The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (20 page)

The Yankees had rearranged their roster again during the winter, going back to Mr. Frazee and his discount store in Boston. They picked up shortstop Everett Scott and pitchers Sam Jones and Joe Bush for Roger Peckinpaugh, Jack Quinn, Rip Collins, and Bill Piercy, that barnstorming pitcher. They also picked up solid center fielder Whitey Witt for cash as part of another fire sale by A’s owner Connie Mack. If anything, they looked stronger than they had a year earlier, only needing the return of Ruth and Meusel to fill out the lineup.

Opening day was in Washington with President Warren G. Harding throwing out the first ball. Ruth sat in the grandstand next to Huston and American League president Ban Johnson for the game, a 5–2 loss to the Senators. The big man was described as restless. His stretch in the slammer had now begun.

He broke up the waiting that followed with an occasional appearance in an exhibition—he clanged out a homer against Jack Dunn’s Orioles on April 16—and sometimes showed up for morning practices before games and more often didn’t. He also bought a house and had his tonsils removed.

The house was back in Sudbury, back in Massachusetts, actually a farm, the old Sylvester Perry place, built in 1737. It had 12 rooms and sat on 155 acres of tillable land, woodland, and water, which was Pratt’s Pond. A barn, garage, and henhouse were in the back. The price, according to local rumor, was $12,000. Ruth appeared on April 29, driven from Boston by a chauffeur, to take charge. He named the estate “Home Plate Farm” and said it was going to be a working agricultural operation. He told a photographer to save the slides of the pictures he took so he could compare them to the place after all of the improvements were made. The move-in date, Ruth said, would be after the end of the season, although “the missus” would be up in a month to buy some new furniture.

“I thought the place was furnished,” a reporter said.

“Oh, we’ll buy some more,” Ruth said.

The mention of “the missus” brought Helen back into the scene. The fog had descended heavy over her. No public mention had been made since she’d flown over the second game of the World Series in a blimp and dropped three good-luck baseballs down to the Polo Grounds in a fine Christy Walsh production. Did she go with the Babe on the barnstorming tour? The vaudeville tour? Fog. She was mentioned again when the Babe checked into St. Vincent’s Hospital to have his tonsils removed on May 4. Helen also checked in to have an operation, but “the nature of her ailment was not revealed.” This was one of a number of trips to the hospital for her, none of the ailments ever revealed.

She once told another ballplayer’s wife that she had had four miscarriages. True? Not true? Not revealed. She also told the ballplayer’s wife she had graduated from Smith College. Not true.

The Babe was discharged first and fully recovered in time for his big return on May 20, coming back as a man with more money, fewer tonsils, and a house that he didn’t have when he left. The condition of Helen, still in the hospital, was not revealed. She didn’t return home until the day before her husband returned to the field.

He was at the races that day. Jack Dunn ran into him at Jamaica Race Track in New York. Dunn’s Orioles had been rained out of a game against the Newark Bears.

“How are you doing?” Dunn asked.

“Couldn’t be better,” the Babe said. “It’s been a long suspension for me; it seemed like a thousand years.”

“Any luck with the horses?”

“Pretty good day yesterday,” the Babe said. “I cleaned up a little more than $18,000.”

Dunn then watched the kid he pulled out of an orphanage proceed to bet $5,000 on the first race, $2,000 to win and $3,000 to place. He then bet $3,000 to win in the second.

The return to glory on May 20 was glorious until the game began. A crowd of 38,000, easily the largest of the season, packed the Polo Grounds. Ruth received a silver loving cup filled with dirt collected from the diamond at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys by some fans from Baltimore, a floral horseshoe from the National Vaudeville Association, and a silver bat from Harry Weber, his vaudeville agent. He then, alas, also received a succession of dipping spitballs from Urban Shocker, one of the pitchers grandfathered into spitball legality, and went 0-for-4 in an 8–2 loss to the St. Louis Browns. Bob Meusel fared no better, also going hitless.

The day was a disappointment in the end.

“No scientist has ever figured out the purpose of tonsils in the human system,” Heywood Broun suggested. “Maybe they have something to do with home runs.”

