The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (30 page)

The rebuilding process had taken exactly one spring.

In the chilly opener at Fenway, the reconfigured Bombers from the Bronx outlasted the Red Sox, 12–11. At the end of April, they put together an eight-game winning streak to sit easily in first place with a 13–3 record. At the end of May, they put together a 16-game winning streak for a 30–9 record. They cruised through the season, withstanding a little late charge by the Indians in September, and won the pennant by three games. They won 91 games, lost 63.

The Babe hit .372, had 47 home runs and 146 RBI, and caught a baseball dropped from an airplane that flew over Mitchell Field on Long Island. (It took seven attempts for the Babe to catch the ball. He was a dizzy, sweaty mess by the end.) Huggins told him to concentrate on catching baseballs hit by humans, not thrown out of airplanes. The king was back on his throne.

The new life, the new team, all seemed to fit together for the big man in the summer of 1926. He had settled in and settled down. Not a lot, understand. The “mind of a 15-year-old” that Ban Johnson mentioned was still there, but this was the 15-year-old who finally had figured out that if he stayed after school every day he was going to miss a lot of fun. The concept of consequences had arrived and been acknowledged. Give up a little to gain more. That finally made sense.

He moved back to the Ansonia, but spent more time at Claire’s apartment on West 79th Street than he did in his suite. The farm was sold in the middle of the season, a worry off his list. Helen and Dorothy, both in Boston, would visit his hotel when the Yankees played at Fenway Park, but mostly were out of the everyday equation. He still chased women with a hound-dog sense of urgency—teammates talked about how he and a waitress had disappeared behind a sand dune in the first weeks at St. Petersburg—and still ate and drank prodigious amounts, and still stayed up later than just about anybody else, but the frenzy of it all was missing. He had developed a better, modified pace. He even seemed to dress better, leaving some of the more flamboyant outfits in the closet. The dissipation mostly had dissipated.

“After 1925, he was a good guy,” Waite Hoyt said. “The ballplayers thought the world of him. He was well regarded by the ballplayers.”

He still had the obligatory court appearances in 1926. There was a mix-up in Massachusetts about unpaid state taxes. (He claimed he was a New York resident, not a Sudbury resident.) There was a speeding ticket, doing 33 miles per hour again on Riverside Drive, settled with a $25 fine, no jail time, because he had been clean for two years. There was even the obligatory fistfight with a teammate, this time with the rookie Koenig. Ruth badgered the shortstop about some errors during an exhibition in Baltimore. Koenig had heard enough and jumped the big man with a flurry of punches back in the dugout. Ruth then held Koenig’s arms back until other players intervened.

None of these things seemed to matter as much. They were symbolic of nothing, over, done. Normal. The most startling difference of the new life was Ruth’s relationship with Huggins. The nicknames and the defiance were gone. The players who liked the little manager, who liked him very much, were the ones who listened to him. Ruth now listened to him.

“Huggins was sort of a fatherly guy,” Waite Hoyt said. “He was sort of a baseball father and sort of a psychiatrist. He had a couch in his office, and I was on that couch more than I was on the field. I was always being lectured, because he always said to me, ‘You should lead the league every year with your stuff, should lead the league, but you don’t because you don’t concentrate. You have friends in the stands and you’re worrying whether your friends are there or not. You don’t concentrate.’ And it would go on for hours.”

A moment came during the season when Huggins wanted to attack an umpire for some call. Ruth held him back. Hoyt loved that picture, remembered it for years. Ruth now worked with Huggins, and Huggins worked with Ruth. The father-psychiatrist had made his breakthrough.

Instead of hiring a private detective to follow the slugger when the Yankees visited Chicago this year, Barrow and Huggins found a more subtle approach. Ruth came to the lobby of the Del Prado Hotel one night, dressed and perfumed, ready for a taste of Windy City decadence, and found Brother Matthias from long-ago St. Mary’s Industrial School sitting in a chair near the elevator.

An international Eucharistic Congress was being held in the city, and the Yankees had paid the bill to bring the good brother west. He invited Ruth to dinner, and what could the big man say? They ate, the brother gave counsel about life and responsibility, and they were back at the hotel by 11 o’clock. Goodnight, George. Goodnight, Brother. Who could run the streets after a night with Brother Matthias?

