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

  Swung too hard? Hooper was on the Babe’s side.

  He campaigned often to have Ruth inserted into the lineup. He brought shortstop Everett Scott and Heinie Wagner and other teammates into the argument with Barrow. The Red Sox had edged to the front in the early stage of the pennant race, but had done it with pitching and speed. They needed hitting, especially left-handed hitting. Barrow’s argument always was that he would be “the laughingstock of the league” if he switched his best pitcher into an everyday player. Hooper’s comeback considered the economics of the situation. He had heard a rumor that Barrow now had a $50,000 investment in the team. Did Barrow notice the way people clamored to see the Babe? Did he think they really wanted to see him pitch? More at-bats would equal larger crowds, which would equal more money.

  The assault finally worked.

  On May 4, the Babe pitched against the Yankees at the Polo Grounds and had a wild afternoon. Yankees manager Miller Huggins decided to attack him with bunts, and he handled 13 chances with two errors. At the plate, he drew revenge. In the seventh inning, after booming a tremendous foul ball and telling umpire Billy Evans, “I’ll hit this [next] one right back and there’ll be no doubt about it,” he homered into the upper deck. The Yankees won, 4–3, but when the game ended, the Babe was sitting on second base after hitting a double.

  On May 5, Sunday baseball still illegal in New York, the Red Sox played an exhibition in Clifton, New Jersey. They beat the Doherty Silver Sox, 3–1, and the important part of the day was that the Babe played the last four innings at first base. Dick Hoblitzel, a dentist and the regular first baseman, had injured a finger in the Yankees game. Ruth went hitless in two plate appearances but played well in the field, well enough that he made his major league debut as a position player the next day against the Yankees at first. Barrow had cracked.

  A weird heat wave hit New York on May 6. In the 85-degree temperature, which broke a 112-year-old record, patrons were suddenly wearing straw hats. In the fourth inning, Stuffy McInnis on first, Ruth hit what was termed in one account “a saucy home run, high into the attic in the grandstand.” Frazee was in the stands, sitting next to Yankees owner Col. Jake Ruppert, who turned and offered $150,000 for Ruth right there. It was a joke. Frazee laughed. Ruppert laughed. It was a joke to be remembered.

  On May 7, the Red Sox had moved down to Washington. Walter Johnson was pitching. Ruth was again at first, this time batting cleanup. In the sixth inning, against the preeminent pitcher in baseball, he whacked a shot over the right-field fence that landed in someone’s victory garden and scared a dog. The feat was so out of the ordinary that a sign said that a local tailor would give a suit of clothes to anyone who hit a ball over that fence. J. V. Fitzgerald of the Washington Post declared, “The tailor is going to have to use a lot of cloth to rig out the Babe.” The Babe, once again, had three home runs in three games.

  On May 8, he doubled. On May 9, pitching his regular turn, he went 5-for-5 with a triple, three doubles, and a single. He seemed to be involved in everything in the game, a 4–3 loss. He was even thrown out at third attempting to steal. He hit in ten straight games before he was stopped.

  Harry Hooper, uh-huh, could spot a good hitter.

  The war shuffled all the baseball cards again at the end of the month. A ruling called “work or fight” came down from the office of Secretary of War Newton Baker and Provost Marshal Gen. Enoch Crowder on May 23. It declared that all men of draft age must either be in the military or employed by some war-related industry by July 1. A fast reading said that July 1 would be the end of the baseball season. Eighty percent of the 330 players in the game were between 21 and 31 years old, the draft limits.

  Store clerks, waiters, bartenders, elevator operators, many salesmen, and employees at places of amusement all were affected. Their employers quickly said that business would continue as usual, with older workers and women taking the vacated positions. (One Park Avenue hotel announced that it would hire “Negroes” to fill the void.) Baseball obviously did not have the same options. (Although the “Negro” option would have been interesting.) Baseball would die.

  “Everything must be done to win this war,” National League president John Tener said. “And if baseball is a sport as classified in this new order, and not a business in which there is a great investment of money, then baseball will not be behind other interests in contributing its part toward winning the war. If baseball is nonessential…there is a possibility that our ball parks will have to be closed and the season be brought to an end.”

