The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (35 page)

Richards Vidmer, another
Times
writer, returned pretty late to his room one night. He found a stack of messages from the Babe, asking him to come to room 436 as soon as possible. Vidmer was worried. He called room 436.

“Where the hell have you been?” the Babe asked.

“I’ve been out,” Vidmer replied.

“Come on up. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Vidmer went to room 436. The Babe poured him a drink. Vidmer asked what the heck this was all about. He was tired.

“Well, Goddamn it, last night we killed a bottle of scotch between us and I had two home runs today,” the Babe said. “I don’t want to break the spell.”

There were no clocks for the Home Run King on the road. The rules for everyone else simply did not apply. He was part of the Yankees’ traveling show—nailing Lazzeri’s shoes to the locker-room floor, making impossible bids to drive Gehrig crazy, selling spare ribs from the ladies’ room—but he also had his own traveling show, fueled by a different level of money and fame.

“I must have that thing that Elinor Glyn calls ‘it’ out in Hollywood,” the Babe said one day.

The description of “it,” as written by Ms. Glyn, author of steamy contemporary love stories, was a strong, overriding sexuality, visible to anyone who watches the owner pass. Ms. Glyn said actress Clara Bow, “the ‘it’ girl,” was the only one who had “it” in all of Hollywood. Maybe the Babe was the only one who had “it” in baseball. Maybe not. He certainly wanted to find out.

“Nobody with the Yankee club seems to know much about the Babe’s unofficial activities,” Westbrook Pegler wrote. “He runs alone and where he runs or what he does are matters of no interest whatsoever so long as he shows up at the yard no later than 1:30
P
.
M
.—and hits home runs.”

For the first four months of the 1928 season, the road trips of the Yankees were a time of joy and wonder. As the first of what would be many teams compared to the 1927 Yankees, this team looked even better. It had opened up an eleven-and-a-half-game lead on the second-place Philadelphia Athletics by July 24 and appeared to be a cinch for another runaway pennant. The Babe, as the first of many hitters to be compared to the Home Run King of 1927, also looked better. On July 24, he hit a rocket to a previously unexplored section of the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park for his 40th home run of the season. He was 28 games and 10 home runs ahead of his pace to 60 in 1927. The
Times
predicted he would break his record “barring sickness, injury and the other misfortunes to which human flesh is heir.”

Question: is a slump a misfortune to which human flesh is heir? That was what happened next.

The Babe slumped. The Yankees slumped. The A’s, a mixture of young talent added to Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, who were playing out their last seasons, started rolling. The Yanks started falling. The two teams continued in their opposite directions until they collided at the Stadium on September 9 in a doubleheader. The A’s, one day earlier, finally had taken a half-game lead for first.

Interest in the games was overwhelming. The Yankees had renovated the park prior to the season, expanding capacity to 72,000, and the doubleheader brought a further expansion. The largest crowd in baseball history, 85,265, stuffed the Stadium, people sitting, standing, crawling everywhere. Policemen worked two blocks away to force crowds off fire escapes on apartment houses for fear the walls would collapse. Traffic jams and parking were problems, the interest was so great.

In the midst of all this attention, the old 1927-style Yankees returned. They won the first game, 5–0, on a shutout by stellar rookie George Pipgras. They won the second, 7–3, on an eighth-inning grand slam by Bob Meusel. They now led by a game and a half, all work done in one day.

“We broke their hearts today,” the Babe said. “And we gave that greatest crowd in baseball history some real baseball.”

His 49th homer the next day capped a 5–3 win that put the Yanks ahead by two and a half, a lead the A’s never could overcome. The pennant wasn’t clinched until two and a half weeks later in Detroit. Two tales about Ruth grew out of that series. Maybe one or even both were true.

The first was that coming into the series he still was in his slump. He had tried everything to start hitting again, even abstinence from liquor as a final resort. Nothing had worked. Finally, first night in Detroit, he decided the opposite of abstinence was necessary. He chased the night, came out the next day in the sunshine at Navin Field, and hit two home runs in a doubleheader sweep of the Tigers that put the Yankees on the verge of clinching.

The next day, as they clinched with an 11–6 win, the second tale evolved. Ruth rented four or five adjoining rooms in the Book Cadillac, bought a piano because there was none available at the hotel, and threw a victory party. He was said to have stood on a chair sometime in the proceedings and announced, “Any girl who doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.” True? Not true?

