The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (5 page)

The Catholic religion would stay with him, the rhythm of mistakes and redemption perfect for his life of rapidly accumulated venial sins. Three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and a good Act of Contrition would clear out his moral digestive system and set him back on the road. He would amaze teammates sometimes when he would appear at Mass in the morning after a night of indulgence. Three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, a good Act of Contrition, a $50 bill in the collection basket, ready to go. He would become a celebrated member of the Knights of Columbus.

The school would continue to function for 36 more years after he left, but it would evolve into a total reform school as it took more and more money from the state of Maryland. The first two Baltimore natives to die in the coming Great War, Harry Luckman and Albert Vogel, both would be graduates of St. Mary’s. Over 3,000 graduates would take part in the war, 572 of them enlisted straight from the school, many of them kids who had been there with Ruth.

The failures in the system sometimes would make headlines. A kid named Leroy Baker, 18 years old, same age and class as Ruth, was arrested in 1912 in Washington after an escape from St. Mary’s. He had embarked on a burglary career in Washington, entering at least seven houses in the middle of the night, shining a flashlight into sleeping residents’ faces, and holding a gun on them. He then would ask for their money and jewels. When apprehended at a rooming house, he was found reading a
Raffles,
a popular mystery series about a thief, written by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. He dropped the book and went for his gun before being subdued.

“I had no money,” he said when asked why he had become a robber. “I was hungry.”

The most notorious graduate of St. Mary’s, Richard Reese Whitte-more, would stay for only a year, from 1916 to 1917. Like Ruth, he was sent there as “incorrigible” by distressed parents. In later life he would form a gang responsible for at least nine murders. He would be executed by hanging in 1927 for the murder of a prison guard during a successful escape attempt in 1924.

“The Boy is ever the same,” Brother Paul Scanlon, the headmaster, would say at the school’s closing in 1950. “The Boy is a crude machine that develops physically from infancy to manhood. The mental growth begins about seven and continues indefinitely. To make this human machine a perfect whole it must be under the supervision and constant direction of the specialists. Every part—heart, mind and body—must have particular attention. The specialists for this are naturally, the parents and the home, the teacher, the school and the church. If these agencies cooperate and the subject is normal, the result generally will be favorable. If one or another of these is remiss it will be the exception if the product is not a failure, or at least imperfect.”

For St. Mary’s, perhaps imperfection was the best that could be expected. Starting with flawed materials, kids from broken and troubled homes, the Xaverians did the best they could. They tried to bang out as many dents as possible, tried to bring order to young lives that had no order. Compassion was served along with a good crack across the back of the head. The Xaverians shaped up and shipped out their charges, put young adults into the outside world. Their methods worked with some, didn’t work with others.

Singer Al Jolson, the other famous onetime resident, a few years before the Babe, a Jewish kid in mostly Catholic surroundings, never liked the place. He returned to St. Mary’s with his wife in 1949, more than 50 years after he left, to show her his strict beginnings. He was amazed to see the front gate open.

“It was always shut when I was here,” he said. “There were bars all around.”

“Was Al a bad boy?” his wife, Erle, asked Brother Benjamin, a teacher from Jolson’s days still at the institution.

“He was like other boys,” the brother replied. “Some boys run away from Harvard too, you know.”

In 1919 sparks from a tinner’s torch would start a fire during repairs on the roof of the administration building. The water pressure wasn’t strong enough to reach the fire, and the administration building, a dorm, the junior building, and the old chapel were destroyed. Ten boys, trapped in the tower of the administration building, had to slide down a rope to safety, but injuries were minor and no student died. Virtually all of the school records were destroyed, including the ones that detailed the progress of the boy from Pigtown.

At the height of the fire, Brother Theodore, the head of the school, gathered the student population in the courtyard. He asked everyone to pray.

“I prayed,” one student remembered. “But I prayed the place would burn down.”

