The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (41 page)

“Did Claire crimp the Babe’s style?” Marshall Hunt was asked.

“Not that I ever noticed,” the sportswriter replied.

Pitcher Red Ruffing, who joined the team in 1930, told a story about coming back from a walk one night in St. Louis. As he approached the front door of the Chase Hotel, he saw that some dinner or dress ball was being held at the hotel and people just now were arriving. The men on the stairs and in front of the hotel door were in tuxedos, and the women were in evening gowns. Ruffing felt underdressed and conspicuous. He decided to walk fast. His chances for embarrassment deepened, alas, when he noticed the Babe sitting in a parked car directly in front of the well-dressed people. Two women were in the car with him.

Ruffing decided to put his head down and keep walking. Maybe the Babe wouldn’t notice him. Maybe the people wouldn’t notice him. He walked past the Babe’s car and was into the crowd of people when he heard a gruff voice behind him.

“Hey, Red,” the Babe shouted. “You want a piece of ass?”

So much for avoiding embarrassment. Ruffing kept walking, straight into the hotel.

Two events stood out as the big man finished the 1933 season with 34 home runs and a .301 average and the Yankees, a universal pick for first place, finished seven games behind the Washington Senators in the American League race. (Jimmie Foxx, the A’s slugger, not only was first in home runs, with 48, but also was first in batting average, at .356, and RBIs, with 163, to win the rare Triple Crown. Ruth’s 34 home runs were still second in the American League. Gehrig was third with 32.)

The first event was the inaugural All-Star Game, dubbed “the Game of the Century,” which was played in Chicago on July 6 at Comiskey Park. This was a grand event, never seen before, only imagined, the best against the best. McGraw came out of retirement in Pelham, New York, to manage the National League, while 71-year-old Connie Mack managed the Americans. There was all the appropriate hoo-ha and excitement, and 49,000 people were in the seats.

In the third inning of the first All-Star Game in history, with Charlie Gehringer on second, Ruth poled the first home run in All-Star Game history, a line shot into the lower pavilion in right. The home run off Cardinals ace left-hander Willie Hallahan propelled the Americans to a 4–2 win. Ruth also preserved the win in the field, his leaden legs carrying him back to the right-field fence in time to take a potential home run away from Chick Hafey in the eighth inning for the defensive play of the game. It was all typical Babe Ruth, rising to the occasion, capturing it, putting it in his pocket.

“He was marvelous,” John McGraw said. “That old boy certainly came through when they needed him.”

The second event came in the final game of the 1933 season. Babe Ruth pitched again. In an attempt to pump up attendance in a game at the Stadium that meant nothing, he made a well-publicized start against the Red Sox.

This wasn’t the Yankees’ idea; it was his idea. He had last pitched in 1930, the same situation, end of the season, stopping the Red Sox, 9–3, with a complete-game victory at Fenway Park. Before that, he hadn’t pitched a major league game in a decade. On barnstorming tours, though, and even in exhibition games during the season, he took the mound. He’d pitched once in 1933 in Indianapolis when 300 fans signed a petition asking him to take the mound.

He prepared himself for this finale, throwing batting practice in the preceding days and weeks. He had Doc Painter, now the Yankees’ trainer, ready to work on his left arm between innings. The Yankees made the occasion festive with preliminaries like a fungo-hitting contest (winner: G. Herman Ruth, 395 feet), a 100-yard dash, races around the bases, and a contest for catchers that involved throwing the ball from home plate into an open barrel at second base. (None of them did it.) Twenty-five thousand people came to watch the proceedings.

Ruth then came out and mowed the Red Sox down, at least for a while. He pitched shutout baseball for the first five innings as the Yanks grabbed a 6–0 lead. Part of that lead was Ruth’s 34th homer in the bottom of the fifth, a shot that sneaked into the right-field stands. He faltered in the sixth, giving up a walk, five singles, and four runs, and he surrendered another run in the eighth, but hung on for the 6–5 win.

It was a remarkable achievement—39 years old, stepping in from the outfield to pitch a complete game—probably as remarkable as “the Called Shot” homer of a year earlier. Again, he created the situation that begged for failure. Again, he succeeded. It was the last big league game he ever pitched. He would finish 5–0 on the mound in a Yankees uniform.

