The Original Curse (19 page)

Red Sox right fielder Harry Hooper proved himself adept at strategy off the field, but the 1918 season might have been the best on-field performance of his Hall of Fame career. (N
ATIONAL
B
ASEBALL
H
ALL OF
F
AME
L
IBRARY
, C
OOPERSTOWN
, N.Y.)

Every day in right field, Hoop was challenged with decisions: what path to take to a fly ball, what was the best angle to throw to third base, where he should be positioned when an outside fastball was coming to a right-handed hitter. Every pitch was a miniature engineering problem. And he had become darned good at solving those problems. He was a fine leadoff hitter, but he was known to Sox bugs for two things: getting key hits and making big catches. Hoop was not one to boast. But he knew Boston had beat the Giants in the 1912 World Series because of his astonishing catch of a Larry Doyle smash in the deciding game. What had Hughie Jennings said? “Hooper’s judgment of the course of the ball was perfect, and he had to get away on the instant and exactly under the path that the ball was taking through the air,”
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as Harry remembered. He liked that. Jennings recognized that it wasn’t athleticism that made a great catch. It was strategy.

Hoop saw strategy everywhere. The flight of a baseball, the contours of land to be surveyed, the waltz of armies along maps of the front, even the way you approached a hand of bridge (few could beat Hooper at bridge). Plenty of players could play baseball. Hoop knew how to
think
the game. This had been an important aspect of Hooper’s place on another Strategy Board—the one that ran the Red Sox. Barrow was no field manager, so it was shortstop Everett Scott, coach Heinie Wagner, and Hooper who made the baseball decisions for the team.
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Hooper had been loudest in insisting that Babe Ruth play the field. Barrow gave in but had said, “Mark my word. The first time he gets in a slump, he will be down on his knees begging to pitch.”
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Actually, Ruth had been slumping, and his reaction was much worse than begging to pitch again. The previous afternoon had been a real bust for the Red Sox. They were in Washington. Ruth committed an error and struck out, twice, against Harry Harper. Ruth had been swinging wildly, eschewing the time-honored Red Sox approach, which called for taking the first strike and making the pitcher work. After the second strikeout, Barrow went after Ruth. Called him a bum and worse. Ruth threatened to punch Barrow on the nose, and history
suggested this was not an idle threat. Barrow was a puncher too. He fined Ruth $500 on the spot.
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Barrow was right, Hooper knew. Ruth was swinging like a gate up there. But Barrow was all iron fist—the players called him “Simon Legree” after the vicious plantation owner in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.
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It had been obvious to Hooper that Ruth was getting fed up with being fought with all the time.

So Ruth left. Took off his uniform. Did not get on the train to Philadelphia. Some of the reporters showed up with word that Ruth was in Baltimore and had signed up with the Chester shipyard team. Harry Frazee went nuts, said he would sue the shipyard. Barrow seethed.

Hooper saw the team was in trouble. Without Ruth, the Red Sox ran out a team of pikers against Connie Mack that afternoon, July 3, and showed no pep. The lineup was barely recognizable. Heinie Wagner at second. One of the new fellows, Jack Stansbury, in center. Two other bushers named Bluhm and Barbare, with the rag-armed Bader on the slab. It wasn’t a big-league team. They made errors, they got just four hits, they lost, 6–0, and it was obvious that Barrow needed Babe more than Babe needed Barrow.

The Strategy Board was working on the movements of General Pershing, but they really wanted word on the movements of Private Ruth. Especially Harry. He, however, was trying not to think about that just now. The war was more important, he told himself. “What else?” Hooper asked.

“Baker sent out word that there are a million American soldiers in Europe now,” Mayer said, whistling. “That’s some reserves. They’re talking about a counterattack.”

Harry sat back and looked at the map, envisioned the slow progress of Allied gains, imagined the angles and lines he’d draw as the front was pushed back toward the Hindenburg Line. Back and forth. Germany and the Allies. Ruth and Barrow. Offensives, fronts, angles, lines, maps, fly balls. It was all the same. Harry nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A counteroffensive—that would be a good strategy.”

