The Original Curse (8 page)

Ed Barrow in a rare relaxed moment in 1918. (B
OSTON
P
UBLIC
L
IBRARY
)

“Hubert, you’ve decided to join us,” Barrow said as Leonard, draped in rubber, awkwardly jogged past. “You look smashing in that rubber shirt.”

“I don’t see why I need to wear this thing,” Leonard said. “I am skinny as a schoolboy.”

“Leonard,” Barrow said, “you would not have to wear the rubber shirt if you had not arrived wearing the suit of flab you call your body. You have some poundage to leave behind. Out-of-shape ball players have always donned the rubber shirt. Melts fat.”

“Like hell it does,” Leonard said.

“This is the way things have been done since before you were born,” Barrow said. “Rubber shirts drop weight. Red flannel shirts—
not white, mind you, red—keep pitchers from rheumatism. Everyone knows these things. It’s baseball tradition.”
²

Leonard grumbled about tradition and his arse.

Saturday

Rain. The Red Sox had left Hot Springs and spent three miserable hours on a train just to get 53 miles south—Barrow could have gotten his team that far jogging at a steady trot—to play the Brooklyners in Little Rock, in front of the Camp Pike soldiers. Blue skies and sun, the entire ride from Hot Springs. Off the train and, goddammit, rain. No game. But Barrow told his hitters to get in some batting practice, rain and all.

Ruth was preparing for practice, stretching. Barrow sang, in his head:

Molly, my Molly—Molly, my dear

If it wasn’t for Molly, I wouldn’t be here

Write me a letter, send it by mail

shoot it to me at the old city jail.

Ruth had sung the tune on the train. Now Barrow could not get rid of it.
³

Ruth stepped to the dish. He reared back and swung into his fierce uppercut motion, clubbing a pitch over the right-field fence. The soldiers cheered. Barrow stared.

Ruth hit another. More cheering. And another. Cheering, louder. And another. Louder. And another. Louder. Barrow still stared. No one hit them like that. Five apples knocked out of the park in batting practice.

Ruth was part blessing, part curse. He wasn’t quite square in the head—he’d eat five, six times a day, drink enough for five men, and, Barrow was quite sure, had already done business at every brothel in Hot Springs. But Barrow needed him. Ruth was his ace pitcher. And a hell of a hitter. If only he could split Ruth in two, one on the mound, one at bat. That’s what Barrow needed. Two Ruths.

But now Ed had another problem. The Red Sox would have to pay for all those balls sailing over the fence.

“That’s enough of that,” Barrow announced.

Ruth shrugged, turned, and walked back to the dugout. He smiled at Barrow and belched vigorously.

Sunday

Back in Hot Springs. Scrimmage against Brooklyn. Carl Mays—sneering, Mays was always sneering—on the pitching mound, getting ready to throw to Zack Wheat at bat. Barrow leaned in to watch.

“No hooks, Mays,” Barrow said loudly. “Save that arm.”

Mays nodded. Barrow glanced beyond the fence, out to Baptist Hill and beyond, where the Ozarks wrinkled the horizon. Ruth was in right field. Barrow had done some pitching when he was a young man back in Des Moines, and he knew the value of a pitcher. Ruth would remain a pitcher. But Barrow stuck him in the outfield because the Red Sox were so short on material and Harry Hooper had been suggesting getting Ruth into the lineup. Now Barrow had his eye on Ruth, just to see how the kid looked. Not good. He could hardly keep still, fidgeting, bouncing, examining curiosities in the grass. Look at him out there. He’s bored. He’s a pitcher; he needs the everypitch action. But he sure did whack that grand slam back in the third inning. Cleared the fence by, what, 200 feet? Into the alligator pond past the right-field fence.
⁴

After Ruth hit the grand slam, Dan Howley, Barrow’s pitching coach, turned and said, “Never saw one quite like that.”
⁵
Neither had Barrow.

Ed turned back to the mound. Mays was rocking into his submarine delivery. Ed could see Mays’s grip on the ball.
Sonovabitch!
Barrow’s face flushed. Mays was throwing a curve. “Mays, you bastard!” Barrow shouted. “I said no hooks!”
⁶

Monday

Finally, Leonard was throwing. Ed had been working with six pitchers—just six!—and he needed all the boxmen he could get. Dutch looked to be in good form, tossing for 30 minutes. Coming off the mound, Leonard approached Barrow, wearing that irritating crooked smile. Barrow needed Leonard. He needed pitching. Leonard did not need Barrow. He was said to be making a killing in raisin farming. This annoyed Barrow. In his younger days, Barrow would have knocked Leonard’s smile clear to Little Rock.