Circumstantial evidence would suggest that something happened. The next day the defending world champions lost, 19–10, to the Tigers. Ruth, Gehrig, and Meusel were the only regulars in the lineup. Hangovers perhaps filled the bench.

The St. Louis Cardinals somehow were five-to-three favorites over this merry band of travelers in the World Series. The leagues, remember, were virtually autonomous universes, one man’s Poland against another man’s Lithuania, and the only time teams seriously played against each other was in the World Series. The last time the Yankees had seen the Cards was in 1926, and remember, the Cards had prevailed in that final game when the Babe tried to steal second. The prognosticators fixed on that picture.

The Yankees also had some injury problems. Herb Pennock’s arm was hurt, and he could not pitch. Earle Combs had injured a wrist in batting practice and would not play. Tony Lazzeri had a shoulder that needed an operation, and every throw pained him. Mark Koenig had an injured foot. Lou Gehrig had been beaned in the final game of the season, and there was doubt about his condition. Even the Babe had been moving slowly on a gimpy knee for the last four weeks of the season.

The injuries were a final factor.

“To me, the St. Louis Cardinals should make short work of the New York Yankees,” Walter Johnson, the now-retired pitching great, predicted through his ghost. “The Yankees don’t look good. They haven’t looked good for a while.”

(Ghost note of the Series: Eddie Bennett, the Yankees’ hunchbacked batboy-mascot, had a ghost. Eddie and his ghost picked the Yankees.)

The Series opened at the Stadium. The Colonel and Ed Barrow were hoping for some more mammoth crowds like the one for the doubleheader against the A’s, but that didn’t materialize. Interest in these games was mild at the box office, perhaps because this was the third Series in a row at the Stadium. Neither of the first two games drew more than 65,000.

In the first one, Waite Hoyt tidily shut down the visitors, 3–1, on a three-hitter. In the second game, Alexander the Great, the nemesis of 1926, finally received the full Murderers’ Row treatment as the Murderers pounded out a 9–3 win. Gehrig hit a giant home run, and Ruth was all over the place, and young rookie George Pipgras pitched well enough to keep the Cardinals quiet.

The games now shifted to St. Louis. In 1926 one of the features of the Series had been a race between the trains carrying the two teams from site to site. The
Cardinals’ Special
, riding the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 1,051 miles, covered the distance in 21 hours and 20 minutes, the fastest time ever recorded. The train was two hours and 40 minutes faster than a normal St. Louis–to–New York run. The Yankees, handicapped by taking a longer route on the
New York Central,
finished second. Alas, there was no rematch here. The two teams whisked across the country in the normal 24 hours.

In the third game, at Sportsman’s Park, Gehrig hit two homers, and Tom Zachary, the man who surrendered number 60, now a Yankee, pitched a 7–3 win. Ruth broke the game open with a thumping slide into home in the sixth inning, causing catcher Jimmy Wilson to drop the ball. Huggins cautioned his players against “making whoopee” with a 3–0 series lead, and they had an extra rainout day to follow his advice. Then, in the fourth game, fill in your own cliché for excellence, the Prince of Pounders took control. He had the best World Series game of his career.

“If there is any lingering doubt, if anywhere in this broad land there were misguided souls who believed that Babe Ruth was not the greatest living ballplayer, they should have seen him today,” James Harrison said in the
Times.
“They should have seen him, hooted and hissed, come to the plate three times, twice against Wee Willie Sherdel and once against the great Pete Alexander, and send three mighty drives whistling over that right field pavilion.”

Three home runs were only the beginning. This was one of those games in which he was a protagonist in some hearty drama, involved in whatever happened. He was in left field, Meusel in the sun in right field, and was involved in a constant dialogue with the fans behind him. They kept telling him how useless he was; he kept telling them he was going to hit two home runs, just for spite. He lost a ball in the sun for an error, which gave the fans some ammunition, then hit the two home runs for his own ammunition. Then he hit the third home run, to match his feat in 1926 as the only man ever to hit three homers in one Series game.

The second of the blasts, hit in the seventh inning, was a drama in itself. Sherdel, burned already by Ruth’s homer in the fourth, quickly whipped two strikes past him this time. The second strike was called, and Ruth turned around to argue with umpire Charlie Pfirman. While Ruth was turned, catcher Wilson whipped the ball back to Sherdel, who in turn whipped it back to Wilson, straight across the plate. The crowd cheered for strike three.