CHAPTER THREE

T
HE MAN
who freed Nigger Lips from the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys was Jack Dunn of the minor league Baltimore Orioles. He was 42 years old, a baseball man, had been a player and then a manager, and now was the owner of the Orioles. He was a bit of a baseball genius.

When he was nine years old, playing with a bunch of kids at a railroad siding in Bayonne, New Jersey, a boxcar ran over his left arm. The kids had uncoupled the car, and it started to roll slowly. As Dunn jumped to get free, his foot caught in the track, and he was thrown back and the car rolled over the arm. Doctors told his mother and him that the arm had to be amputated or he would die.

“If it makes no difference to you, I’d just as soon die with my arm on,” the nine-year-old declared.

His mother agreed. There was no operation. He didn’t die, was brought back to health, but the arm was left in a strange condition. Below the elbow, everything functioned fine. Above the elbow, the arm was crippled. He couldn’t lift it higher than his neck. Also, a running wound on his shoulder refused to heal for the next 20 years. Surgery was prescribed. Dunn again refused. Even then he wanted to be a baseball player and didn’t want to risk any further loss of motion.

With his withered left arm and its limited abilities, he still played eight years in the big leagues as a shortstop, third baseman, and right-handed pitcher. He learned tricks, ways to overcome his restrictions at both the plate and in the field. He became a conniver, a schemer, a student of the game, working all of its angles and shortcuts simply to survive. He learned extra lessons as a pitcher. Never a hard thrower, he had to study other players, figure out their tendencies, look for weaknesses and take advantage.

All of this helped when he became a manager, winning an International League pennant in Providence in 1905, and then, after mortgaging everything he had, as both the owner and manager of the Orioles. Studying players, he developed preferences for body types, for a “look.” He liked big, agile, rangy athletes. (Unlike himself, it should be noted. He was 5-foot-9 and slender.) He was unorthodox and confident in his selections. He would sign players to a contract on sight alone, simply by how they presented themselves.

He would check out the player the way a trainer or potential buyer might look at a young Thoroughbred horse. If he liked the player’s size, the way the player moved just walking across a room, he might make an offer. Dunn sometimes never even saw the player play a game, but the amazing part was that he seldom was wrong.

In this case, a respected referral came from Brother Gilbert. Dunn was trying to sign a highly regarded left-handed pitcher named Ford Meadows from the brother’s team at St. Joseph’s. The brother wanted to keep Meadows, who was a senior, for one last season. In trying to send Dunn elsewhere, Brother Gilbert suggested an alternative…there was this kid at St. Mary’s Industrial School, you see, a left-handed pitcher who was too good to believe. Dunn already had heard about a talented kid at the school from Joe Engel, a pitcher for the Washington Senators. Engel said that he played against the kid, who not only was terrific but at the end of the game had joined the band and played a big bass drum. Dunn was interested.

There are various descriptions of what happened next. A story is told by Fats Leisman of a legendary game played solely for Jack Dunn’s benefit at St. Mary’s, and Nigger Lips running away from the school, then returning to pitch a shutout and sign a contract. Ruth in his ghost autobiography mentions no game, says he pitched for half an hour in a workout for Dunn before he signed. The account of Brother Gilbert and Rodger Pippen, a
Baltimore American
sportswriter and friend of Dunn’s, is much more romantic. Maybe it is even true. In this story, Dunn went to St. Mary’s on a February day accompanied by Brother Gilbert and Fritz Maisel, a Baltimore native who now was the third baseman and captain of the New York Yankees. They traveled in Maisel’s big-time car, which had been purchased with big league money. Dunn never had seen Ruth play.

Brother Gilbert was nervous. He had recommended Nigger Lips as a pitcher, but never had seen him pitch. The big kid was a wrong-handed catcher on that one day when Brother Gilbert saw him. Admittedly he looked like he had a very good arm, and he was amazingly adept at removing the ball from the wrong-handed mitt and rifling it to second on a line, all in one motion, but could he pitch? People said he could. Brother Gilbert didn’t know.