“So, when is the Duke coming back?” Leonard asked.

“What Duke?” Barrow said.

“The big gun, the head gizzazzer,” Leonard said. Barrow stared blankly.

“Frazee.” Leonard continued, “You know, we are close, me and him. He and I are just like that,” holding up two crossed fingers. He then reached down and cupped his crotch. “Yup, me and Frazee are closer than my raisins are packed.”
⁷

Barrow did not like this Dutch Leonard.

Tuesday

Discipline was Ed’s strength. And so there were rules that spring. No wives. No poker wagers bigger than 10 cents, and all games were to end by 11:00
P.M
. Wake-up call: 8:30, and no one was to be in the breakfast room past 9:30. The team would practice straight through the afternoon, with no lunch. It was two miles between the hotel and the stadium. Players were required to walk or run the two miles each day.
⁸

Ed was clear on the rules.

Barrow himself was huffing and sweating his way to Majestic Park this morning. A few yards from the entrance he heard applause, followed by a shout from a taxi: “Hey, Ed, you are good for a few more blocks!” He turned and looked, and there they were—what looked like half his players, stuffed into a cab, hooting at him. So much for the required two-mile walk. Ed’s neck burned, and his face reddened.
⁹

Of the 16 major-league teams limbering up for the ’18 season, only the Cubs traveled all the way to California for spring training, and that was mainly because stockholder William Wrigley owned land near Pasadena. In deference to the war, spring training was limited to 30 days, and though no one went quite as far as the Cubs, other teams traveled long distances to hold their camps. Four teams were in Florida. Four others were in Texas. Two were in Louisiana, two were in Georgia, and one was in Alabama. The Red Sox and Dodgers were both in Hot Springs, arguably the birthplace of spring training. As the story goes, the 1886 White Stockings (who later became the Cubs) stopped there on their way back to Chicago after a winter of barnstorming and found the area’s mineral baths useful for melting flab and sobering up. Spring training at the time was similar to modern spring ball—teams brought large groups of players, many of whom had no chance to make the club, for weeks of workouts. They played exhibition games against minor-league teams, against nearby big-league teams, or against their own teammates.

But railroad travel had been restricted because of the war, and the Red Sox took a skeleton crew on their 1918 trip. Barrow was short on players, especially pitchers. That limited his opportunities to have regulars vs. Yannigans games, a problem for Barrow (and all big-league managers) throughout the spring. Another issue was that, though he was strong on discipline, Barrow had never been much of a field manager. The team brought in Evers, after firing the popular Heinie Wagner, to help Barrow with his bench coaching and to play some second base. Nicknamed “the Crab,” Evers was baseball’s top “goat-getter,” a role defined by
The Sporting News
as “loud-mouthed persons who, in uniforms, sit on the benches and attempt to ‘ride’ the enemy with foul abuse of a personal nature … [using] alleged wit and humor of the coarsest kind.”
¹⁰
Evers, it turned out, also liked getting the goats of his teammates and would soon be let go because he was too sharp-tongued and combative for Red Sox players.

Barrow had other serious problems to solve, especially difficult for a new manager with a limited knowledge of the day-to-day workings of a big-league team. The Red Sox were an almost entirely new mix, with Scott and Hooper the only everyday players returning from the ’17 team. Converting McInnis into a third baseman was a top priority. Left field was the other major question. Boston had signed George Whiteman, but he was out of his league. Barrow, testing all of his options, even tried catcher Wally Schang at third and in the outfield. Asked, at one point, what ground he was covering, Schang shrugged and replied, “Siberia, I guess.”
¹¹