Ruth objected immediately in colorful and emphatic words. He said this was a quick pitch, which was illegal. Pfirman agreed. Sherdel never had set himself, simply had thrown the ball back in an absolute hurry. This was legal in the National League, but not legal in the American. The two leagues had agreed prior to the first game that the quick pitch would be illegal in the Series.

Sherdel protested. Catcher Wilson protested. Manager Bill McKechnie came out of the dugout to protest. The entire Cardinals team, in fact, gathered around Pfirman in protest. Ruth stood at the side, making fun of all of them, the longtime truant suddenly on the right side of the law.

Pfirman held firm. Sherdel was forced to throw another pitch, a curveball, and the result on this day was totally predictable. The ball cleared the pavilion and was last seen heading toward Grand Boulevard.

Ruth loved this home run. He waved his hand at the crowd. He waved directly toward his friends in the left-field stands. He waved again as he turned third base, headed for home. The shot had tied the game, 2–2. Gehrig then came to the plate and hammered Sherdel’s second pitch down the line for another homer. The Yankees wound up scoring four times to take a 5–2 lead on the way to a 7–3 win.

The third homer by Ruth was in the eighth off the fading Alex the Great, who had been brought into the game in relief. The Bam finished off his day by making a spectacular running catch of a high fly ball from the bat of Cardinals shortstop Frankie Frisch for the final out of the game. He galloped at full speed on a diagonal across the foul line and speared the ball as he hit the fence, fighting off fans in the process.

He held the ball high in the air as he ran across the field in triumph. He was still holding it in the clubhouse, still excited, still babbling.

“There’s the ball that says it’s all over,” he shouted to no one and to everyone. “There it is, right where I grabbed it out of the air. What a catch! Boy, maybe I wasn’t glad to get my hands on
that
ball.”

“Hooray,” someone shouted. “Ruth for President!”

“Ruth for Sheriff!” someone else shouted. “Vote for Ruth.”

“I told my friends out there in the bleachers I’d hit two homers in this game,” Ruth babbled. “Wow! And I hit three. And what’d I hit? All hooks.”

Someone started to sing “The Sidewalks of New York,” and soon the whole team, everyone in the room, was singing. They sang the entire song, the parts about the “ginnie playing the organ” and “Me and Maggie O’Rourke” and “East Side” and “West Side, all around the town” and the tots singing “Ring-a-Rosie” and “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” The final line—“On the sidewalks of New Yorrrrrrrrrk”—was held longest and loudest by the man still holding the baseball.

Was there any doubt about the best team in the game? This same group now had won three pennants and two World Series in a row. Won? They had annihilated the National League, four games and out, for two straight years. Was there any doubt about the best player in the game? The man still holding the baseball had hit .625 for the Series. It was a record.

“Gee,” Waite Hoyt, who was the winning pitcher, said, “it’s great to have a fellow like Ruth in there with you and not against you.”

The final train trip of the year was a cross-country alcoholic hayride. Ruth had his mysterious St. Louis sources deliver a clothes basket full of ribs and ample amounts of what one paper called “amber-colored liquid that foams when poured.” Other, heartier spirits magically appeared. The players sang, cavorted, and floated home.

“The hustlingest, fightingest world champions that ever rapped home runs over right field walls are on their way back to Baghdad-on-the-Subway,” Jack Kofoed of the
New York Post
reported with a headline, “Eastbound on the Yankee Special.” “This train is just one large package of exuberance.”

The leader of all exuberance was the Bam. He had picked up a Mexican hairless dog somewhere along with the ribs, beer, and whatever else. He carried the dog, which shared space with a few bottles of ginger ale on a silver tray, through the cars on the train. An ice bucket was under Ruth’s other arm.

A conga line was formed, and the party danced through the aisles of the entire train, Ruth at the front. He left mayhem in his wake, going back to his favorite trick of smashing all straw hats. Another favorite trick, a specialty, was grabbing hold of a person’s shirt from behind, yanking in a certain way, and ripping the shirt off the person’s body. This was a trick that seemed to be learned easily, and soon everybody was doing it to everybody else, and soon the train was filled with shirtless bodies. The Babe was soon down to his silk underwear.