Pinstripe Empire (17 page)

The Yanks were 29–18 after obtaining Mays, and although they fell short of their first pennant, they wound up third, thirty-two games over
.500 and just seven and a half games out of first. They drew 619,164, the most they had ever attracted and just twenty-five thousand shy of leading the league for the first time. (The Giants led the majors with 708,857.) Peckinpaugh hit .305, Baker hit .293 with 10 homers, Pratt hit .292, and Bob the Gob Shawkey was again a 20-game winner.

A couple of interesting 1919 call-ups were outfielder George Halas, who would go on to own and coach the Chicago Bears the following year (he played a dozen games and had two singles), and pitcher Lefty O’Doul, who was both an outfielder and a pitcher and who would play briefly for three seasons before finding his real niche in the National League, where he batted .353 over seven seasons (1928–34).

It was also the year that Sunday baseball became legal in New York. Fred Lieb observed:

Sunday baseball in this state and town have been vindicated … Before the war there were gloomy forebodings that Sunday ball would lead to disturbances, organized roughhouse, and what not.

Yesterday I watched 45,000 fans file out after the game. It was a refreshing sight.

Leisurely, good-natured, without unnecessary pushing or shoving, the big throng dispersed. It was entirely different from the rush-hour jam in the subway, when it is a case of every man for himself.

The lady fans grow more numerous with each passing year. Never is this more noticeable than in the Sunday crowds. At least a quarter of that crowd yesterday were women.

Indeed, the Polo Grounds was becoming more female-friendly.

An oddity worth noting was the fastest game ever played by the team, when the Yanks beat the Athletics 6–1 on September 28 in just fifty-one minutes.

For Huggins, despite the tension with Huston, it was a solid season, a year that had people taking New York seriously in the first postwar test of whether the Yankees were indeed on the move.

Now what could the Colonels have in mind to make the team even better in 1920?

THE COLONELS DISPATCHED HUGGINS to Los Angeles to catch up with the vacationing Babe Ruth and deliver news of his new team in person.

It did not go well.

Babe had never been impressed by short men in leadership positions. It was the beginning of a tough relationship for both of them, a constant test of Huggins’s ability to lead, a constant test of Ruth’s ability to follow.

But let there be no mistake: This was the biggest deal in baseball history. It changed the fortunes of two high-profile franchises for decades.

Babe Ruth would take baseball soaring into a new era as the number-one game in the Golden Age of Sports. It is always difficult to say any athlete is bigger than the game. But Babe Ruth may have qualified.

He certainly became an overnight celebrity when he came to New York, and may have been the best-known American after the president throughout the remainder of his career. Many European immigrants first became aware of baseball by his presence—his easy to remember name, his easily identified look, his love of celebrity. If they could talk about Babe Ruth and smile when his name was mentioned, they were on the road to assimilation.

He looked different. His moon face with the boyish grin, atop a barrel chest and skinny legs, made him easy to pick out in any group photo. He wasn’t fat but was rather top-heavy, and not until late in his career did he occasionally let himself get out of shape. He could run the bases well and cover a lot of ground in the outfield: Otherwise, Barrow might have converted him into a first baseman.

And he was lovable. Even when he’d get himself into a tight spot, he’d win over the fans with a humble apology, like a child scolded and sent to his room. He had a gift for saying the right things in interviews and being the all-American boy for kids even if he really wasn’t. Today’s players know how to answer media questions because they grew up watching the process on TV. In Ruth’s day, he was inventing it as he went along, and he usually got it right.

He visited hospitals and inspired sick children. He signed more baseballs than anyone in the game. A joke long after his playing days was that there is nothing as rare as a ball not signed by Babe Ruth. A Sinclair Oil ad on the back of the 1937 Yankee scorecard promised five hundred Ruth-signed baseballs as contest prizes.

By June of his first season in New York, the
Times
reported that he was so popular, “girls in the field boxes bring their cameras and take snapshots of him as he walks to the plate.”

He also broke new ground in having a personal trainer during off-seasons (Artie McGovern’s gymnasium on Madison Avenue) and in having an agent (Christy Walsh) to ghostwrite stories for him and find him promotional deals—and to some extent to manage his image, although he never moderated his behavior.

