The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Read online

  The manager did not say that a disciplinary problem didn’t exist with the young pitcher.

  The 20-year-old Babe Ruth (who thought he was 21) was a kid let loose in the adult funhouse in 1915. He was loud. He was profane. Nights ended only when morning arrived. There was no such thing as ordinary self-discipline or self-control. Joe Lannin had jumped his salary to a very respectable $3,500 for the season. Money removed the last of few inhibitions. He was off to fill in all the blanks.

  Nothing mattered except the fun. Action. His first trip around the baseball circuit had been taken with bug-eyed wonder. Now he had an idea of what was out on the table—and it was time to grab.

  He and Helen rented an apartment in Cambridge in the shadow of Harvard University, and the fog moved in tight around their relationship. They would do things together, be seen in public, go to bowling parties and events, but he clearly had an outside paper route too, one that did not include her. Very early there was an accommodation for infidelities. What did she think about that? Fog.

  The later-distributed picture of his personal life was a mosaic of anecdote, rumor, speculation, exaggeration, and a headline every now and then. Exclamation points usually accompanied each addition. He liked to eat! He liked women! He used three swear words in every five words he spoke! There was a question about when he started drinking—teammate Harry Hooper said he never remembered Ruth drinking in Boston; other people did—but when he did start to drink, he liked to drink!

  Ernie Shore, the other young pitcher and a college graduate, did not last long as an early roommate. He said in public that he didn’t like Ruth using his toothbrush all the time. He said in private that he didn’t like a roommate who never flushed the toilet, who walked around naked, who never sat down, never slept. A pride for personal flatulence and exaggerated belches also was not an admired quality.

  The consumption of food was always a wonder. The emerging Babe liked his steaks uncooked and he liked them large. Helen told an interviewer that he would eat two large uncooked steaks at a sitting, consuming an entire bottle of chili sauce on the side. He would order piles of sandwiches when the train stopped in the night on the road, eat them in rapid order. He would eat six, eight, ten hot dogs at a time, wash them down with four, six, eight bottles of soda (“On Sunday we had three hot dogs, which we called “weenies…”). He would eat before the game, after the game, during the game, until Carrigan ruled there was no eating on the bench, and then Ruth snuck food into the clubhouse. He ate every day like a man released from prison.

  The stories about women were constant. He told them. Everybody told them. Not exactly shy about his sexuality, he brought professional women back to his room on the road, coupling while his poor roommate tried to sleep. (In a story told in many variations, the names and places changing with each retelling, Ruth is in the bedroom of a suite with a professional, or maybe an amateur, while the roommate tries to sleep in the living room. Ruth, after each adventure, comes into the living room to smoke a cigar. The roommate the next morning counts the cigar butts in the ashtray. The number is…it varies. Seven seems popular.)

  Third baseman Larry Gardner talked about walking into a room and finding Ruth with yet another prostitute.

  “The guy was lying on the floor being screwed by a prostitute,” Gardner said. “He was smoking a cigar and eating peanuts and this woman was working on him.”

  All women were potential partners. He let that be known, through word, leer, and innuendo. Not all women were charmed.

  “He was a mess,” Larry Gardner’s wife, Margaret, remembered in Ken Sobol’s Babe Ruth and the American Dream. “He was foul-mouthed, a show-off, very distasteful to have around. The kind of person you would never dream of having over for dinner. I suppose he was likable enough in his way, but you could never prove it by me.

  “Once, on a train, he came up to me and started talking in that loud voice of his about how I had gotten him in trouble. I asked why and he said earlier on the trip he had seen a woman he thought was me and he had come up behind her and whopped her on the head, but it turned out to be somebody he didn’t know. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.”

  He was a practical joker in the clubhouse, physical stuff out of second grade—like nailing someone’s new shoes to the floor, slipping a piece of cardboard into the middle of someone’s sandwich, using fire in creative ways. The bulk of his teammates accepted him in the way they would accept a mischievous, immature little brother. Some couldn’t stand him. The team was split pretty much into two different cliques along religious lines, the Protestants and the Catholics. Ruth was with the Catholics. Veterans Tris Speaker and Smokey Joe Wood, best friends and leaders of the Protestants, couldn’t stand him. Forty years later Wood would do a taped interview with Lawrence Ritter and talk about life with “the Big Baboon.” Thinking about what he said, pretty much unkind, he would call Ritter back a few days later to redo the interview in a nicer fashion.