  No mention of the players was made in the order, though they seemed to be covered in a section listing nonessential occupations that specified “Persons, including ushers and other attendants, engaged in and occupied in and in connection with, games, sports and amusements, excepting actual performers in legitimate concerts, operas or theatrical performances.” Actors and opera singers were exempted; ballplayers were not.

  The War Department said that a ruling on ballplayers couldn’t be made until one of them was drafted and appealed the decision to his local board. The owners’ hope was that the board in this test case would rule that a ballplayer was the same as an actor, exempt. Failing that, the owners hoped the War Department would give baseball an overall exemption to finish the season.

  Ruth’s draft status was class 4: married, head of household. That was why he hadn’t been called already. He said little about the war and seemed to follow along with whatever the other players were doing. They joined the Massachusetts Home Guard, the backup to the activated National Guard. He joined too. They drilled in close order in a team competition set up by league president Ban Johnson, an attempt to give the game a patriotic shine. The Babe drilled too.

  The ballplayers were in a predicament. The line between athletic hero and slacker had become a tightrope. A false move—look at boxer Jack Dempsey, criticized as a draft dodger—could drop a famous man into a swamp. Even the ballplayers who had gone into the service or to the shipyards were not exempt. Most of them were still playing baseball, only in different uniforms and for less money. Was it a contribution to the war effort to pitch for a shipyard? More and more fans were thinking that it was not.

  The unsettled season was now even more unsettled. On each team, more players headed toward defense-related jobs or enlisted or were drafted. Dutch Leonard, having a good season for the Red Sox, soon left for the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. Outfielder Fred Thomas enlisted. The rest of the players simply kept playing and waited for the next edict to roll out of Washington.

  Ruth was not in the lineup when the work-or-fight ruling came down. He was sick. On May 19, a Sunday, a day off, he and Helen went to Revere Beach, the oldest public beach in the country, a Boston version of Coney Island. He had not been feeling well for the last week and now felt terrible. He had fever, chills, a 104-degree temperature. He had the flu.

  In another two months that diagnosis would be a life-and-death proposition, another gift of the war, as the misnamed Spanish influenza came from the German trenches to the Allied trenches, back to the United States to become the most serious epidemic in the country’s history. Before the end of the year, it would kill over 600,000 people in the United States, with Boston and Massachusetts hit hard. The flu for the U.S. troops would be more deadly than the war.

  With the Babe—and this might have been the same strain of flu, simply not given a name yet—it simply was the flu. He appeared at Fenway the next day, Monday, his day to pitch, but Barrow looked at him and sent him straight to the trainer. The trainer treated him with silver nitrate, which at the time was used to coat a flu victim’s throat. The trainer, alas, used too much silver nitrate. The Babe’s larynx became swollen, a condition known as acute edema, and he started choking and collapsed. Barrow, hearing the commotion, grabbed him and took him to a nearby druggist, who administered an antidote to silver nitrate. The Babe then was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he stayed for the next week surrounded by flowers and comforte
d by Helen. Barrow fired the trainer.

  On Decoration Day, 11 days after Ruth became ill, he pinch-hit at Fenway. Three days later he returned to the lineup in Detroit as a pitcher and…he hit a home run.

  The next day, playing center field…he hit a home run.

  The next day, center field again…he hit a home run.

  The next day…he hit a home run.

  Four home runs in four games broke his own record. The lasting effect of his illness would be a raspy voice from the irritation of the silver nitrate. He always would complain of that. The immediate effects of the illness seemed minimal.

  The work-or-fight rule went into effect on July 1, and draft boards around the country slowly began to reclassify baseball players. Speculation in the Globe named Ruth and Amos Strunk as the two most vulnerable Red Sox. In Washington, 28-year-old catcher Eddie Ainsmith became the test, appealing his reclassification to the office of Secretary Baker. All of baseball awaited the decision, uncertainty everywhere, attendance down for a season that might end tomorrow.