Of this there can be no doubt: He became the face of the Yankees as they emerged as the best-known team in sports. All discussions of Yankee greatness, dynasties, and success begin with the Babe. Obtaining him proved to be the greatest transaction a team ever pulled off, and keeping his name and image front and center proved to have enduring qualities for the franchise. With baseball hurting from the notorious Black Sox scandal of 1919, after which eight Chicago White Sox received lifetime suspensions for taking money to lose the World Series, Ruth was a welcome sight.

FOR ALL OF his immaturity and humble education, he was aware of his worth. In 1920, Ruth was locked in the beginnings of a contentious dispute with Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, seeking $20,000. He felt he’d signed a bad deal in 1918: three years at $10,000 a year.

After signing that deal, he was converted to a full-time outfielder by Sox manager Ed Barrow for 1919, and responded by hitting a record 29 home runs, driving in a league-leading 114, and batting .322. He also pitched 15 games and compiled a 9–5 record, making him 89–46 lifetime for Boston (17–5 against the Yankees). He knew his worth.

The 29 homers had broken the mark set in the nineteenth century. It was truly amazing in the deadball era; Ruth himself had led the league the previous year with just 11. No one is exactly certain when the Spalding Company put more juice into the baseballs (the conversion to cork centers didn’t do it), but it wasn’t in 1919 and it probably wasn’t in 1920 either. Yet Ruth was hitting the ball a ton. The 29 home runs were almost triple what the runners-up hit—10 each for Home Run Baker, George Sisler, and Tillie Walker.

Frazee, though, was starting to think that life after Babe might not be so bad. He thought Babe was as much a disruption to discipline as he was a good player. He had survived the sale of Speaker; he could survive this.

He’d also become an ally to Ruppert and Huston in opposing Ban Johnson over his sale of Carl Mays. So the parties were good pals now and able to talk freely about doing business together, as though off on their own crusades.

By mid-December of 1919, they were heavily engaged in talks. Frazee was a New Yorker, and this was holiday party season. His office was on West Forty-eighth Street, about six blocks from the Yankee offices. Ruppert and Frazee would meet as snow fell over New York, a spirit of good fellowship between them, a shared sense of having put one past Johnson in the Mays deal.

At one point the Colonels sent Huggins to see Frazee, and it was he who returned with the news that the Babe could be had for $100,000. Interest on the payment schedule made the price $125,000.

The formal papers were signed the day after Christmas. The Yanks’ longtime attorney Byron Clark prepared the documents. Included was a reported loan of $350,000, without which Frazee might have defaulted on his mortgage payments. In effect, the Colonels would be the mortgage holders on Fenway. The loan is what put the deal over the top.

The Yankees would also take out an insurance policy on Ruth for $150,000.

“I’m not surprised,” said Ruth of the sale. “When I made my demand on the Red Sox for $20,000 a year, I had an idea they would choose to sell me … and I knew the Yankees were the most probable purchasers in that event.”

Babe also tried to get $15,000 of the sale price from Frazee, to no avail.

Over the years, as the effects of the trade became apparent through Yankee successes and Red Sox failures, Frazee would be vilified in Boston history as simply the “man who sold Babe Ruth.” His manager, Ed Barrow, told him, “You’re making a mistake, Harry. You know that, don’t you?”

It was said Frazee was using the money to finance his play in development,
No, No, Nannette
, which wouldn’t open for five more years. That, argues
Red Sox historian Glenn Stout, is unlikely, although it became accepted wisdom. Leigh Montville, in
The Big Bam
, his biography of Ruth, cites a drama produced by Frazee called
My Lady Friend
that opened in December 1919 as the beneficiary on the Ruth money. The Red Sox, who’d won the league’s last legitimate World Series, wouldn’t win another until 2004—by which time the Yankees had won twenty-six.

George Vecsey of the
New York Times
first referred to a “Babe Ruth curse” during the 1986 World Series (Bill Buckner vs. Mets), and in 1990 Dan Shaughnessy wrote a book called
The Curse of the Bambino
, which made the term part of the culture. There was no curse discussed before then, but baseball fans knew how the fortunes had reversed after the sale.