  The “Baboon” nickname was in effect. “Tarzan, King of the Apes” was another. A late entry was “Two Head,” a tribute to the literal size of his head (large) and the figurative size (growing larger by the day.) That was a favorite of Dapper Dan Howley, a former Phillies catcher from nearby Weymouth, who worked out with the team.

  Howley spotted Ruth driving one day on Washington Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in Boston. Howley started shouting, “Two Head, Two Head.” Ruth spotted him, stopped his car, and started chasing him. Traffic backed up immediately. Howley hid. Automobile management was and always would be a problem. Ruth drove fast and without worry. He parked anywhere. He hit things, including pedestrians, was caught for speeding, had at least one auto incident in each calendar year. He hit a hay wagon in 1915.

  Every day was a 24-hour flurry of activity. He dressed in a cacophony of plaids and colors, had a pair of yellow shoes. He was known in the sporting houses off the Fenway. He was increasingly known in the sporting houses across the American League. He hunted, fished, brought words to exclusive golf courses that simply weren’t allowed. He had another sandwich, thank you very much. He developed a taste for beer.

  Carrigan, who first fined him back in training camp, eventually came up with a plan to corral him on the road. Dutch Leonard was another late-night rambler, and the manager started ordering two adjoining hotel rooms at every stop. He put himself in one room with Leonard, coach Heinie Wagner in the next room with Ruth. That arrangement didn’t end the wanderings (no word on whether Ruth used Heinie Wagner’s toothbrush), but it did slow them down. Carrigan also tried to curb Ruth’s spending. He drew Ruth’s pay and attempted to ration out the money every day. This did not work as well.

  “He had no idea whatsoever of money,” Carrigan said. “You have to remember his background.”

  Carrigan had another plan for spring training in 1916. He invited the wives to come to Hot Springs. Helen made the trip. She was as much of a young, naive outsider with the other wives as the Babe was with their husbands. The couple did go out, however, with the Gardners one day to a carnival. The Babe paid the operator to stop the Ferris wheel while he and Helen were at the top, proceeding to rock the car back and forth and scare her witless. He loved carnivals, loved the midway at Revere Beach near Boston. Most kids did.

  Sometime during the day the party passed the monkey cages. Ruth started jumping around in front of a cage, doing monkey impressions. One of the monkeys started to do exactly what Ruth was doing.

  “Look, Babe,” Helen said. “He knows you.”

  The next two seasons—1916 and 1917—were his grand moments on the mound. No pitcher in baseball, certainly no left-handed pitcher, was better. He could throw a fastball past anyone, including the feared Ty Cobb of the Tigers. He was 23–12 the first year, 24–13 the second year. In 1916 he had a league-leading 1.75 ERA and a record nine shutouts. In 1917 he pitched 35 complete games in 41 starts. He was durable and consistent.

  The Federal League had folded after the 191
5 season, creating a reverse stream of talent back to the major leagues in 1916, a situation that should have caused trouble for a young pitcher. Hadn’t the talent vacuum created by the Federals been one of the reasons he’d jumped to the American League so fast in the first place? Shouldn’t a tightening of talent make his job harder? Not really. He seemed to handle whatever came along.

  “One night he and Helen were out riding when their car ran out of gas,” Herb Pennock, a young patrician lefty from Kenneth Square, Pennsylvania, who’d joined the team in 1915 and oddly had become Ruth’s best friend, said. “Babe had to walk five miles to get some. He didn’t get to sleep until five in the morning. Then he pitched the first game of a doubleheader, won it, 1–0, and took the second with a homer. The next time Esther, my wife, saw Helen, she said, ‘What do you feed that man?’”