The little group of Brother Gilbert, Dunn, and Maisel ran into Brother Matthias as they searched for Ruth. They all chatted a bit about the subject. Brother Matthias was not a flamboyant conversationalist.

“Ruth can hit,” was his scouting report.

“Can he pitch?” Dunn asked.

(Brother Gilbert held his breath.)

“Sure,” Brother Matthias said. “He can do anything.”

And so it happened. The group found Ruth, wearing overalls, making his one fashion statement with rings on three fingers, sneaking a chew of tobacco, sliding on the ice, fooling around with a couple of kids outside the tailor’s shop. Introductions were made. The calibrations, based on a lifetime of making calibrations, whirred inside Dunn’s head. The numbers and memories said that Ruth, large and lean and ambitious, was the ideal baseball candidate. It was as easy as that. Dunn settled down to do business.

The man who never had seen the potential pitcher play a game, on the recommendation of a man who never had seen the potential pitcher throw a pitch, offered a contract for $250 per month to the potential pitcher. The potential pitcher, who never had seen a professional game, who never really had known that money could be made from playing baseball, accepted immediately.

It was a grand and odd transaction, all at once, and took place on February 14, 1914. The date at least was documented. Two weeks later, George Herman Ruth, the legal ward of Brothers Gilbert and Paul, under the guardianship of baseball manager and owner Jack Dunn, was on his way to spring training.

Where to begin with the new sights and sounds and tastes and smells and experiences that awaited the 19-year-old boy? The Orioles were heading to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and he went to the train at Union Station on March 2, 1914—the train, yes, would be a good place to start—in a blizzard, breathing free and different air. He had new clothes, a new suitcase, had money in his pocket, and was outside the walls and on his own for the first time in his life, heading into a horizon he had seen only from afar.

“Since I signed with you, I’ve played eight games,” he informed Jack Dunn at the station.

This was winter. Eight games?

“And your arm isn’t sore?” Dunn asked.

“No, sir, Mr. Dunn,” the 19-year-old boy replied. “We had some snow this winter, and I was the commander of Fort McHenry in the snowball fights. My arm doesn’t get sore.”

He never had ridden a train. He never had been able to pick from a menu, then pick again and again, as much as he wanted. He never had done a lot of things. Dunn did not take the train, waiting to lead a second group of players south, including the ones who had not been able to reach Baltimore due to the blizzard. Scout Steinman, an old-timer who took care of odd jobs with the team, was in charge of the first group. Off it went.

The veterans pulled the requisite old tricks on the newcomers on the ride, and the newcomers wound up in the requisite foolish situations, guarding their shoes during the night from the porters, who surely would try to steal them, counting off the towns loudly toward Fayetteville. Ruth fell for everything. He spent his night with his left arm in the hammock over his upper berth, told that it was a special conditioning contraption for pitchers rather than a place to store clothes.

Fayetteville was a warm marvel. The temperature was 70 degrees. The men in town already were wearing straw hats in the middle of March. How can this be? Everything was a marvel. The Orioles checked into the Hotel Lafayette, where Ruth was fascinated by the elevator, riding up and down for days, leaving the door open, sticking his head out—watch it!—pulling back just in time to avoid serious injury. He was up in the mornings at five, familiar time for St. Mary’s, early for everywhere else, and down at the train station to watch the activity. He walked early to the Cape Fear Fairgrounds, where practice was held in a field next to the racetrack. He ate prodigious amounts of food at every sitting, buckwheat cakes piled into a syrup-drenched tower, gone in a moment, seconds on the way.

He was as raw as any kid who ever had stepped off any farm into this situation. He was very happy.

“He looked like a big, overgrown Indian,” Fred Parent, a former big league shortstop brought to the camp to work with the younger players, said. “He really had a dark complexion. He seemed to be really a happy-go-lucky kind of kid, made acquaintance easily. He had a really big voice. You’d think he weighed 500 pounds with that voice, and it grew bigger as he grew older.”

