The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (29 page)

“At the beginning the Babe was quite sluggish and went to his work in a dull way,” Artie said. “Now he is more alert and keen—has more snap and pep; he kids and jokes with the boys, where as previously he had very little to say.”

The Babe publicly laid out his goals for the 1926 season in the
New York Graphic
on January 2. They were listed as his New Year’s resolutions:

To beat his world’s record of 59 home runs made in 1921.
To observe strictly the training rules laid down by the Yankees.
To hold his temper.
To be obedient.
To be thrifty—no more extravagance.
To take part in every one of the 154 games on the schedule.
To watch his diet carefully.
To conserve his health.
To do his share in bringing another pennant to New York.

The newspapers were filled with questions about the great rehabilitation work that was taking place at McGovern’s gym. Was this a publicity push for the Babe? Was this just another halfhearted, half-baked attempt to keep everyone quiet? Paul Gallico appeared at the gym to check on Ruth’s conditioning. He also was surprised. He played handball with the Babe.

“Ruth plays a handball the way he does a fly ball against a concrete wall,” Gallico wrote.

Get the ball first and worry about the wall afterward. He is amazingly fast on his feet. Baseball fans realize that for a big man he is speedy, but not until you get him inside a small enclosed court do you realize how he carries those 220 pounds about. He gets his hands on shots he had no business making. I slammed one ball past him when he was at mid-court and he chased the thing back and by the time he got to the rear wall he was right with it. True, he slammed head first into the wall so that the building shook, but what of it? He made the shot. And that seems to be all that counts when the Babe is playing.

A gag picture from the gym showed the famous client tooting on the saxophone. Paul Whiteman, a heavy man known as “the King of Jazz,” was on one side, sticking his fingers in his ears and making a face. John Philip Sousa, in shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, looking as if he had been rousted out of bed in a daze by a house fire, was on the other side. There is no record of the conversation, but Artie McGovern did have stories about all three men.

“Paul Whiteman was a surprise,” McGovern said. “Most people think he’s just a fat man. They don’t know he used to be an intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champ. Fast as lightning on his feet. He can beat Babe Ruth at handball.

“John Philip Sousa is a grand old man. In fine shape. When he came to me a couple of years ago, he couldn’t lift his left hand to his head. He had conducted his band with his right hand, holding the left across his chest, for so many years the muscles of the left side lost their function. He had to take a slow, painful, patient set of exercises, but he went through with it.”

The Babe was the story of the day. He wasn’t with the program long at the gym—six weeks total—but the slide was stopped. He lost 44 pounds. His waistline was reduced by eight and three-quarters inches. (He now had a 40-inch waist.) His blood pressure went up from 107 to 128. His pulse rate went down from 92 to 78. In the six weeks, he stopped his body’s sad decline and not only brought it back to what it once was but made it better. He was now the mature athlete hitting his prime.

The slide was done. Wait and see. He would spend time with Artie McGovern every winter for the rest of his playing career. He had discovered—or perhaps had been pushed by Ed Barrow or Christy Walsh or even Claire Hodgson to discover—a new approach to baseball training. To use a term that would not arrive until years later, he had a personal trainer.

Ballplayers of this time didn’t go to gyms and work out under the direction of fitness specialists. They didn’t work on specific muscle groups that might be a concern. Ballplayers mostly went home to their farms and planted their crops or raised their cattle. Ballplayers found off-season jobs. They needed the money. They needed the start toward second careers after their baseball lives were done. Ruth, because of his situation, because of the money he made, was one of the few ballplayers who could devote this extra time to preparing to play the game. It was the same situation the wealthy boxing champion traditionally enjoyed compared to the struggling challengers he would face. He was the full-time athlete, while the competition had to work a second job to survive. The champion had the advantage.