  His duels with Walter Johnson in 1916 were a memorable, season-long series of struggles. Johnson, the Washington Senators’ 28-year-old star right-hander, had established himself as the benchmark for all pitchers. He was in the midst of a string of 10 seasons when he would win 20 or more games, on the way to 417 career wins, second only to Cy Young in baseball history. He was a tall (6-foot-2) and gentlemanly character who didn’t smoke, drink, cuss, or throw at batters’ heads. Cobb always claimed he crowded the plate against Johnson because he knew Johnson was too nice to brush him back. Not that it mattered. Johnson had exceptionally long arms and threw only fastballs from a sidearm motion that froze right-handed batters in the box. He was called both “the Big Train” and “Barney,” after Barney Oldfield, the auto racer.

  Matched against Ruth, the emotional, developing reprobate, Johnson easily was cast as the white hat against the black hat, goodness against perdition. The problem was, perdition had the much better team behind him. The two men faced each other five times during the ’16 season:

  April 17—Ruth was a 5–1 winner in a rain-shortened, six-inning affair. He gave up eight hits, struck out six. Johnson was whacked around for 11 hits.

  June 1—Ruth was a 1–0 winner. He gave up only three hits. The winning run came in the eighth inning when speedy Mike McNally scored from second on an infield out.

  August 15—Ruth was a 1–0 winner in 13 innings. Johnson gave up only five hits in the first 12 innings. Ruth gave up only one in the last seven.

  September 9—Ruth was a 2–1 winner. He gave up four hits. Johnson gave up eight.

  September 12—Three days after their last meeting, on two days’ rest, goodness and perdition met for the last time of the year. It was the last home game of the season for the Senators, and Clark Griffith brought Johnson back because he wanted to give the fans a show. He tried to give Johnson an edge, having the shades on the windows at Griffith Stadium pulled up to create a glare every time the Red Sox took the field on defense. (The Red Sox protested and the practice stopped.) A drummer also played loudly every time Ruth was ready to pitch. (The Red Sox protested and the drummer was allowed to keep drumming.)

  For a long time none of that mattered. Ruth cruised. He brought a 2–0 shutout into the ninth inning, but then loaded the bases, surrendered a game-tying, two-run double to John Henry, and was pulled from the game. The Red Sox scored a run in the top of the tenth, but Ernie Shore gave up two in the bottom to hand the Senators and Johnson the win. Ruth had no decision.

  It was terrific athletic theater. Added to a win in his first year, Ruth was now 5–0 against the Train. The two men, between them, won 48 games during the year. Neither surrendered a single home run. In 1917 Ruth would stretch his string to 6–0 with a third 1–0 win, a two-hitter, but Johnson finally would prevail in the last month of the season, 6–2.

  “That was one of the best ball games I have ever seen,” American League president Ban Johnson exulted after one of the 1–0 thrillers. “It was a treat to be in the stands and watch two such masterful twirlers as Johnson and Ruth. Until the Red Sox bunched two hits and a sacrifice fly in the eighth, I thought the game would likely have to be called for darkness with neither team able to tally.”

  Ruth’s two most memorable performances, other than his meetings with Johnson, came in different-sized packages. The first lasted 14 innings and was part of the 1916 World Series. The second lasted four pitches and was part of a 1917 perfect game.

  In the second game of the 1916 Series against the Brooklyn Superbas, finally getting his first postseason start, Ruth surrendered an inside-the-park home run to Hi Miers in the first inning, a ball that was rifled between Speaker and Hooper and kept rolling in the Fenway Park outfield. After that, he simply shut down the visitors. Lefthander Sherry Smith, pitching the game of his life for the Superbas, surrendered a run in the third on a groundout by Ruth, then also settled down.

  The game, played on a dark Boston day, went into extra innings, one after another, and the pitchers kept battling and the darkness grew increasingly darker. In the bottom of the fourteenth, after Dick Hoblitzel walked and was sacrificed to second, manager Carrigan made some inspired choices. He knew the game probably would not last another inning, due to the darkness, so he sent McNally in to run for Hoblitzel. He brought Del Gainer, a righty, in to bat for Gardner, a lefty. Gainer singled into the gloom in left. McNally ran home with the winning run. Carrigan was a genius. The Babe was a World Series winner.

  “I told you a year ago I could take care of those National League bums,” he told Carrigan, the Sox on their way to a second straight world championship. “You never gave me a chance.”

