The Selling of the Babe (24 page)

Freeman, who had played in Boston after Washington, was magnanimous and later admitted, “I could never hit like Ruth.” He also noted that he believed hitters of his era “would be helpless against the spitter and some of the other deliveries pitchers now use.”

The only other baseball news was coming from the courts in New York. Over there, the whole sordid little story of how baseball ran and operated behind the scenes was slowly being exposed. By entering into a legal war with the Yankees over the Mays deal, Johnson left himself open for legal discovery and what was being revealed stank. Forced to testify under oath, Johnson's long-rumored financial interest in the Cleveland Indians was exposed as fact, as was his desire to have purchased the Red Sox himself from Joseph Lannin after the 1916 season, one thwarted by Frazee. No wonder he had chosen his target. It was further revealed that when the Mays deal was made, Johnson, acting on behalf of the National Commission, communicated in secret with five American League club owners, freezing out what the press began referring to as the “Insurrectos”—the Red Sox, Yankees, and White Sox.

Johnson was in over his head. He thought he was connected, but in the New York courts he couldn't match Ruppert's and Frazee's political and personal power. The Yankees' attorney excoriated Johnson in front of New York Supreme Court judge Robert Wagner, a crony of Frazee (and later his divorce lawyer), and Wagner let him talk, then publicly called Johnson a czar and dictator.

They were hardly disinterested parties, but the Insurrectos charged that it was now clear that Johnson, for years, had “the entire league under his domination.” Those he favored reaped the benefits in the form of favorable trades and other favors. Those he did not—the Yankees, Red Sox under Frazee, and now the White Sox as well—usually got the short end. Increasingly, everything the Red Sox, the Yankees, and, to a lesser degree, the White Sox did, had to take Johnson into account. He was cornered now, and although weakened and publicly humiliated, he was still dangerous. The man who “never forgets an enemy,” now had three who felt the same way about him. Ruppert publicly called for Johnson to be “put out of baseball,” and the Insurrectos worked behind the scenes to garner support from other owners.

For now, however, very little broke through the stranglehold Ruth held over the attention of the nation's baseball fans.
He
was revolutionizing the game. After playing Washington, Boston went into New York, and with the attention of the entire city focused upon him, Ruth rose to the occasion once again. In the eighth inning of the first game of a doubleheader, he hit a curveball to the deepest part of the right field stands and passed Freeman with home run number 26. It hit an empty seat back and rattled around the upper reaches as fans scrambled for the ball.

The guy that got it managed to get Ruth's attention between innings. The King made his way back onto the field and the fan threw the record-setting ball back to its rightful owner. As one writer noted, Ruth now owned two of baseball's most impressive records, the home run mark, for individual achievement, and the scoreless innings pitched mark in the World Series, perhaps the ultimate team mark. Even the fact that the doubleheader was played was a sign of Ruth's power. Johnson had not authorized the second game of the contest, a makeup of one of the Boston rainouts. The Yankees were so eager to insure a big crowd and cash in on Ruth they didn't even bother to ask permission.

That was all that mattered now—cashing in on Ruth. Frazee announced that on September 20, the first game of Boston's final home stand, the Red Sox would honor Ruth with his own day, yet another ploy to milk the Babe for everything he was worth. Now the press started to make ready mention of Ned Williamson's 1884 mark of 27 home runs, providing Ruth yet another target, one more reason for fans to continue coming out to the ballpark.

As if to sustain the drama, for the next eleven days Ruth hit only ground balls, line drives, and flies that fell short of the fence, increasing anticipation every day and suddenly making Williamson's record, which no baseball fan had even heard of a few months before, the most famous in the game. No one cared about the circumstances in which it was set.

What's nearly as interesting as what Ruth was doing was what the press wasn't reporting on, which is everything else in his life. It's not as if Ruth's home run binge coincided with a turnaround in his personal behavior, his sobriety, sexual abstinence, diet, or vocabulary. Oh no, he was still the same coarse, self-obsessed, unrestrained human animal as he had always been. But now Ruth was royalty, protected by his people—the press. They had as much at stake in him as anyone, including Frazee.

