The Selling of the Babe (10 page)

That may have been true, but it also may have been something more. It hadn't earned the name yet, but Ruth may well have contracted a case of the most deadly pandemic the world has ever seen, the so-called Spanish flu. The sore throat and rapid, high fever were classic early symptoms.

The malady, which likely first appeared in Austria in the spring of 1917, made it to the United States in Haskell County, Kansas, in January of 1918. This first wave of the disease reached the East Coast in March, and in the spring there were sporadic outbreaks throughout the Northeast. The government partially suppressed news so as not to cause panic during wartime.

And there was reason to panic. In a three-year period approximately one third of the human population became infected, killing 10 to 20 percent of everyone who contracted the flu—perhaps as many as 100 million people worldwide, 6 percent of the human race. The first wave was less virulent and tended to be most dangerous to the very young, the old, and those with weaker immune systems. At the start of the season, nearly a dozen members of the Cleveland Indians were sick, and soon thereafter most of Detroit's pitchers became ill. Younger and healthier subjects, like Babe Ruth and other ballplayers, were usually able to fight off the disease and, significantly, gain some immunity. During the summer, it appeared as if the epidemic had passed. It was a good thing, because the second wave of the disease, a mutation that swept over the United States in the fall, proved to be much deadlier, and for reasons still not fully understood, most dangerous to healthy young adults like Ruth.

Ruth stayed in the hospital for the next five days, until the following Sunday, much of it with his neck wrapped in ice and Helen by his side, as the swelling went down and his fever finally broke. Ruth was tickled when Dick Hoblitzell and Bill Carrigan sent him flowers; no one had ever sent him flowers before. He got a huge kick out of it and showed them off every time anyone entered his room.

He went to the ballpark the day after his release as the Red Sox hosted Chicago, and after playing .500 ball with Ruth in the hospital, as he sat on the bench still recovering they ripped off four straight wins. But the signs were not good. On Memorial Day, a doubleheader versus Washington drew only 11,000 fans, Ruth returning to the lineup in game two as a pinch hitter. The uncertainty over whether the season would continue played havoc with attendance. A year earlier, the Sox had drawn twice that on Labor Day. It wasn't just that interest was down; simply being able to go to the ballpark was akin to a public acknowledgment that you probably weren't doing your share to support the war. They might as well have posted a sign outside that read “Welcome Slackers and Draft Dodgers.”

Ruth didn't make it back into the regular lineup until June 2, when he took a turn on the mound in Detroit. He was wild, and lost 4–3, but he launched a home run to right field that allegedly landed on Trumbull Avenue, described as both “the hardest hit ball of the year” in Detroit and a feat never accomplished before. Even Cobb, the greatest hitter in the game, had never done it. As the Red Sox then split the four-game series with the last-place Tigers, Ruth played the rest of the series in center, as Barrow was afraid he would run into the fence in left.

But the only fence that mattered to Ruth was in right field, as he duplicated his home run three more times, setting a new record with home runs in four straight contests, including one in a no-hitter tossed by Dutch Leonard. Barrow now admitted “it's almost impossible to keep him out of the game,” and fans throughout baseball, already thrilled with Ruth, now became enthralled.

With the pennant race and the season entirely up in the air, what Ruth did became more important than who beat who and what place that gained in the standings. For perhaps the first time in baseball history, fans, en masse, were not so much rooting for a team, and following the score, but rooting for an individual player, and following his every action. In Europe, the Allies were bogged down in the trenches, the war proceeding inch by bloody inch. In comparison, Ruth was the precise opposite, all kinetic action and excitement.

Even Ruth was getting into the act. Dick Hoblitzell's number had finally come up and he was on the precipice of joining the service, so Barrow moved Stuffy McInnis back to first base and installed Fred Thomas at third. Ruth wasn't happy about that. Playing outfield was boring, and he didn't give a damn what was best for the team. He wanted to play first and complained, “I get sleepy out there in the field.”