The caricature of the overweight fat man would remain, especially as Ruth grew older with an older man’s body, the weight harder to lose with each succeeding year, but the truth was that he had rediscovered the athlete at his core, the secret of his performance. His appearances always deceived. He was a big man with an oddly shaped body, naturally thick in the middle, but with slender legs and small ankles and wrists that gave him so much whip, torque, when he swung a bat. He had the body of a Thoroughbred racehorse.

He would not exactly become a leader of temperance and fitness movements, but he also would never squander his abilities the way he had during the 1925 season. He would listen. In his own way, he would listen. He was not a fat pig.

“Babe Ruth has to be kidded into everything,” Artie McGovern would say in later years. “If you suggest a thing, he’s against it. If I told him to lay off sweets and pastry, he’d go out and eat a half-dozen pies à la mode. So I don’t say anything. I look sad.

“‘What’s the trouble Artie?’ says the Babe.

“‘A good friend of mine died last night, Babe. Bill Brown. Diabetes.’

“‘What’s diabetes?’ says the Babe.

“‘Well, Bill Brown was a great big fellow. Always ate a lot of sweets and pastries. Gave him diabetes.’

“The Babe doesn’t say anything, but he begins to go light on the pie à la mode.”

Before he left for spring training, the new and improved Bambino showed up at the Yankees’ office at 42nd Street for a day and asked assorted staffers to punch him in the stomach. He also appeared at the third annual New York baseball writers’ dinner at the Hotel Commodore, an evening of sketches and laughs. He and Artie contributed to the fun when they became involved in a loud, comic argument about whether or not the Babe should have dessert and wound up sparring. One of the sketches also was devoted to the Babe. The title was “If the Babe Was the Manager.” He was portrayed making out the lineup card in the hotel lobby at three in the morning after returning from a night on the town. After much debate about the perfect nine to face the Cleveland Indians, he was told that the opponent was the St. Louis Browns. It was funny stuff.

He arrived in St. Petersburg on the morning of February 5, wearing a now-unneeded camel’s hair overcoat and muffler, Marshall Hunt in tow. A writer remarked that he looked very good and maybe had found the nearby Fountain of Youth.

“No,” the Babe replied, “I found Art McGovern’s gym.”

“I used to eat ten meals a day,” he added. “Every time I saw a frankfurter stand or a soda shop I had to stop. The trouble was I knew nothing about how to eat. A few months in the hospital and a few more in the gymnasium have taught me something.”

His workout plan now was to play 36 holes of golf per day. He and Hunt went straight from the train to the Jungle Club to take care of the first 18 holes on the schedule. Hunt reported that the Babe’s golf game needed some work. The big man—well, the not-as-big-as-he-was-before big man—shot an even 100.

“The orthodox construction of the modern golf course was a disastrous handicap to the Babe’s style of play today,” Hunt wrote. “Had the rough been directly in front of the tees and the fairway on both sides of the rough, Mr. Ruth assuredly would have had a much more satisfactory score. Yet, under a ripe Florida sun Ruth enjoyed a good workout, contracted a handsome case of sunburn and announced that his gross leakage through the hide was entirely gratifying.”

For the next two weeks, golfing partners were amazed most at what Ruth had—or didn’t have—for lunch between rounds. He would order a dish of ice cream. Or he would order tea and toast. End of order. This was the Babe? Where were the fat steaks and the Appalachian mounds of potatoes? He went deep-sea fishing on some days, once with a cigar-smoking Congregational minister. A minister? He returned for more golf.

When official workouts for the 1926 season began, he was tanned and healthy. He affected a new look with a rubber shirt that made him sweat more and a white eyeshade that soon had him compared to tennis player Helen Wills. He was more than friendly with Miller Huggins and filled with optimism. Everybody noticed the change that had arrived. The Babe was a professional athlete again—or perhaps for the first time—and ready for work.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

H
ELP HAD ARRIVED
without much notice during the 1925 season. Who sees a pinch hitter in the eighth inning of a 5–3 loss to the Washington Senators on June 1 when the King of Swat has returned from his sickbed? As every eye watched and each pencil recorded the slightest furrow in the brow of the wobbly Bambino, the fluctuations of labored breath after labored breath, a 21-year-old rookie went to the plate and hit for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger. He flied gently to left, and truth be told, even the Bam himself, pulled from the game in the sixth, back in the clubhouse, missed the first of 2,130 games Ludwig Heinrich Gehrig would play in succession for the New York Yankees.