Now, apart from the rare, occasional, veiled allusion, the public was shielded from the whispered gossip of the streets. As long as Ruth retained his throne—which he would do for the rest of his life—this other Babe Ruth would rarely be seen. Like Christy Mathewson, whose All-American image was belied by his love of gambling and a few other pursuits never brought up publicly, Ruth would benefit from the same protection. Today, he'd be splashed over Deadspin or TMZ like a sour bucket of paint. In 1919, his life was already being rewritten for the pages of
Boy's Life
. In only a few short months, the transformation of Ruth as both a player and a public figure was remarkable. It needed only the finishing touches to elevate him from the mortal sphere to one inhabited only by the gods, but that was soon to come.

Frazee and the Red Sox pulled out all the stops for Ruth's big day. The Catholic fraternal charitable group the Knights of Columbus agreed to sponsor the festivities. Ruth likely hadn't seen the inside of a church for some time and by now had a list of sins to confess that that would embarrass a whole seminary of priests, but it didn't matter. There was a special song, “Look at Him Now,” written by South Boston songmeister Jack O'Brien and sung by Dorchester tenor Billy Timmins, cash awards and cigars, flag raisings, and anything else they could think of. Hell, Ruth might even hit a home run.

No one went home disappointed. This time 31,000 fans packed already aging Fenway as the bleacher seats, reinforced before the game, sagged and groaned under the weight of the crowd, and the prose ran a gaudy purple. The
Globe
's James O'Leary, rapidly supplanting Webb and Shannon as Ruth's private press agent, wrote, “Rome may have been made to howl for some particular or sundry reasons in the long, long ago, but the efforts of the Roman populace were only murmurs compared to the vocal explosion … of 31,000 fans at Fenway Park.… Nothing like this demonstration was ever heard at Rome or Elsewhere.” The day unfolded as if scripted.

Ruth started the first game on the mound with perhaps as many as 5,000 fans standing behind ropes in the outfield—special ground rules in effect to make sure no home run would be cheapened. Boston scored three, first inning runs—Ruth walked—but after the White Sox tied the score in the sixth Ruth was relieved and moved to left field. The score stayed tied until the ninth … and up came Ruth.

So far, Chicago's Cy Williams had mastered Ruth, the left-hander pitching Ruth carefully, knowing that his best chance came to get him out came from keeping the ball away from the pull hitter. If Ruth had made any change over the course of the 1919 season, it was that he had become more adept at pulling the ball. Yet at Fenway, that wasn't as effective; he'd only homered in Fenway eight times in 250-some plate appearances in 1919, as too many long drives, if not hard down the line, died in deep right, about where the bullpens sit today.

This time however, Ruth reached out toward a fast one going wide of the plate. He got the fat part on it, and lifted the ball not to right, but to left, toward the middle of the wall atop Duffy's Cliff. It first passed over the head of White Sox left fielder Joe Jackson—as a hitter a pure afterthought in Ruth's shadow—then the crowd crammed onto Duffy's Cliff, and then, as heads turned up to watch, over the top of the wall, just to the center field side of the clock perched atop the fence above the scoreboard. Then, according to the press (although none could really see it from the press box), the ball sailed over Lansdowne Street and into the window of a building across the street.

It won the game, it tied Williamson's record, it capped Ruth's career in Boston, and it provided an exclamation point to the season. The stands fairly exploded, not with the sounds of the crowd at the Roman Colosseum cheering the death of a slave thrown to the lions, but worshipping an emperor taking over before an adoring public, Ruth dutifully doffing his cap as he toured the bases. More recent Red Sox lore counts Ted Williams's home run in his final major league at bat as the most dramatic in Fenway Park history, or perhaps Fisk's home run in 1975, but neither had anything on the drama the 31,000 fans in Fenway on September 20, 1919, had just witnessed. If was as if Ruth could will himself to hit a home run on demand. No one had ever seen anything like it.