  The four-pitch appearance in a perfect game came on June 23, 1917. A number of things had changed from the glories of ’16. Carrigan was gone, for starters, retired at age 34 to run a bank in Lewiston, Maine. Owner Joe Lannin was gone, replaced by Harry Frazee, a theatrical entrepreneur from New York. The precision also had gone from the Red Sox machine as it headed toward a second-place finish, eight and a half games behind the Chicago White Sox.

  Ruth had turned petulant, even though he had a 12–4 record and the team was still only two games out. He grumbled loudly about errors behind him, about judgments against him by umpires. He had been involved in assorted loud discussions, arguments, both in his own clubhouse and on the field. He soon was involved in one here on June 23.

  Facing leadoff batter Ray Morgan of the Senators at Fenway, he threw ball one and didn’t like umpire Brick Owens’s call. He threw ball two and then ball three and didn’t like either of those calls. Grousing from the mound at Owens, he delivered ball four and really didn’t like the call. As Morgan departed for first, Ruth continued to shout and Owens told him to keep quiet or he would be out of the game. Ruth then informed Owens he would punch him in the nose if Owens ejected him—and Owens did just that, ejected him. Ruth charged the umpire.

  Catcher Pinch Thomas tried to stop him, and did in part, but Ruth still unloaded a punch that landed somewhere on the back of Owens’s head. The umpire went to the ground. It all would have been racy but perishable stuff—the subsequent $100 fine and nine-day suspension from the league office soon forgotten—except for what replacement pitcher Ernie Shore did.

  Morgan, after all of the hubbub, tried to steal second. Replacement catcher Sam Agnew, in the lineup since Thomas also had been ejected, threw out Morgan at second. Replacement pitcher Shore, working on only eight warm-up pitches and two days’ rest, then proceeded to retire the next 26 Senators in a row. The feat was deemed a perfect game, one of baseball’s rarest accomplishments.

  For the next 74 years, until long after all the participants were departed, the perfection of Shore’s performance would be celebrated. In 1991 the eight-man Committee for Statistical Accuracy would be formed to look at all the records that had been set in baseball’s history. The committee would discard an asterisk typed next to one famous home run record and rule on the record-setting legitimacy of over 50 other events that had taken place. One of them was Ernie Shore’s perfect game, which was changed to “a combined no-hitter” between Shore and George Herman Ruth.

  It turned
out to be the Babe’s only no-hitter.

  The off-season between 1917 and 1918 was spent mostly in New England. This was a change. With his first World Series check of $3,780.25 in 1915, Ruth had backed his father in the purchase of a bar on the corner of Lombard and Eutaw streets in Baltimore. He and Helen had spent that winter of 1915–16 in one of the two apartments above the bar, and he had run a small gymnasium behind the bar. They also had spent time there after the following season. He’d crashed a car in Baltimore in the winter of 1916–17, in fact, totaled it. Helen reportedly suffered “internal injuries.”

  This year’s off-season car crash was in Boston, late on a November night, another total as he tangled with a trolley. Helen was not injured in this one because she was not in the car. Another woman, nameless, was. No other details given. Sportswriters and fans read between the lines and smiled.

  Home, at any rate, was now a cottage in South Sudbury, Massachusetts, leased year-round from a Sudbury man named Bill Joyce. It probably wasn’t a bad idea to stay in the area. A backdrop for the entire season had been the war in Europe. The United States had entered the conflict on April 4, back in spring training, and no one had been affected by the first draft call in June. A second call in September, however, had sent manager Jack Barry and other unmarried members of the team to the enlistment office of the Naval Reserve. Who knew what would happen next? Would married men be called?

  The Babe had found the cottage and Sudbury, a rural town 30 miles outside Boston, early in his Red Sox career. A number of players and local celebrities lived or stayed in the area. He liked Sudbury, and Sudbury, enthused at having a real-life baseball star in its midst, liked him. He had been given what Joyce called “a lifetime lease” on the cabin. He planned to use it.

  No doubt there was some subterranean plotting here. Helen, stuck 30 miles from the big city, certainly gave the gentleman of the house a free pass for his in-town wanderings. The Babe also liked the place. It sat on the edge of Great Pond, perfect for whatever daydreams he might have glimpsed on a Currier and Ives calendar on a wall somewhere in the institutional cold at St. Mary’s Industrial School.