His left arm throbbed after the game, and his immediate euphoria was dulled to the promise, “Never again.” (He said a month later that he hadn’t been able to comb his hair for a week.) Marshall Hunt was giddy in the
Daily News.
He typed out whimsical appraisals of the Babe’s multitask performance in four- and five-paragraph bursts with the aid of different experts from other parts of the paper. The best was under the name of A. T. Gallico, Paul Gallico’s wife, who was the fashion editor.

“The Babe wore a plain everyday white flannel Yankees uniform as he carted his huge bulk to the mound for his pitching ordeal,” Hunt/Gallico wrote.

His slender calves were encased in blue wool stockings. A blue cap with a chic white “NY” embroidered above the peak sat jauntily on his head.

Babe completed his apparel with a pair of kangaroo hide shoes with imported spikes of Bethlehem Steel. The sleeves of a white sweatshirt showed as he warmed up for the battle.

When Babe knelt in the dirt while awaiting his batting turn, he had his left arm encased in a navy blue Yankees windbreaker…. In the Yankee dugout, the Babe used a dozen nice, clean, white towels to swab his perspiring face between innings.

It would have been a nice, sweet way to end a career. Of course, it didn’t happen that way.

Reports that Babe Ruth would become the manager of some major league team for 1934 appeared often. He was linked in the coming weeks and months to any team that had a sudden opening in the position, an easy headline without much research. He had been mentioned for the Red Sox job, a logical location, as early as 1932, but he had said then that he wasn’t ready. Now he was ready, but no one else seemed to be. The Red Sox had a new owner in boy millionaire Thomas A. Yawkey and a new general manager in Eddie Collins…the Tigers had an opening, and Chicago looked promising…Cleveland was a possibility, and then Cincinnati showed interest and finally…nothing happened.

Another candidate always seemed to surface. Another opportunity always seemed to be lost.

“I wouldn’t be choosy about what club it is,” the Babe said in all interviews. “The lower the club, the better for me. If I improved it and got it up in the race, I would get credit for it.”

The job he really wanted, of course, was the one Joe McCarthy owned. But Ruppert wasn’t budging: McCarthy was his man. The manager had a contract through the 1935 season. He had won a pennant and finished second in the past two seasons. Why should he not be the manager? Ruth had to be handled delicately, owing to his great popularity and his great service to the Yankees, but the truth was that Ruppert and Ed Barrow didn’t want Ruth. Headaches were worthwhile when the man was hitting 60 home runs, but without the homers, headaches would be a bundled nuisance.

Ruppert and Barrow mostly wished the Babe would fade away without a lot of noise. If he received an offer from another team, they encouraged him to take it. The best one seemed to come from Frank Navin, owner of the Tigers, who was interested in Ruth as a potential manager. Ruppert encouraged Ruth to pursue the job. Ruth, booked by Christy Walsh on a barnstorming tour of Hawaii after the 1933 season ended, said he would see Navin when he returned. Ruppert told him he was making a mistake. Ruth didn’t listen.

“There’s time,” the Babe said. “The baseball season doesn’t start for six months.”

The maddening part about this exercise was that he and Claire and Julia went to the World’s Fair in Chicago before proceeding to Los Angeles to catch the boat to Honolulu. Why didn’t he call Navin from Chicago, simply slide over to Detroit for a meeting before proceeding to California? How hard would that have been? Why didn’t Claire push him?

Maybe he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Maybe Claire didn’t know. He was Babe Ruth, dammit. He never had applied for a job in his life. People came to him with their offers. That’s the way it always had worked. Why didn’t it work that way now? Maybe he simply didn’t understand.

At the World’s Fair, he was introduced to the crowd at the A&P Carnival by a middle-aged man who said, “I’ve been a fan of Babe Ruth since I was ‘that high.’” “I wasn’t playing when Mr. Rector was ‘that high,’” the Babe grumped in his remarks. He felt his age, but didn’t necessarily want to hear about it.

He saw a marionette show that featured a Babe Ruth marionette. He took the tour. Somewhere in the day, he refused to throw at the African dodger, the racist character out of that stellar 1926 comedy
Headin’ Home
. The Babe said he knew too many guys who had thrown their arm out trying to dunk the black man. He said he still had uses for that arm. There were chances he still could play.