Who knew?

He was a big kid, this Lou Gehrig, raw in the field, shy in personality. He had been around the scene for a little bit, a local phenomenon signed off the campus of Columbia University. He was young enough to have developed his approach to hitting in the glow of the Babe’s heroics, one of the first of a first generation of free-swinging imitators, kids who wanted to hit the ball far as much as they wanted to hit it often.

In June 1923, shortly after scout Paul Krichell convinced him with a $1,500 bonus to quit college, he went to the newly opened Yankee Stadium for a first workout. The story—maybe true, maybe not—was that he was told to grab a bat and the one he grabbed belonged to G. H. Ruth, which of course worked just fine. He spent that season and the next in Hartford, busting fences, loved by the local population, and was called up to the big club at the end of both years.

In the spring of ’25, he had made the team, then mostly sat on the bench until Huggins decided to shuffle some cards in a losing hand. The day after Ruth returned and Gehrig pinch-hit, the little manager inserted Gehrig at first in favor of Wally Pipp, put Howard Shanks at second in favor of Aaron Ward, and Benny Bengough behind the plate instead of Wally Schang.

The first baseman was the one who stuck for the next 15 seasons.

Krichell had called Ed Barrow after seeing Gehrig for the first time—a game at Rutgers in New Brunswick where he hit two homers—and said he had found “the next Babe Ruth,” but “next Babe Ruths” were being discovered everywhere. There seemed to be a “next Babe Ruth” in every town in America. There were young Babe Ruths, old Babe Ruths, female Babe Ruths, even animal Babe Ruths, dogs and cats and chickens that performed some feat of strength. John McGraw had tried out a guy from Texas named Moses Solomon, “the Jewish Babe Ruth,” “the Rabbi of Swat,” who lasted for only eight at-bats in 1923. The real Babe Ruth had been confronted with Cristobal Torriente during his misadventures in Havana. Torriente was known as “the Cuban Babe Ruth.”

“What’d you think?” sportswriters asked the real Ruth.

“Them greasers are punk ballplayers,” he replied. “Only a few of them are any good. The guy they calls after me because he made a few homers is as black as a ton and a half of coal in a dark cellar.”

Gehrig was the closest thing that would come along. His swing was different from the Ruth swing, tighter, more compact, but he held the bat down at the bottom, next to the knob, and swung hard. His home runs went on a different course, straight and direct as opposed to Ruth’s happy parabolas, but they landed in the same place.

Time would come when the two men would be compared in a thousand different areas, from the way they dressed to the way they spoke to the way they ate, drank, and made what each thought was merry, but that was the future. The new kid, the big kid, was good but not spectacular in his debut in 1925, with 20 homers and a .295 average, more than enough to keep his job. The legend would grow that Pipp had begged out with a headache, never to return, but this was not true. What did happen was that Pipp was beaned in batting practice a month later, suffered a fractured skull, played little the rest of the season, and was sold to the Cincinnati Reds in February for $7,500. Gehrig owned the job outright when he went to training camp in 1926.

“Lou Gehrig was sort of a model American young man,” Waite Hoyt said. “He was sort of a Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy…. He was not very popular at first with the Yankees because, with his teammates, he was one of two or three guys who just lived in a world of their own. He was not a carouser or a nightclub guy or a fellow who sought out entertainment. He was shy, a family guy, in a sense, with his mother.”