The odd, shortened season began. The Yankees had been doing fine without their exiled stars, shooting out to first place, 22 and 11, two games in front of the Browns. Whitey Witt had been a hitting machine, hitting better than he ever had in his life. Now, “the Albino must move over for the Bambino,” as one writer said. The great man was back, and he was making all this money, and the team was going well, and he had better do something spectacular.

He didn’t.

The pressure to perform, coupled with the layoff, had him flailing at pitches. He was booed by the big crowd on that first day back for failing to catch up with Shocker’s spitballs, and the boos increased as he struggled through his first five days with one home run and an .093 batting average. This was the first time in his career he had been booed daily, and it was obvious by his actions that he did not like it. He often tipped his cap in sarcasm to the booing fans.

In his sixth game back, he whacked a single in the second inning that he tried to stretch into a double. He was called out by umpire George Hildebrand. Reacting to the call, Ruth jumped up and threw dirt in Hildebrand’s face. Reacting to the dirt, Hildebrand threw Ruth out of the game. The boos came from everywhere. Ruth gave the sarcastic tip of the cap, seemed to be in control, but when he reached the dugout, he could make out the words that were being shouted. He particularly could make out the words being shouted by two Pullman car conductors.

He leaped the fence and went into the stands to challenge one of them. The conductor bolted back a few rows and continued to shout. Ruth shouted back, restrained gently by a few fans. Someone shouted, “Hit the big stiff.” The conductor continued to move backward. Ruth finally went back on the roof of the dugout, where he challenged anyone in the crowd who wanted to come down and fight. With no challengers, minus his cap, he jumped back onto the field. He picked up the cap, along with his glove, and started to walk to the clubhouse, which at the Polo Grounds was located beyond center field. The boos and the jeers followed him all the way.

“They can boo and hoot me all they want,” he said when reporters found him back at the Ansonia. “That doesn’t matter to me. But when a fan calls me insulting names from the grandstand and becomes abusive, I don’t intend to stand for it. This fellow today, whoever he was, called me ‘a low-down bum’ and other names that got me mad, and when I went after him he ran.”

The tone for the season somehow had been established. Luckily for Ruth, Landis was not part of this judicial process and Babe was fined only $200 and given a warning by American League president Johnson, but he was off in a different, contentious situation that no one had predicted. The picture of the hero, hanging so well in the living rooms of America during the past two or three years, had been knocked askew during his seven weeks on the sidelines. Everything seemed off-kilter.

The missing seven weeks, 33 games, left Ruth with no chance to reach the standards that had made him famous. He was 11 home runs behind surprising outfielder Ken Williams of the surprising Browns in the home run chase before the chase even started. He had little chance to catch Williams and, more importantly, no chance to catch himself.

He had blustered during the seven weeks that he thought he still might hit 60 home runs, but two weeks of reality and opposition pitching convinced him that was impossible. He admitted the fact in Chicago on June 7. He said he still thought he had a chance to pass Williams and National League leader Rogers Hornsby, but this was hope more than certainty. He was caught in a hole, and people were yelling at him and didn’t seem to understand.

The afternoon of June 12 at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis described Ruth’s situation as well as anything. Williams hit his 15th homer, best in the majors, and the Browns won, 7–1, and Ruth…well, this was the way he was struggling.

The Browns pitched a rookie, a 21-year-old left-hander named Hub Pruett, fresh from the University of Missouri, who quickly had been nicknamed Shucks for his unflappable nature. As a kid, Shucks had idolized Christy Mathewson, the master of the “fadeaway.” The pitch, later known as the screwball, was basically a curveball in reverse, thrown with an unnatural twist of the wrist and elbow. Mathewson was a right-hander, but Pruett figured the pitch would work for a left-hander too. Shucks, reaching the majors, had developed a pretty good screwball.

Every hitter in history, no matter how successful, comes across a pitcher and a pitch he cannot handle. Shucks was that pitcher for Ruth. He had faced the Bambino in relief in May, struck him out with the screwball and walked him, and now as a starter struck him out three times and walked him once. In July, meeting again, Pruett would strike him out three more times. In August, bases loaded, nobody out, Ruth at the plate, Shucks would come out of the bullpen and strike him out again. In the first 12 times he faced Ruth, that was nine strikeouts, two walks, and a tapper back to the pitcher for an out.

