate Ruth’s demonstrated superiority in the batter’s box,” Fuchs wrote.

The two most interesting observations from the test were buried in Fullerton’s text. First, it was determined that Ruth swung with the most power and could make the ball travel farthest when it was thrown to the low, outside corner of the plate. Second, he did not breathe during his entire swing. The psychologists said that if he kept breathing while he swung, he could generate more power. This was a frightening prospect.

Working without the pneumatic tube and the wires to his bat and the Hipp chronometer or whatever it was, the Babe was doing quite well outside the laboratory too. He banged out his 25th homer on July 15, the 138th of his career, which made him baseball’s all-time leading home run hitter at the age of 26. He fell behind his 1920 “pace” in early August, but whacked two on August 8 to get back on track. In a sidelight, an exhibition game in Cincinnati, he whacked the first ball pitched to him over the center-field fence, which never had been done, then came back later in the game to knock a ball into the right-field bleachers, which also never had been done.

There was no more talk of a “fluke” about this home run business. F. C. Lane, in
Baseball
magazine, talked instead about the amazing change his favorite game was witnessing.

“Every owner of the 16 big league clubs is united with his manager in the prayer that somehow, somewhere, he can dig up a player who can remotely parallel Babe Ruth,” Lane wrote. “Babe has not only smashed all records, he has smashed the long-accepted system of things in the batting world and on the ruins of that system, he has erected another system, or rather lack of system, whose dominant quality is brute force.”