“I’m not through yet, but I couldn’t play many over 100 games,” he said. “Funny thing, they had me all through going into last year, and I felt better than I had for several years. I played with my ankles wrapped in tape, and that strengthened them a lot.”

He finally did make a call to Navin from San Francisco. The timing was not good. Not taking the two-hour time difference into account, Ruth awakened the Detroit owner in the middle of the night. Ruth said he needed to have an answer about managing the Tigers; was it going to be yes or no? The sleep-deprived Navin said no, and went back to bed.

The not-to-be manager of the Tigers sailed west and was greeted by a crowd of 10,000 when his ship, the
Lurline,
docked at Honolulu. Schools were closed for a half-day so local children could see him play. He had two white-and-yellow leis wrapped around his neck the next afternoon as he hit a home run, struck out, and had to shift from right field to first base and then the pitcher’s mound because the out-of-school kids kept swarming the field.

His popularity was obvious. How could the magnates of baseball not see what an attraction he would be as a manager? When he returned, Ruppert and Barrow suggested the possibility that he manage the Newark Bears, the minor league team that Ruppert also owned. Ruth rejected that idea immediately. Both Christy Walsh and Claire backed his decision.

“To ask me,” he said, “after twenty years of experience in the major leagues to manage a club in the minors would be the same, I think, as to ask Colonel Ruppert, one of the foremost brewers in the country, to run a soda fountain.”

He was Babe Ruth, dammit.

On January 15, 1934, he signed a contract for the coming season at Ruppert’s Third Avenue brewery for $35,000, which was a $17,000 pay cut from 1933. No razzamatazz was involved, no Florida standoff. Ruppert laid out the contract. The Babe signed. The $35,000 was the smallest salary for Ruth since 1921, although he still was the highest-paid player in the game.

Any sense of celebration was missing. The parties basically were locked together for one, last fractious year of a marriage that already was done. Every writer who went to Artie McGovern’s gym to report on the Bambino’s progress noted a sadness in the proceedings that never had been present in the past.

An attack of the flu disrupted the big man’s training, then kept him from traveling to St. Petersburg until the day after his birthday. No party at the Jungle Club this year. He turned 40 in the apartment with the sniffles. When he got onto the train, he was bundled in overcoats and hurried to his compartment.

“Pretty cold, this, for an old man, eh, kid?” he said from under all his clothes. “Pretty cold.”

The highlight of the spring came on the trip back when he went with outfielder Sammy Byrd, who later became a professional golfer, to play in an exhibition with Bobby Jones in Atlanta. The baseball highlights were harder to find. The season opened, and he hit a home run here, another there, hit three in two days in one momentary return to glory, but every day was a fight against embarrassment.

He benched himself for a doubleheader on June 8 against the Red Sox because he heard reports that his teammates didn’t think he should be in the lineup. McCarthy said the decision was totally up to Ruth. Ruth said he felt hurt.

“I don’t think that is the way to treat a fellow who has given as much to baseball as I have,” the Babe explained. “I have been having some trouble with my ankle, but I don’t think I’m washed up yet. This is going to be my last season as a player, but if I thought I was hindering the Yankees, I could not throw this uniform fast enough.”

He had his own radio show now, three times per week for the entire summer, and the irony was that in every show one section was devoted to a dramatization of some famous moment from his career. He sat at one microphone with producer Norm Sweetser while two or three actors stood at a second microphone and read dialogue from “the Called Shot” or the Johnny Sylvester homers or whatever was the topic of the night, each page of the script dropped noiselessly to the floor when completed. A third microphone hovered over the band and also could pick up the studio audience reaction.

The only moment for the script this season came on July 13 when he unloaded on the Tigers’ Tommy Bridges in the third inning in Detroit for home run number 700, the long-desired goal. It was not a particularly dramatic blast—the game would be won by catcher Bill Dickey’s homer in the eighth—but it traveled 480 feet, high over the right-field wall at Navin Field, an example worthy of its 699 predecessors.

Only two other players in baseball history—Gehrig at 314 and Rogers Hornsby at 301—had hit even 300 homers. The number promised to stay on the wall for a long time, maybe forever. Ruth, rounding third base, told coach Art Fletcher, “I want that ball.”