Then came the ceremonies. Ruth and his wife gathered at home plate and received tribute. Mrs. Ruth received a traveling bag—she'd soon need it—while Ruth accepted $600 worth of bonds from the Knights of Columbus. Then, as the two were surrounded by photographers and cameramen, ritual was made of the presentation to Ruth of the bat that tied the record. More ceremony followed, as Ruth magnanimously gave it back to a delegation from the Liberty Loan Newsboy Association, which planned to auction it off to support “Scotty's Newsboy Fund,” a charity honoring a fifteen-year-old Boston newsboy who had enlisted and then given up his life in France.

Interestingly enough, who wasn't involved in the ceremony was almost as interesting as who was. Harry Frazee later claimed to have given Ruth a cut of the proceedings that day—$5,000—but he stayed out of the way and watched from his box. Generally, whenever a player had a “day” his teammates chipped in and made some kind of presentation, or at the very least were involved in the ceremonies. Not on this occasion. Tellingly, Ruth's teammates only watched. He received no gifts from them.

It was in all ways and every way Ruth's day, and his alone. He didn't limit his contribution to the home run; he also tumbled into the crowd and nearly made a remarkable catch, threw out a runner at the plate, and in game two hit what many fans thought was home run number 28 when he rocketed a ball into the crowd in right, only to have the umpire rule that since it didn't make the fence, it would only be a double. The crowd howled and a “Sergeant of the Military Guard” even went out and took statements from witnesses, which he later tried to present to umpire Billy Evans. The arbiter told him, none too politely, to “attend to your police duties and leave the umpiring to me.”

A day marked by the spectacular ended quietly. When Allen Russell retired Buck Weaver to end game two, the Red Sox escaped with a doubleheader sweep. Ruth trotted off the field to applause, but no one, as yet, had an inkling it would be the last time he'd appear at Fenway Park wearing a Red Sox uniform.

Of course, the very next day, when the frenzy for Ruth was highest, the Red Sox played … in Bristol, Connecticut. It was a Sunday and once again the Sox lost a potential big crowd to the blue laws. Frazee had done what he could to compensate, scheduling exhibitions in the hinterlands as much as possible, taking the same approach he did with his Broadway shows, but it wasn't very lucrative and the players resented the travel. Taking into account the cost of sending the whole team back and forth several hundred miles to play before what was usually only 5,000 fans or so, it didn't compare to the 30,000 suddenly eager to jostle their way into Fenway to see Ruth.

It was almost as if everyone sensed that something special was taking place, something that was only a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and something bigger than Babe Ruth alone. At the precise time the country was changing, everything picking up the pace and becoming more modern, faster, quicker, bigger, and flashier, baseball was keeping up with the times and evolving from a game in which victory was wrung out like a snake coiled around a rat, a slow squeeze of defeat, to a sudden strike. It wasn't trench warfare anymore; it was a revolution. The air force had been called in and Ruth, the deadliest of aces, was leading the way by showing the awesome power contained in the home run, dropping bombs into the crowd.

And he wasn't the only one, either. The new ball was having its impact all around baseball as every hitter in the league was affected by a ball that traveled a little better, that rewarded a big swing with a big result. Home runs and offense were up almost everywhere. In 1917, the last full season of major league ball, clubs had combined for 335 home runs. In 1918, due to a combination of the war and the baseball, the total slipped to 235. In 1919, however, led by Ruth, clubs combined for 447 home runs in only a 140 game season, and the arc of their frequency more or less matched Ruth's, a relative handful in April and May and then a deluge later in the year as the new ball, and, to a new degree, a new approach took hold.

Perhaps the biggest impact had yet to be seen in the major leagues but was apparent everywhere on the sandlots and the other places where boys still played baseball from dawn until dusk. They didn't imagine themselves to be Cobb, or Jackson, slashing out singles and committing acts of daring on the bases. They were Ruth, grabbing the bat at the end and swinging for all it was worth, as enamored of Ruth and what he could do as Ruth himself had once been of Brother Matthias, dreaming of one day doing what had then seemed almost superhuman.

In a few short years, the first of those boys and young men who were now dreaming of being Babe Ruth would enter professional baseball and complete the revolution he had started from the bottom up. In only a handful of years the game would almost be unrecognizable, the impact of the home run as dramatic on the sport of baseball as the forward pass in football, or the jump shot in basketball. Transformative is simply not a strong enough word. Ruth didn't transform the sport; it remade itself in his image.