But there may have been something else at play as well. Ruth's home run explosion in Detroit, giving him seven for the year in only 23 games, may have also marked a turning point in the season, because from that point forward, not only did Ruth's home run production drop, but so did that of the entire league. Of the 95 home runs hit in the American League in 1918, 59 came during the first half of the season, when most teams presumably were still using baseballs manufactured before the war effort commandeered wool and horsehide. By midseason, these inferior baseballs, wound with lower quality wool and covered with hides that would have been discarded before the war, were coming into use, a subpar and less resilient product that rapidly turned soft. Although hitting, in general, was not much affected, home run hitting was. After averaging a home run every three games so far in 1918, Ruth would hit only four more over the remainder of the season.

Day by day, which team won and which team lost seemed to matter less and less. While baseball hemmed and hawed and waited around for Washington to make a decision, some players began looking around at other options. There was already a tradition of industrial semipro baseball in many places in the United States, and more than a few players earned more money playing semipro ball than they ever could have in professional baseball, with the added benefit of being able to live in one place and have a cushy job in the postseason. The captains of industry who operated the nation's largest industrial plants liked nothing better than to beat the competition, so at some levels these teams were semipro in name only. Most ballplayers never saw the assembly line.

With the “work or fight” order pending, there was a sudden buildup in industrial production, particularly in the steel, textile, and shipbuilding industries. Eager to avoid the war, and afraid that if they waited much longer they might be drafted, major leaguers began to entertain offers from “essential” industries that also just happened to sponsor a potent baseball team. The White Sox star outfielder Joe Jackson was already threatening to quit and Red Sox pitcher Dutch Leonard was mulling an offer from the Fore River shipyard in nearby Quincy, Massachusetts. Lacking any real leadership at the top from Ban Johnson, the season was taking on the character of a sinking ship. It was every man for himself and not enough lifeboats.

Ruth was not an exception, and he led the way in the “what's in it for me?” brigade. The Red Sox needed him on the mound—particularly if they lost Leonard or anyone else. Yet after pitching in relief and losing to Cleveland 14–7 on June 7, walking the only two batters he faced, Ruth let Barrow know he didn't want to pitch anymore.

He didn't make a big announcement, and Barrow didn't push back very hard, but Ruth now balked every time Barrow brought it up, first telling the manager that pitching and playing in the field made him too tired. The press didn't make much of it, either. With the Red Sox on the road, there wasn't even a Boston beat writer with the team.

The next day Ruth struck out to end the game, stranding the tying run as he swung for the fences. When Barrow pushed him again about pitching when his turn came up next, Ruth suddenly complained of a sore arm. When that raised eyebrows it suddenly morphed into a sore wrist, one that he decided to treat by wrapping with a leather strop just to make sure everyone noticed, a malady that miraculously disappeared as soon as he lifted a bat or had to make a throw in the outfield.

It didn't sit well with either Barrow or many of his teammates. They recognized that as much as they liked his bat, it was even more valuable when paired with his arm, and if Ruth couldn't pitch, and Leonard went to “work” in a shipyard, they would not only have a short pitching staff, but one without any reliable left-handers, leaving them exposed.

It was uncanny, almost even comical, but the uncertainty of the season left Ruth feeling immune. He received little criticism in the Boston press. The fans' preoccupation with whether or not Ruth hit a home run sold newspapers, and in that pre-radio era, when the only way to know what took place at the ballpark was either to attend the game in person or cobble together a full accounting from several papers, Ruth moved newsprint.

It almost didn't matter if he hit a home run or not. Either one paper or another described damn near every swing in excruciating detail. There may never have been a player in baseball history whose pop-ups, fly-outs, foul drives, and grunting misses attracted more press, or apparently never committed an inconsequential act on the field. The newspapers had created a mythic Colossus and now they had to keep feeding the public appetite for it.

Over the next few weeks, Ruth got his way, playing left field, first base, and even center, hitting relatively well but not quite to his earlier standard, his home runs much less frequent as the deader ball came into play. The Red Sox stumbled along, playing barely .500 baseball, clinging to a narrow lead of a game or two as New York, Chicago, and Cleveland remained in pursuit, with no team able to get any traction.