  Amid the uncertainty, the Babe was caught in a second uncertain bind. Barrow, with the defections and turmoil, wanted him to pitch. The Red Sox had dropped out of first place, and the Babe’s home run barrage had quieted down after the four home runs. Barrow thought his star’s pitching would help the team more now than his hitting. The Babe, alas, didn’t want to pitch anymore.

  He and Barrow went through a daily, contentious dance. The Babe claimed his wrist was hurt and he couldn’t pitch. Barrow didn’t believe him. Back and forth the argument went. The Babe, almost as if it were part of his case, started to hit again, whacking out homers number 10 and 11, the last one in the tenth inning against Walter Johnson over that same tailor’s sign in right field in Washington on June 30. (No mention of another free suit.) He was now on a pace to do great things at the plate. Less than half the season had been completed, and he seemed a sure bet at least to break the American League home run record of 16 set by Socks Seybold in 1902. No one in 15 years had hit more than 12.

  Barrow didn’t seem to care. He still was looking for a pitcher. The day after Ruth’s 11th home run, a Monday, the Red Sox had an off-day in Washington. Ruth went to Baltimore to visit his father and friends. He was late arriving back in Washington Tuesday afternoon, reaching the dugout only an hour before the concluding game of the series with the Senators. Barrow was not happy. Ruth was not happy.

  “Say, isn’t that Barrow there in the dugout?” asked a relocated friend from Sudbury who saw Ruth before the game.

  “Yeah, that’s the goddamned old shitpot,” replied the Babe.

  In the game, Ruth made an error and then struck out. Barrow made a comment about swinging at the first pitch, “a bum play.” Ruth made a comment in return that involved punching Barrow in the nose. Barrow said that comment would cost $500. Ruth said that it wouldn’t, because he had quit the team. He unbuttoned his uniform and wound up watching the last three innings with his friend from Sudbury in the stands.

  By the next morning, the Red Sox were in Philadelphia for a series against the A’s and Ruth was back in Baltimore, signing a contract to play with the Chester, Pennsylvania, shipyard. He, like other stars in the game, had been receiving offers from shipyards and other military-related companies (all with baseball teams) for the entire season. The news did not land well with Barrow and Harry Frazee. They sputtered about lawsuits and injunctions and the next day sent Heinie Wagner back to Baltimore to try to convince their man to return.

  The convincing wasn’t hard. Ruth already had talked with reporters at his father’s bar and sounded ready to return. The anger had softened.

  “I was mad as a March hare,” he said, “and told Barrow then and there that I was through with him and his team. I know I was too mad to control myself, but suiting the action to the word, I did leave the team and came home….

  “I am all right and willing and ready to get back to playing. But I do not want to be fighting and fought with all the time.”

  He and Wagner showed up in Philadelphia at two o’clock in the morning of July 4. The Red Sox had a doubleheader with the A’s at Shibe Park. Ruth did not play in the first game. Barrow would not speak to him or even acknowledge that he existed, and Ruth started taking his uniform off between games and declared that he was leaving again and for good. Hooper and other teammates convinced him to stay. They also convinced Barrow to talk with him.

  The meeting went well. Ruth apologized. Barrow said there would be no fine. Ruth went back to center field for the second game, and the next day, July 5, he was back on the mound for the first time in a month. He beat the A’s, 4–3, in ten innings. There was no mention of a sore wrist.

  “I like to pitch,” he said, “but my main objection is that pitching keeps you out of so many games. I like to be in there every day. If I had my choice, I’d play first base. I don’t think a man can pitch in his regular turn, and play some other position and keep the pace year after year. I can do it this season all right. I’m young and strong and don’t mind the work, but I wouldn’t guarantee to do it for many seasons.”

  The fighting with Barrow ended, he went on a hitting spree. In the next week he had 12 hits in 30 at-bats, a figure that included five triples and four doubles. One of the triples was actually the longest home run ever seen at Fenway, two-thirds of the way up the bleachers, but good only for three bases under the rules because it came in the bottom of the ninth and a runner ahead of him scored to win the game. He also pitched a rain-shortened 4–0 shutout against the Browns. All was well.