A look into the Yankee future had come toward the end of the 1925 season, lost this time in the attention paid to Ruth’s recent return from tabloid exile and the inattention paid to a seventh-place ball club. On September 10, in the fourth inning at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, A’s pitcher Dolly Gray surrendered a leadoff home run to Bob Meusel, a line shot to the center-field bleachers. Ruth, the next batter, pounded the ball over the right-field fence. Gray took hold of his third new baseball of the inning, delivered it to Gehrig, and watched it go over the right-field fence, farther and deeper than the first two shots. This was the first time since 1902 that three major league batters in a row had hit home runs.

The Babe now had a playmate.

The Yankees opened the 1926 season in Boston on April 14, a bone-cold, frozen day at Fenway Park with dignitaries shivering in their overcoats and 12,000 fans in the stands. This was the batting order:

Mark Koenig, shortstop

Earle Combs, center field

Lou Gehrig, first base

Babe Ruth, right field

Bob Meusel, left field

Tony Lazzeri, second base

Joe Dugan, third base

Pat Collins, catcher

Bob Shawkey, pitcher

Gehrig was far from the only change. Only Ruth, Meusel, and Joe Dugan, who had been picked up in the middle of the 1923 season, were left in the everyday lineup from the World Championship team of only three years earlier. First baseman Pipp, shortstop Everett Scott, center fielder Whitey Witt, and catcher Wally Schang all had been sent elsewhere. Second baseman Aaron Ward, whose hitting had been in steady decline and bottomed out at .246 a year earlier, was locked onto the bench.

The reformed Ruth—okay, the semireformed, kind of reformed Ruth—was now a senior man in the operation. It was the start of his seventh season in pinstripes, and only the fading Shawkey had been around longer. Meusel had arrived at the same time as Ruth, but everyone else had been brought aboard to fill out a team picture that had the face of the Sultan of Swat in the middle.

Koenig and Lazzeri were the biggest gambles. How many teams open a season with a rookie double-play combination? Koenig was a nervous, error-prone shortstop from San Francisco who had been obtained from St. Paul in the American Association in the middle of the ’25 season. He had replaced the light-hitting Wanninger, who had replaced Scott. Koenig had played 25 games at the end of the year, showing an impressive arm that could compensate for his other shortcomings. Lazzeri, at second, hopefully was a star in the making.

He was a California version of “the next Babe Ruth,” a slender, deceptive power hitter also from San Francisco. Five feet 11, maybe 160 pounds, he had put together amazing numbers at Salt Lake City in the Pacific Coast League in 1925, hitting a record 60 home runs, knocking in a record 222 runs, and scoring a record 202 runs. The numbers were suspect because the PCL schedule ran for 200 games and the ball flew in a tiny park at high elevation in Salt Lake, but they couldn’t be ignored. His obvious strength came from working as a full-time boilermaker with his father from the time he was 15 years old.

Ed Barrow had paid $55,000 plus three players for Lazzeri. The 22-year-old kid never had seen a big league game, never had been east of the Mississippi River. Would he be overwhelmed? A further complication was that he was epileptic. Some teams had stayed away from him for that reason, wondering what the effects of the disease would be. Other teams had stayed away because he was Italian, a minority not in favor with the white, old-line managers of the game. Was there room for an Italian epileptic? Everybody knew his condition and watched.

“He’d be standing in front of the mirror, combing his hair,” Koenig said years later, describing Lazzeri’s epilepsy. “Suddenly the comb would fly out of his hand and hit the wall.

“One morning in Chicago he had a fit in the clubhouse. He fell onto the ground and started foaming. I didn’t know what to do. I ran out the door without a stitch of clothing to get Hoyt, who was a mortician in the off-season. I figured he’d know something.”

With Koenig, Lazzeri, and Gehrig in the lineup, three-fourths of the infield would be handled by virtual rookies. Third base also was a question. Dugan, a terrific fielder and a solid bat, was now 29 years old. He’d missed much of the ’25 season after knee surgery. Could he come back? His lifestyle was closest to the Babe’s. The same questions that surrounded the Babe surrounded him.