The net effect of everything—the better conditioning, the quieter life, all of it—was the wonderful season. In addition to the 47 homers, the .372 batting average, the Babe had 10 sacrifice bunts. He was part of team success. The nickname “Murderers’ Row” had been given to the Yankees’ lineup back in 1921, but never really stuck. It did now, and there was no doubt about who was the most efficient murderer.

The Bam was first in the major leagues in home runs (47) by an incredible margin: Al Simmons was second in the American League with 19, and Hack Wilson was at the top of the NL with 21. (Lazzeri had 18, Gehrig 16.) He had the same kind of margin in RBI, his 145 far ahead of George Burns from Cleveland (114) in the AL and Jim Bottomley’s 120 in the NL. If his batting average had been five points higher, catching the .378 of Detroit’s Heinie Manush, he would have been a Triple Crown winner for all of baseball. He would have been the easy MVP if rules at the time didn’t state that a player could win the award only once. (Burns of the Indians was given the honor by default.)

As the Yankees went into the 1926 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, he was again the center of all attention. The sportswriters saw the Series as a matchup of the Cardinals’ overall strength against the Yankees’ hitting, which translated into the Babe. How would the Babe do? That would determine the outcome. The sportswriters made the Yankees favorites.

“We’ll beat ’em,” the big man said as he “elbowed his way through the crowd of small boys and men who met the Yankee Special” at Penn Station in one report. “There’ll be nothing to it.”

A newly formed organization, the National Broadcasting Company, which had purchased New York station WEAF during the season, broadcast the games on a 25-station radio network across the country and into Canada. This was the first true, easy-to-hear broadcast of the event. It was estimated that more than 15 million people would listen, an idea so staggering that the
Times
reported after the first game “in a fraction of a second the thrill of each exciting incident ran from coast to coast and probably from below the Mexican border to points around Hudson Bay.”

The play-by-play announcer was 38-year-old Graham McNamee, whose excited portrayals of the action would set a standard for sports broadcasting. An out-of-work salesman and part-time baritone singer, he was on jury duty at federal court for $3 a day in 1923 when he walked into the nearby WEAF studios at 195 Broadway during his lunch break. He was hired immediately for a job that required him to “open and close pianos for artistes, answer telephone calls, escort unaccompanied young ladies home after programs, sing operatic and religious selections and do some announcing.” The “do some announcing” part became the most important.

He and partner Phil Carlin eventually did a six-hour show every afternoon—with an hour out for dinner—and they also covered the political conventions and sports events of the day. His voice became so familiar and accepted by America that recordings of it were analyzed in laboratories to pick up the cadence and frequencies to teach to young announcers.

The
Times
ran full-page summaries of his broadcast of every Series game. Sport as entertainment had never come close to reaching this kind of audience. The mind reeled at the thought of farmers in lowa, ranchers in Texas sitting down and being part of each Series moment as it happened.

“We are just about to go on,” McNamee told the country as the Series began. “The umpire is behind the plate now putting on his mask and adjusting his chest protector. The diamond and ground and everything look beautiful. The dark brown chocolate color of the base line and the beautiful ground is wonderful. Around the edges is a running track and still around that is an embankment of green….”

The House That Ruth Built sat right there, perfect, in front of everyone. The white of the home uniforms and the gray of the visitors’ could be seen in faraway living rooms. McNamee would describe the color of ladies’ hats, the passing of advertising airplanes, the chill of the air or the warmth of the sun, the exhaustion felt at the seventh-inning stretch. Magic. Now he described the Babe, coming to the plate for the first time in the home half of the first inning:

Babe Ruth at bat. He is taking his usual hand, a tremendous adulation from the New York crowd. Babe bats lefthanded with his right foot tremendously extended toward the plate. A slow ball, too low—ball one. Another ball, outside and low—two balls for the Babe. Ruth, one out and a man on first, Combs. Babe gets a tremendous slice at the ball, and he throws that entire body of his onto the right leg and pivots with it. Again, a little low, over the pan, but a little for three balls, no strikes on Babe Ruth.