The immediate reaction in January 1920 (the sale was announced in newspapers on the sixth, ten days before Prohibition took effect) was mixed. To be a baseball “purist” in 1920 was to respect the deadball way of playing the game, the Cobb-Wagner way of moving runners along with well-placed hits. With Ruth socking home runs, all strategy was changing, and the purists didn’t like it.

In the
Reach Official Guide
, the sale was reported with this lack of enthusiasm:

We question the judgment of the New York Club in buying another player who has no respect for his obligations, who is not a team player in any sense of the word, and who is a constant troublemaker, according to Mr. Frazee’s confession; and that too, at a price which is out of all reason. However, leaving the price out of consideration, where will the New York Club come out artistically? With Mays’ assistance the New York Club could finish no better than a scant third, while Boston, with Ruth was lucky to finish fifth. By adding Ruth to its team, the New York simply gains another undesirable and uncontrollable player, adds enormously to its expense account and its salary roll, and gains absolutely nothing except the probability of boosting Ruth’s home-run record, which never did and never will win any pennants. This was proven by Boston’s experience last year, despite Ruth’s home-run record.

Of course, this was not an opinion shared by all. A headline in the
Sporting News
of January 15 said, BOSTON FANS UP IN ARMS AND THREATEN DIRE VENGEANCE ON HARRY FRAZEE.

The life story of Ruth quickly became required knowledge for any American schoolboy who fancied baseball. He was born in Baltimore on February 6, 1895, and when his parents found him too difficult to raise, he was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in 1902, where he discovered baseball and learned both the game and a manner of discipline from Brother Matthias Boutlier, a six-foot-six Canadian who managed to control young George Herman Ruth.

That baseball could “save” this waif was the part of the life story that publishers loved. But as Montville writes in his biography, “How bad could he have been” to be sent off at age seven as “incorrigible”?

St. Mary’s remained his legal guardian when at nineteen he found his calling and joined the Baltimore Orioles, the local International League team, to begin his professional career. The team owner was Jack Dunn, and soon after he was referred to as “one of Dunnie’s babes.” This grew into Babe Ruth. His teammates would call him Jidge, a remake of George. He would, of course, also become the Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, and an assortment of off-color racial “jokes” that players used to taunt him over his heritage.

He was never good with names, and even longtime teammates were forever “kid” to him. Once he visited a hospital with teammate Red Ruffing, couldn’t remember his name, and just called him Meathead in introducing him around. How hard could it have been to remember “Red” for a red-haired teammate?

On July 14, having been sold to Boston after just a few months in the minors, Babe made his pitching debut for the Red Sox and discovered the fast life of the major leagues and his ability to succeed and enjoy it there. It all agreed with him.

The Red Sox won pennants in 1916 and 1918, and Babe was 3–0 in the World Series with a record 29
⅔
consecutive scoreless innings pitched, a record that would later be broken by two Yankees—first by Whitey Ford and later by Mariano Rivera.

With the move to the outfield by Barrow in 1919 and his astounding 29 home runs, he was already a gate attraction and a celebrity. But so much more of that was still to come in the spotlight of New York.

I was fortunate to begin my career with the Yankees in 1968, and thus got to know a number of people who had been close to Babe Ruth during his Yankee days.
New York Times
sportswriter John Drebinger, a member of our PR department when I arrived, was a hard-living fellow himself and
used to enjoy telling stories of how Babe would pay everyone to keep a speakeasy open past closing time.

Jackie Farrell was a Jersey guy who was a
Daily News
sportswriter and editor and was smaller than even Huggins. He had a misstep in the forties when he passed up a chance to become Frank Sinatra’s manager, but smartened up when he left the
News
to join the Yankees and became a lifelong friend of the Babe’s. Jackie, with whom I would share an office for four years, never missed a chance to talk about what a terrific friend the Babe was. One of his assignments would be to accompany him on his personal appearances around town. Babe even called him Jackie, not “kid,” perhaps the ultimate honor.