In September, Pruett already had developed a sore arm from throwing the pitch. He tried his one—and only—curveball against Ruth. Ruth deposited the ball into the right-field stands, crossed the plate, picked up a straw hat someone had thrown from the stands, and wore it with a smile back to the dugout. Everybody knew what the celebration meant.

“At the ballpark during the year we passed each other without speaking,” Pruett, who finished with a career 29–48 record, said years later. “But every once in a while he would do something that would give me a kick. He would wink at me.”

The three-strikeout game in June set the Yankees off on an eight-game losing streak, dropping them two and a half games behind the Browns. They were 13 and 16 since the return of Ruth and Meusel to the lineup. This was the great hero? He also drew a second suspension in the eighth successive loss for running in from left field to argue with umpire Bill Dineen over a play at second base. Dineen threw him out of the game, and that night Ban Johnson suspended him for three games because “my reports show that Ruth used vulgar and vicious language, calling Umpire Dineen one of the vilest names known.” (The mind searches, of course, to figure out what that name would be.)

After batting practice the next day, Ruth approached the umpire again and made the situation worse. He told Dineen, “If you ever put me out of a game again, I’ll fix you so you will never umpire again, even if they put me out of baseball for life.” Dineen did not like this. Ruth also told him, “You’re yellow,” and challenged him to a fight. Dineen also did not like this. He took off his mask and started to go under the stands with Ruth, but was restrained by Cleveland Indians Tris Speaker and Steve O’Neill. Ban Johnson did not like any of this. He increased Ruth’s suspension to five games and said he would suspend Ruth for the entire summer if necessary.

This at last brought the Bambino to contrition. He apologized to Dineen the next day in the umpires’ locker room, swore off on more arguments, and sat on a table and tried to figure out what was happening. Why had the picture on the wall been knocked sideways? He couldn’t understand.

“Some persons are saying that I welcome the suspensions because it gives me an alibi for not equaling the home run record of last year,” he said. “This is ridiculous, as I realize that is impossible. Others claim I have a swelled head. My friends know different. I want to be in there every minute because I love to play baseball.”

“It’s no use,” he continued on the field to a reporter, in between turns at the plate during batting practice. “They’re all after me. If I’m not wanted in organized baseball, all they have to do is tell me and I will step down and out.”

He stepped into the cage, hit a couple of balls out of Dunn Field, stepped back out, and continued. Why was he being singled out? Everyone had yelled at Dineen. He stepped back into the cage, hit another shot over the wall. Stepped out, said all the breaks seemed to be going against the Yankees, but things would improve. Stepped back in, hit a ball that was as long as any home run ever seen at Dunn Field. Stepped out.

“Tell my ‘friends’ about the four balls that have gone over the fence,” he finished, heading back to the dugout.

The season was played out in this same discordant key. The Yankees won the pennant, of course, rallying, winning two out of three in a big series in St. Louis in the middle of September and then going on a six-game win streak to outlast the Browns by a game, and Ruth finished with 35 home runs, four behind Ken Williams and two behind Tilly Walker of the A’s—not bad for four-fifths of a season—but nothing came easy. One brushfire, just about to be extinguished, seemed to ignite another.

This edition of the team—ten different players on the roster from the 1921 pennant winners—was filled with contentious veterans, devotees of the speakeasy and the racetrack in their off-hours, no-nonsense hardball players on the field. They didn’t pay much attention to manager Miller Huggins, didn’t pay much attention to anyone.

The Colonels went so far as to hire a private detective to follow the team around on the road and report back on what he learned. Using the name of Kelly, he quickly infiltrated the after-dark scene, became friends with the players by buying them shirts and neckties and whatever, and they brought him to a ham and cabbage dinner Ruth had arranged at a brewery in Joliet, Illinois. Somewhere in the night, Kelly posed everyone for a famous beer-filled photograph—smile!—which he brought back to the Colonels as exhibit A, the star right fielder directly in the middle.

Huggins confronted the players involved, one by one, in his hotel room in Washington. Ruth was the last visitor. Huggins asked Ruth why he always was moving, running, staying up late, finding himself in all of these situations.