The Babe is quieter at the plate than he usually is. He usually is rather nervous and moves around quite a bit, you know, but today he is very quiet. Four balls. The Babe has been passed. (Yelling and shouting.)

The Series that America heard evolved into a classic. The teams split the first two games, then went to St. Louis, where the Cardinals won the third. In the fourth game, Ruth exploded. He hit home runs in his first two at-bats, walked in the next, then hit his third homer in the sixth as the Yankees took a 10–5 win to tie the best-of-seven Series at two home games apiece.

Three home runs in a game was not only a Series record but seemed to border on the unbelievable. Each shot was longer than the last, the final one bouncing in the center-field bleachers and skipping out of Sportsman’s Park. Newspapers around the country the next day printed large pictures of the park with dotted lines and arrows following the path of the three balls. One newspaper even printed a large picture of Yankee Stadium and dotted lines to show where the balls would have gone if hit in New York. The man who described the final blast probably had the emotion right.

“Oh, what a shot!” McNamee screamed. “Directly over second. The boys are all over him over there. One of the boys is riding on Ruth’s back. Oh, what a shot! Directly over second base, far into the bleachers out in center field, and almost on a line and then that dumbbell, where is he, who told me not to talk about Ruth! Oh boy! Not that I love Ruth, but oh how I love to see a shot like that! Wow…that is a mile and a half from here. You know what I mean.”

The Yankees won the fifth game in St. Louis, 3–2, in ten innings, which brought the Series back to New York with the home team only one win away from the World Championship. Alas, Grover Cleveland Alexander, the veteran Cardinals pitcher who was one of the few men in baseball known to not only drink more than Ruth but feel the effects less, masterfully shut down the Yanks, 10–2, to set up a winner-take-all seventh game at the Stadium.

On a cold, wet October day, wind gusting everywhere, Waite Hoyt went to the mound against Jesse Haines. Ruth put the Yankees ahead, 1–0, with a shot in the third, his fourth homer in the Series, and made a spectacular running, diving catch on the warning track against Bob O’Farrell. The Cardinals came back in the fourth with three unearned runs off Hoyt. It was one of those maddening rallies filled with a botched double-play ball by Koenig, a dropped ball in left by Meusel, and a pop fly by the Cards’ Tommy Thevenow that scored the final two runs.

“With a two-strikes-no-balls count, I threw him a curveball that was a foot outside the plate,” Hoyt said. “I was criticized for that later on, for allowing Thevenow to hit the ball with a count of two strikes and no balls. But the ball was a bad ball. It was a curveball, and it was about a foot off the plate, outside. Thevenow reached out, and he popped the ball over the head of Lazzeri.

“The ball never reached the outfield. It hit the mud and twisted around, and Lazzeri couldn’t find it, and the runs scored while he looked.”

The Yankees scored a run to come within 3–2 and then loaded the bases with two outs in the seventh. St. Louis manager Rogers Hornsby pulled Haines and brought Alexander out of the bullpen, a move that surprised everyone, especially Alexander. Forty years old, hungover after celebrating his game six win, maybe even still half-drunk, he came to the mound to face Lazzeri.

“Are you all right?” Hornsby asked as he gave Alexander the ball.

“I’m okay,” Alexander mumbled in reply. “But no warm-up pitches. I don’t want to give anything away.”

The first pitch, no warm-ups, was a called strike. On the second, Lazzeri swung and lifted a long fly to left that everyone thought was a grand-slam homer until a gust of wind sent it just foul. On the third pitch, Lazzeri expected another fastball. Alexander, known as Alexander the Great, threw a slow curve that was so low, according to the
New York Times
, that “a Singer midget couldn’t have hit it.” Lazzeri swung for strike three, the end of the rally.

Alexander retired the Yankees one-two-three in the eighth, then took care of the first two batters in the ninth. This set up a confrontation with Ruth. Working carefully, Alexander took the count to 3–2, then walked the Bam. Bob Meusel came to the plate, swung at a pitch, and Ruth tried to steal second.

And was thrown out. Easily.

It was—and probably still is—the weirdest end to a World Series. Ruth explained later that he had a hunch. The decision to steal was his decision. He didn’t think the Yankees would collect two hits in a row to bring him home. He tried to put himself in position to come home with one hit. It simply didn’t work out.