The catcher, Pat Collins, had also been picked up from St. Paul. He had major league experience with the Browns, but they had shuffled him back to the minors. He mostly won the Yankees’ starting job by default. Huggins had slated defensive-minded, strong-throwing Benny Bengough from Buffalo for the spot, but Bengough showed up for spring training with a sore arm. He was strong-throwing Benny Bengough no more.

The outfield was more than solid with Ruth, Meusel, and fleet Earle Combs in center. A college graduate and farmer from Kentucky, Combs had arrived in 1923, missed most of ’24 with a broken leg, and developed quietly in the midst of the chaos in ’25. He was a throwback to the John McGraw School of Baseball, graceful, pesky, a perfect setup man for Ruth and Meusel and Gehrig at the plate, a perfect defensive standout between two large-sized outfielders. He didn’t smoke, chew, spit, drink, or cuss. He read the Bible in his free time.

The pitching was familiar, with the hard-throwing Hoyt, veteran Sam Jones, and Herb Pennock, Ruth’s friend, the master of three different curveballs, each one curvier than the last. The big pitching addition was Urban Shocker, picked up from the Browns in the deal involving Everett Scott. Shocker was another veteran, one of those grandfathered spitballers, very tough to hit. He also had a medical condition, a problem with a valve in his heart, so serious that he couldn’t lie down; he had to sleep sitting or standing every night. He would sit up for the entire trip in the Pullman cars. How long could he last?

This was the basic team, pretty much built for the years ahead but playing in the present. The preseason prognosticators saw a lot of work here, hard and almost impossible work. The prognosticators did not prognosticate good things.

“The Yankees are dawdling through the gestures of spring training in St. Petersburg, paying the least possible attention to Miller Huggins, who reciprocates their disinterest and pays the least possible attention to them,” Westbrook Pegler wrote. “They will start home a few weeks hence, about as well organized and disciplined as a panic.”

“Despite reports to the contrary, the Yankees are not the worst ball club in the world,” Ford Frick wrote in the
New York World
in March from St. Petersburg. “They look a bit better than the Boston Red Sox or the Cleveland Indians. Over a long schedule they probably would finish ahead of Saskatoon and Medicine Hat. But finishing ahead of Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit and other American League clubs is quite another question.”

Frick, who went on to praise the revitalized Ruth as “the one largest asset in a field of probable liabilities,” was joined in this thought by most other writers, even by Miller Huggins. The Yankees manager cautioned that the excitement around this team would come in two or three years.

Then the games began.

Sloppy at first, comical in two losses to the Boston Braves by 18–4 and 16–2 scores, the Yankees finished up their time in St. Petersburg by winning their final six exhibitions. They then went on the annual jaunt north, this time with the Brooklyn Robins, the forerunners to the Dodgers, and as the teams hit the now-familiar stops of the Babe’s tour of sickness a year earlier, Knoxville and Asheville and all the rest, a powerhouse grew daily in front of small-town eyes. Just like that. Koenig could play, and Lazzeri, indeed, could hit, and Dugan had recovered, and Gehrig certainly could hit, and Meusel and Combs and…Ruth was back! Every day Robins manager Uncle Wilbert Robinson rolled out an array of pitchers, and every day this new lineup pinned their ears back. Twelve games were played on the trip, ending with a game at the Stadium. Twelve games, all twelve, were won by the Yanks, ending with a 14–7 romp at the Stadium.

“The 18 straight games the Yankees won during their exhibition campaign…have caused the experts to look a second time at the array Miller Huggins has assembled,” Richards Vidmer wrote in the
Times
. “At first it did not seem the Yankees would be even on the outside looking in; now it is highly probable they will be well on the inside of the first division.”

“The Yankees have the greatest hitting team that has ever been assembled under one tent,” Wilbert Robinson said more forcefully at the end of his team’s succession of shellackings.