His nickname, the nice one, the one that would stick and become famous, arrived early. There are assorted versions of the story about when and how it arrived during the camp, but the one that is tidiest and, again, maybe even true has interim leader Steinman telling the veterans to take it easy with the new kid because “he’s one of Dunnie’s babes.” Rodger Pippen and Jesse Linthicum of the
Baltimore Sun
were in camp, heard Steinman use the word, and began to refer to “Babe Ruth” in their reports. It was not an uncommon nickname at the time. The babe officially was the Babe.

Some of the first newspaper stories that mentioned his name came after the first scrimmage at the fairgrounds. The team was divided in two, the Buzzards against the Sparrows, and he played a left-handed shortstop and pitched a few innings. He also hit the longest home run in Fayetteville history.

A white post had been planted at the edge of right field to mark a spot where Jim Thorpe, the decathlon champion in the 1912 Olympics, now with the New York Giants, once had hit a ball while playing in the Carolina League. In the seventh inning against the Sparrows, Ruth hit a ball that went past the post and over the racetrack and into a cornfield. The ball was hit so far that right fielder Bill Morrisette said he refused to retrieve it unless given cab fare. Rodger Pippen, 26 years old and filling in as a spare center fielder in the game, measured the distance. He said the ball had traveled 428 feet.

“The main topic of conversation is the work of Lefty Ruth and the prodigious hit he made in practice yesterday afternoon,” Pippen wrote in the
Baltimore American
. The rival
Baltimore Sun
had a two-column headline that read “Homer by Ruth Feature of Game.” Notable was the fact that his first headlines in professional baseball were for hitting, not pitching.

In his free time, he still roared. He was one of the players duped in a little roulette wheel operation a local resident set up in a room in the Lafayette. He tried horseback riding. Since he never had ridden, the man at the stables gave him a Shetland pony for starters. Ruth rode the pony into the local drugstore, where his teammates were relaxing at the soda fountain. He said he wanted to buy two ice cream cones, one for himself and one for the horse. The owner said he didn’t serve horses. Then there was the bicycle. Ruth convinced a local kid to let him borrow his bicycle every day. He rode it tirelessly around the town. He rode quite fast.

Jack Dunn and veteran catcher Ben Egan were standing at a street corner when Ruth came flying past, ran straight into the back of a hay wagon, was thrown six feet in the air, and landed on his back. Dunn ran to his newest acquisition and delivered some loud guidance.

“You wanna go back to that school?” he shouted. “You behave yourself, you hear me? You’re a ballplayer—not a circus act.”

Dunn had fallen in love with the kid. The exhibition games had started, and Ruth very much could pitch. He pitched well in scrimmages, a hard thrower with a workable curveball to back up his speed. He pitched well in relief against the Yankees. He pitched a complete game, a 6–2 win, against the Philadelphia Athletics, who had the best-hitting lineup in baseball. He also assuredly could hit. He could be fooled sometimes and look bad in striking out, but when he caught the ball, it traveled.

Talent like this did not just show up, well sanded and finished. Talent was supposed to be wild, and time was needed to tame it. Here was a kid who came straight out of school and could beat the Athletics. This just didn’t happen.

“Brother,” Dunn wrote to Brother Gilbert, “this fellow Ruth is the greatest young ballplayer who ever reported to a training camp.”

“He’ll startle the baseball world,” the owner told the writers quietly, “if he isn’t a rummy or he isn’t a nut.”

Spring training was short. Twenty-six days after he left, the boy from St. Mary’s was back in Baltimore. He was a secret no more. He was Babe Ruth. The newspapers said he was.

His first purchase back in the city was an Indian motorcycle for $115. His first trip on the motorcycle was to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. His first fall off the motorcycle…well, there were a few of them before he reached St. Mary’s. The final one was in front of the school. Brother Matthias saw the whole thing. Ruth landed in a puddle next to some horse droppings.