When the Red Sox went north from Washington to Philadelphia on the evening of July 2, Babe Ruth went south, to his father’s house in Baltimore. He hadn’t really wanted to quit, and though he did wire the shipyard team at Chester, he wanted to be with the Red Sox. But he’d lost patience with Barrow. Ruth contacted Wagner—who had served as Ruth’s quasi-chaperone early in his career—and told him so.
Wagner took a late train to Baltimore, talking the wayward star into rejoining the team in Philadelphia. Wagner and Ruth arrived at the Aldine after 2:00
A.M
. on July 4.
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The Red Sox had a doubleheader that day, and Ruth, happy to be back, showed up at Shibe Park in the morning. But Barrow continued the iron-fist act and refused to speak to him. He kept Ruth on the bench for the entire first game, letting the slugger stew through a long, 11–9 Red Sox victory.

Déjà vu. Ruth “didn’t seem highly pleased at not being received with open arms” and again took off his uniform between games, again saying he was leaving.
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Hooper and some teammates talked Ruth back into the park before the second game and went to Barrow, persuading him to come to some kind of détente. Barrow put Ruth back in the lineup, in center field. From the
Globe
: “So far as is known, Ruth is resigned to his hard fate with the Boston Red Sox and Manager Barrow. It is not believed that he had any serious intention of jumping the team. His fellow players strongly resent his actions. They think he should remain loyal to the Sox.”
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July 4 was the bottom for the Red Sox. Not only was the Ruth-Barrow situation tugging at the team, but Cleveland moved into first place. Boston lost third baseman Fred Thomas, who had been called to war two days earlier, and now the Red Sox were getting very thin very fast. Barrow had begun purchasing minor-leaguers to bolster his roster—utility man Jack Stansbury, outfielder Walter Barbare, pitcher Vince Molyneaux, pinch hitter Red Bluhm, Cuban infielder Eusebio Gonzalez (several teams signed Cubans, because they were not enemy aliens and not subject to the draft), infielder Frank Truesdale, and later infielder George Cochran and veteran pitcher Jean Dubuc. None helped. Thomas was no star at third base, but he was adequate, far better than any in Barrow’s new crop. (Thomas was rejected by the army because of diabetes, but, afraid of being labeled a draft dodger,
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he enlisted in the navy, which did not require a physical exam.)

Nothing was going right. Pitcher Carl Mays was moved into Class 1A and was harangued daily by agents of the shipyard league. Shortstop Everett Scott, it appeared, would not win his exemption appeal and would remain in Class 1A too. Stuffy McInnis struggled and missed time after an “attack of boils.”
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Barrow bought the rights of outfielder Hughey High—who had left the Yankees to join the shipyards—hoping to play High in left field and move Ruth back to the mound. High consented to join the Sox but failed to show up in Philadelphia.
When contacted by Barrow, High said, “My wife won’t let me.” Even spousal duty was conspiring against the Red Sox.
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But the outlook brightened after July 4. Ruth, Barrow, and Frazee had a meeting, and Frazee agreed to give Ruth a bonus of $1,000 for pulling double duty on the mound and in the field. Ruth agreed to pitch when Barrow needed him—and Barrow wasted no time, calling on Ruth to pitch July 5. For the first time in over a month, Ruth was in the box, finishing the forgettable trip by pitching the Red Sox to a 4–3 win. Back in Boston and facing second-place Cleveland, Ruth had the day off, but Barrow could not resist pinch-hitting him with two men on base and the Red Sox down, 4–2, in the sixth. Ruth smacked a triple and scored on an errant throw. That gave Boston a 5–4 win and put the Red Sox back in first place. Ruth solidified that lead on July 8, when he hit what would have been, under modern scoring rules, his 12th home run, into Fenway’s right-field bleachers in the 10th inning of a scoreless game. Under old rules, the batter stopped when the winning run scored, even if the ball left the park. Because there was a man on first, Ruth’s hit counted only as a triple. But the Red Sox won, 1–0, part of a July string in which they won 15 out of 18. Ruth would stay stuck at 11 home runs.

Hooper, in his 10th season with the Red Sox, finished the year in a bit of a slump (he was batting over.320 on July 1 but hit.249 the rest of the way). Still, the 1918 season was his best all-around year. Hooper tutored Ruth, helped defuse the Barrow-Ruth situation, advised Barrow, and got comfortable as a team leader. For the first time in his career he was the best, most polished everyday player on his team. Hooper thrived. He hit .289, finishing second in the AL in doubles and triples and third in walks and runs. And, he noted, “Barrow was technically the manager, but I ran the team on the field.”
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A fact that surely made the Strategy Board proud.