The pennant was Boston's for the taking, but the team could not overcome the twin loss of Ruth and Leonard, who last pitched on June 20 and then joined the Fore River team. After a slow start, he'd been Boston's best pitcher over the last month, giving up only a single earned run in his final 32 innings. His departure from Boston's rotation left it in shambles. After Mays, Joe Bush and Sad Sam Jones, Barrow was left flipping coins. Frazee picked up players when he could and even tried to entice former star Ray Collins, now retired, off his Vermont farm, but as more and more players left for jobs or joined the service, everyone was looking for help.

Then Ruth made a bad situation even worse. During the brief home stand, he crashed his car into a telephone pole and although he escaped unscathed, it was his fourth or fifth car accident in the past few years and was almost certainly alcohol related. The Red Sox then went into New York and dropped three of four to the Yankees, although Ruth, as was his custom in the Polo Grounds, managed to crack a home run—significantly, in the first inning, before the ball got soft—one the
Boston Herald
described as a “tornadic thump” that caromed off the concrete facade of the upper deck in right field. Although good ole Bob Dunbar, the
Herald's
faux byline, offered, “Babe can hit telegraph poles as hard as he hits the horsehide. We love him just the same,” Barrow didn't share the sentiment.

He didn't just want Ruth to pitch—he needed him to, even after he cracked another home run, his 11th of the year, off Walter Johnson in Washington.

Everyone seemed caught up in the hype—at least everyone with a typewriter. Dispatches to soldiers in Europe supplied only the scores—unless Ruth hit a home run. And there was all sorts of wild speculation, or at least speculation that seemed wild at the time. One writer in the
Boston American
calculated that if Ruth remained in the lineup “his collection of four-play slams at the end of the campaign would be forty-four.”

Everything came to a head on July 2. After Barrow and Ruth argued about Ruth taking the mound again and Ruth refused, he came to bat in the sixth inning with the Red Sox trailing the Senators 3–0. Washington's Harry Harper was having no trouble as the Red Sox hitters seemed to be going through the motions, and Barrow ordered Ruth to take the first pitch—maybe they could start to tire Harper out, or get a good pitch to hit.

But that was not Ruth. He was already fuming over the way he'd been pitched to recently, as pitchers were beginning to figure out the best way to retire him was to let his aggressiveness work against him. It had worked, too, as over the last month his batting average had tumbled from over .400 to just over .300. He was becoming an “all or nothing” hitter, something the savvy gamblers in the stands—and the pitchers—were starting to realize. Ruth ignored Barrow, swung at the first pitch to fall behind, then took a couple more wild swings and walked back to the bench.

Barrow let him have it. His patience was gone. “That was a bum play,” he told Ruth, and Ruth responded by telling Barrow if he called him a bum again, he'd get a punch in the nose, although Ruth likely used a few additional adjectives. Barrow snapped back “That will cost you $500,” and Ruth stormed out of the dugout, changed into his street clothes, and after sitting in the stands for a bit left the park, showing up several hours later at his father's saloon in Baltimore, still hot. After the game, Barrow told the press Ruth left the game because of stomach trouble, but no one was fooled for long. Ruth had become a headache.

He had options. As his fame increased so, too, had his opportunities to make money on the side. Johnny Igoe, also a member of the Royal Rooters, Boston's famous group of Red Sox fans made up of equal parts of politicians, gamblers, and businessmen (most of whom were all three), had gained Ruth's confidence in money matters and acted as sort of a de facto agent. He was always alerting him to opportunities to earn a little extra. If Dutch Leonard had found it more lucrative to play shipyard ball than stay in the major leagues, what was Ruth worth?

Barrow didn't know it, but Ruth had already been approached by representatives of a shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia. He knew enough to send a wire to their manager, Frank Miller, asking what he could get. The shipyard immediately dispatched a representative to Baltimore to work something out. The July 4th holiday was coming up, and if Ruth appeared, a big crowd was guaranteed. The Red Sox would be playing the A's in a doubleheader in Philadelphia at the same time, but with Ruth onboard, the shipyard just might outdraw the major leaguers. While Ruth, technically, could only be paid a shipyard worker's wage, there is little question that some kind of side arrangement was in the works—Ruth was always eager to accept offers of cash. While much would be made of his joyous behavior during public appearances, much of the time those appearances were not quite as spontaneous as they appeared but rather were accompanied by a fat envelope of hundred-dollar bills. It was easy to smile then.