Barrow wanted to put his mark on the team with toughness and discipline. About the Red Sox’s first practice on March 13, the
Boston Post
reported, “It is evident that the men are a little in awe of their new boss.”
¹²
But for all Barrow’s focus on discipline—he had a notoriously quick trigger when it came to fining players—these were still ballplayers, and they were going to have typical ballplayer entertainment. Throughout the spring, the Red Sox bolted from practice as quickly as possible in order to get to the horse races at Oaklawn (Barrow often went too). They hung out at the vaudeville shows in Hot Springs’ Calamity Alley. The players were not so awed by Barrow that they could not poke fun at him, either defying him by hiring a car to the park instead of jogging or by nudging his short temper. Pitcher Sam Jones, speaking years later to Lawrence Ritter in
The Glory of
Their Times
, recalled an exchange with Barrow during 1918. Having pitched the day before, Jones was playing checkers in the clubhouse when the batboy told Jones that Barrow wanted him outside for a photo. Jones ignored the request and, as he told Ritter:

“In comes Mr. Barrow himself. As you might know, he was a pretty rough talker. Huge man, with these fantastic bushy eyebrows. They always fascinated me. Couldn’t take my eyes off them. Well, he gave me a good going over for sitting in the clubhouse playing checkers when he’d asked for me outside….

“‘This newspaper photographer came all the way from Providence to take your picture,’ he says.

“‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well, he can go all the way back to Providence without it.’

“Oh, did that get him! … I thought he was going to take a sock at me. He’d been known to do that on occasion, you know. ‘This will cost you $100,’ he shouts. His face was so red he could hardly talk. And you should have seen those eyebrows!

“‘Make it $200,’ I said, still sitting there.

“‘It’s $200 all right.’

“‘Make it $300,’ I said, ‘and then go straight to hell.’

“‘It’s $300,’ he roars, and slams the door.

“Finally, I went out on the field and the photographer posed me and Mr. Barrow together. Arms around each other’s shoulders, both smiling, best friends ever. But as soon as the shutter clicked we both walked real fast in opposite directions.”
¹³

More than Barrow’s temper, though, Boston’s spring foreshadowed what 1918 would become: the Babe Ruth Show. Ruth was a popular left-handed pitcher who had gone 47–25 in the previous two seasons. He was immature on and off the field. He had received a 10-game suspension for punching umpire Brick Owens the previous year and in 1916 missed two weeks with a broken toe suffered when he kicked the bench in anger after an intentional walk. He had well-known appetites for food, drink, and women, but there was an appealing innocence about him. Hooper described him as “a big, overgrown green pea.”
¹⁴
After four years as a pitcher in the majors, Ruth had just nine career home runs, but his swing-for-the-fences approach was unique. He tried for a home run every at bat. That just wasn’t how things were done. The focus of hitters was on making contact, not busting home runs. The fact that Ruth was a pitcher early in his
career probably enabled him to become a power hitter later—had he been an everyday player, some manager surely would have forced him to cut down his swing and focus on contact.

Ruth’s spring success with the bat made an impression—with Barrow, with Hooper, and, most important, with Ruth himself. He was a pitcher, but he liked hitting. His home runs riled the fans. In the Red Sox’s 14 games with Brooklyn that spring, Ruth hit .429 with four homers in 21 at bats. No other Red Sox player hit more than one home run. The
Globe’s
Edward Martin described the home run Ruth hit on March 24: “The ball not only cleared the right field wall, but stayed up, soaring over the street and a wide duck pond, finally finding a resting place for itself in a nook of the Ozark hills.”

Ruth joked, “I would have liked to have got a better hold on that one.”
¹⁵

On April 3, the Cubs arrived in Bakersfield, California, from Fresno, prepared to wrap up 17 days of training on the West Coast and begin the trek back to the Midwest. It hadn’t been a good trip. Mitchell was having the same trouble in California that Barrow was having in Arkansas. Conditions were bad, and not enough players were on hand. A weeklong holdout by Grover Cleveland Alexander hadn’t helped. Now there was one last game before the team would begin heading east, a trip that promised to be a slow crawl, because the Cubs were scheduled for a packed slate of games against minor-leaguers throughout the Southwest. The final game before they left California was in Taft, 46 miles west of Bakersfield, and—this was fitting, given the Cubs’ spring travel woes—the only way to get to Taft was by stagecoach. This helps explain why, over the course of the California mis-adventure, the Cubs called themselves “Weeghman’s trained seals.”
¹⁶

Still, the Taft game drew 3,000 fans. Before it started, a band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a practice that was becoming more common during the war. Most of the Cubs were not quite sure what to do. Outfielder Les Mann, who had served in a quasi-military position in the off-season, training soldiers for the YMCA at Camp Logan in Houston, instructed them—
take off your caps, put them over your hearts, face the band, and, for Pete’s sake, shut up!