Crowder’s work-or-fight order went into effect as soon as July 1 arrived, but men of draft age had a 10-day grace period to secure essential work. On July 11 the grace period was up. That day the Cubs took the first half of a home doubleheader from the Braves, 4–3, and between games, as some fans made for the exits, an announcement went up by megaphone: no one would be allowed to leave the park without giving an account of their draft status. The gates were locked and manned by federal agents. If draft-eligible men were found not carrying their
cards, they were taken to the nearby Town Hall police station and jammed into the squad room until they could adequately explain their circumstances. This was part of a “slacker sweep” around Chicago that day. Movie houses, theaters, railway stations, cabarets, and poolrooms were swept, and more than 5,000 suspected slackers were detained. Of those, 500 had been at the Cubs game.
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While there was rancor in the stands, there was anxiety on the field. The Cubs and Braves played the second game of their doubleheader (the Cubs won, 3–2, behind Phil Douglas), but players had to wonder what was to stop officials from asking
them
to show they were not slackers. Ten days after work-or-fight became law, the question of baseball’s usefulness remained unanswered. The notion that the fans who drove the game’s popularity were subject to arrest simply by being in the stands could not have been comforting. Baseball was still waiting for a test case that could be appealed to the War Department and decide the sport’s fate.

A few candidates emerged. The Brighton, Massachusetts, draft board, which oversaw the district in which Braves Field was located, summoned the entire team (eventually modified so that only catcher John Henry had to appear). The board found that baseball was not essential, and an appeal to Washington was prepared. In St. Louis, Rogers Hornsby received word from his home draft board in Fort Worth, Texas, that he needed an essential occupation. He, too, readied an appeal. But the first appeal to reach Baker and Crowder was that of a player in their backyard—Washington catcher Eddie Ainsmith. Manager Clark Griffith filed the appeal for Ainsmith the next day. (In a strange and sad twist, Ainsmith’s wife had died just one week earlier after a long illness, leaving him with a young daughter.)

Griffith was generally a good representative of baseball. The Old Fox was smart and moved easily in Washington’s political circles. His appeal was based on three precepts. First, that baseball was a big business, and enforcing the work-or-fight edict would cripple the business—part of Crowder’s order exempted workers from the mandate if removal of those workers would ruin an entire industry. Baseball would be ruined without players. Second, Griffith noted that players are specialized. Few had skills outside of baseball that could be useful to the government. Because of those limited skills, they could get only menial new jobs in useful fields, which would cause severe financial hardship (another cause for work-or-fight exemption). Third, baseball
was the national sport, and to stop it would end the country’s most popular form of outdoor recreation. Additionally, Griffith pointed out, baseball was not seeking special exemptions for players. It just wanted baseball to be considered an acceptable way to fill the “work” part of the work-or-fight order. Players who were already Class 1A would continue to join the army as called.

Griffith may have made a miscalculation or two in his brief, though. He did not make clear to the War Department just how many of baseball’s players were of draft age—remember, in May, Baker had said he thought most players were outside draft age. Surely, too, Griffith slipped by bringing up the willingness of baseball men to answer the draft call. It was true that many players had joined the colors. But the War Department was also well aware of the many players who had skipped the draft to play for shipyard teams, which had been an embarrassment for the military as well as for baseball.

As Baker considered Griffith’s brief, players kept playing, with their eyes on Washington, their minds on shipyards, and their tired bodies going through the motions on the diamond. “So long as Washington officials keep the players in suspense, there is certain to be bad baseball,” Hugh Fullerton wrote. “The uncertainty and worry already have affected not only individual players, but entire clubs.”
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The Cubs, without ace Grover Cleveland Alexander and wondering when they might lose catcher Bill Killefer, got more worrisome news when Charley Hollocher was ordered to appear before his draft board on July 15 for a physical that, if he passed, would make him eligible to be immediately called. Little-used pitcher Vic Aldridge, who had made three relief appearances, got a jump on his draft board and left the Cubs to join the navy.