  The Red Sox moved back into first place and started to pull away, and Frazee gave Ruth a $1,000 bonus for playing two positions, money Ruth had wanted. The owner wrote in another $1,000 bonus if the team won the pennant, which would bring Ruth’s salary to $9,000 for the season if the season was completed. The second qualifier, the second “if,” was the catch.

  On July 19, Secretary of War Baker made his decision on the Ainsmith case. The appeal was denied. Ainsmith had to go into the army, and, no, baseball was not exempt from work-or-fight. American League president Johnson immediately said the game would shut down in two days, on July 21.

  The owners, headed by Frazee, immediately overruled Johnson and sent a 12-man committee to Washington to appeal for an extension until Labor Day, a chance to complete a truncated season. They also asked for a further extension for the two league champions to play a World Series in the first two weeks of September. On July 26, Baker’s office agreed.

  The season could be completed. For the first time in 1918, there was a semblance of baseball order.

  Barrow politely asked Ruth to be a pitcher every fourth day for the remainder of the schedule. Ruth politely complied. His battles with the manager were done for now. He hit no more home runs in the final month, stuck forever on the 11 of June 30 that had seemed so promising, but he played almost every day, batted fourth, took the mound in regular rotation, and completed eight of nine games, winning seven of them.

  The Red Sox clinched the pennant on August 30 and finished two and a half games ahead of the Cleveland Indians. The Babe missed three games in the finishing stretch.

  His father had died.

  The fog around his family, his roots, settled down one more time on August 25, 1918. A call from Baltimore on that Sunday morning told him that George H. Ruth, now 45 years old, had been killed in a fight outside the saloon his son had bought for him.

  The fight, the death, was wrapped up in a second family situation the father had entered after the death of the Babe’s mother. Married to Martha Sipes, his second wife, George became involved in a dispute between his two brothers-in-law. One brother-in-law was 30-year-old Benjamin Sipes, Martha’s brother. The other was Oliver Beefelt, 35, married to Martha’s sister.

  Beefelt had left Martha’s sister for a young girl he had met two years earlier when she was 15, a move that put him in assorted legal predicaments. On the night in question, he was drinking in Ruth’s saloo
n. His estranged wife was upstairs in Ruth’s apartment, where she was staying after a period of hospitalization.

  Sipes came to the apartment to see his sister. She talked about Beefelt and the terrible things he had done to her, which sent Sipes downstairs to say a few words to Beefelt. No punches were thrown, but the words were heated. Sipes left, he said, to cool down.

  He was standing in the street, he said, when Ruth came out of the bar and attacked him. Two punches sent him to the ground, and then Ruth kicked him. Sipes said he climbed to his feet and hit Ruth, who lost his balance on the curbstone and tumbled onto the street. Ruth’s head hit the street hard, and his skull was fractured. That was the cause of death.

  Sipes’s story of self-defense, good enough to have a coroner’s jury drop all charges, left several questions open. Why was Ruth attacking him? Why wasn’t he swinging at Beefelt, the nemesis to family tranquillity? Was Ruth a friend of Beefelt’s, but not of Sipes’s? Was this simply a drinking situation, late at night, everybody too easy to argue and swing, a drunken row that turned tragic? Was there a longer history at work here, other factors and incidents involved? What? None of this ever was explained.

  The Babe, if he knew, never told the story, not in all the words written about him. He never said anything substantial about how his father died and not much more about how his father lived. George Ruth left few more traces than the Babe’s mother had six years earlier. His story was again part of the fog.

  The Babe had been in Baltimore less than two months earlier when he was threatening to jump to the Chester shipyard. He was found at his father’s bar, the same bar where the incident occurred. He supposedly stayed in the same apartment upstairs from the bar. Did he know any of the other parties involved in all this? Did he know them all? Did he—in the end—know his father? There had been obvious contact in later years. He had helped his father buy the bar, had helped work the bar. Wasn’t that a sign they had come to some kind of an understanding? Why were there no tales of that, no words from a proud parent about a successful son, no words from the son about earlier life with the parent?