The Selling of the Babe (15 page)

By now, the players just wanted it to end, too. Who won? Who lost?
Who cared?
They were playing for free, for nothing. Any victory now would be purely Pyrrhic. Hell, the umpires, each guaranteed $1,000 for working the Series, would probably take home more than the players would.

The fans who did show up were surprisingly enthusiastic. No one was going to spend good money to jeer, so those who did turn out were the few fervent fans who remained—them, and the gamblers. The gamblers always showed up.

Still, after playing Game 5 in an hour and forty-two minutes, they played Game 6 as if in a contest to beat that mark. The Cubs played inattentive baseball—two of their three baserunners were picked off. The only player on the field who seemed to give a damn was the least likely hero of all, playing in place of an indifferent Ruth—George Whiteman.

In the third, with two on and two out, he came to bat against Lefty Tyler. For a moment, the Cubs paused and considered walking Whiteman to face McInnis, but in the end decided the career minor leaguer's luck was due to run out. It wasn't. He hit a sinking line drive to right.

Cubs right fielder Max Flack raced in and tried to catch the ball on his shoetops, but the dipping drive broke through his hands and hit the ground. Mays and Shean raced home, giving Boston a lead it would not relinquish.

Of course, it was Whiteman who provided the only remaining drama, launching himself in the air to snag Turner Barber's sharp drive to short right in the eighth. He caught the ball inches from the ground—a remarkable catch given the gloves of the era, and then tumbled head over heels. When he left the game one batter later, and Ruth, making his last World Series appearance in Boston, trotted out to take his place, a late-inning scrub, the crowd reacted with its most genuine outpouring of emotion and affection of the Series, cheering the only player who didn't seem to have a dollar sign on his back, Whiteman. Ruth and the others just watched.

It ended an inning later, with a ground ball to Shean, who made the short toss to McInnis. He held the ball in the air for a minute, and then, as Ed Martin wrote in the
Globe,
“Hooper, Ruth, Mays, Shean, Schang, Scott and others did a fade out. Down came the curtain and from out of the stillness that swept over the battleground came a lone voice piping up: Those Red Sox always were a lucky bunch.”

Somehow, Boston had its fourth World Series in the past seven seasons, something no other team had done, and with three virtually different ball clubs—only Hooper remained from the 1912 club, and of the regulars, only Hooper, Ruth, Scott, and Mays from 1916. At the final out, a carrier pigeon was released to deliver news of Boston's 2–1 victory to the soldiers stationed at Camp Devens, some thirty-five miles northwest of Boston. For many there, it was the last good news they'd ever receive.

After a summer in some kind of remittance, the Spanish influenza was roaring back. There was a big outbreak in Chicago at the end of the summer, and circumstantial evidence suggests that those who made their way to Boston from Chicago for the World Series might have hastened the fall outbreak in Boston.

At Fort Devens, where thousands of soldiers lived in close proximity to one another, the pandemic that fall was particularly devastating, killing more than 700. Less than a month after the Series, baseball was the last thing anyone was thinking about. Death hung over Boston like a pall. In all likelihood, had the 1918 season been played to a full schedule, due to the pandemic a 1918 World Series would never have been played at all. By October, the city was in a panic and large gatherings of people rare. As it was, at least two members of the local sporting press fell victim to the disease anyway, the
Globe
's Ed Martin and the
Record
's Harry Casey. Their reports on the World Series would be among the last they would ever file.

Fortunately, the disease infected no Boston or Chicago players. They scattered as soon as the Series ended, the Sox earning $1,102.51 each and the losing Cubs $679.09, a touch more than they anticipated a few days earlier, but still only about a third of what players had earned in recent World Series. But that wasn't the worst of it. Despite promising they'd take no punitive action against the players for the threatened strike, the National Commission refused to issue the players' Series medallions, the equivalent of today's ring. Despite petitions from a number of players, most notably Harry Hooper, for the next seventy-five years every baseball commissioner through Fay Vincent upheld the decision. Even a plea from Whiteman, who pled “I have never asked for anything in my life” and included a canceled check, proving he'd made his 10 percent donation to the war charities, was ignored. Not until 1993, when there was no official commissioner to say no, was the decision rescinded and the medallions belatedly awarded to the ancestors of the members of the 1918 Red Sox, including George Whiteman's ninety-four-year-old sister-in-law, and Babe Ruth's adopted daughter, Julia. By then, every player on either team was long dead.

Although history would later remember it as Boston's last world championship of the century, and for Ruth's record-setting pitching performance, in truth the only player anyone much talked about afterward was Whiteman. Compared to everyone else, the quiet, humble minor leaguer appeared almost saintly.

Ruth had a pretty good year personally, although in the end his overall value to the team in 1918, despite his histrionics at the plate, was offset by his diminished performance on the mound. According to most modern metrics, in terms of wins he was actually less valuable to the Red Sox in 1918 than he had been in 1917. When one factored in the disruptions he caused—jumping the team, balking at pitching—perhaps even less so. According to the numbers, the most valuable player in the league, for the fifth time in seven seasons—was pitcher Walter Johnson. Still, Ruth's stalwart pitching performance down the stretch had saved the season for the Sox—and, in some respects, his standing. Had Boston not won the pennant, Ruth may well have taken the blame and earned a reputation even he may have found difficult to shake.

But Ruth and everyone else learned one enduring lesson in 1918: home runs made news, made money, and made everyone overlook bad behavior. Remember, even after jumping the club, it was he, Ruth, who had gotten a new contract and a midseason raise, not anyone else. That didn't go unnoticed by the other Boston players.

After the Series, Ruth briefly returned to his gentleman's farm in Sudbury, and with the help of the press participated in photo ops that showed him chopping wood, feeding chickens, and standing next to his wife, the picture of domestic bliss. This fall, however, he postponed the usual postseason fare of barnstorming and partying. In addition to the pandemic, there was still that pesky “work or fight” order and players were no more eager to fight than they had been during the regular season.

Ruth could have easily found “essential” work around Boston, but instead he soon made a beeline to Charles Schwab's Bethlehem Steel plant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, to secure a spot on the giant steel company's baseball team, joining White Sox outfielder Joe Jackson, Indians pitcher Stan Coveleski, and Cardinals infielder Rogers Hornsby. After all, there was still another month or two of decent weather and good money to be made down there, where the flu had abated. And if the war continued into the spring of 1919, the only place Ruth or many other major leaguers would be able to continue to play baseball would be in one of the larger industrial leagues. The big money for that wasn't in Boston, whose factories were smaller, but farther down the Atlantic seaboard, where the plants producing raw materials were closer together, employed tens of thousands, and whose owners liked to one-up each other.

Ruth didn't do much work for Bethlehem—he might never have even seen a single piece of steel. One Bethlehem employee later recalled that Ruth was given the makework job of “blueprint messenger,” telling writer William Ecenbarger that “the whole gang of them [the ballplayers] was draft dodgers. They were supposed to be working for the war, but they didn't do any work. All they did was play baseball. Babe Ruth used to show up at the plant for an hour before practice. He'd be wearing fancy trousers, silk shirts and patent-leather shoes. He'd just walk around talking to people about baseball. There wasn't anything essential about what he was doing.” In this, Ruth was not unique. As much as baseball and other professional sports like to wrap themselves in the flag today, the truth is, that with few exceptions professional athletes and leagues have little tangible to brag about when it comes to patriotism, unless it happens to intersect with profit.

Records are incomplete, but Ruth played, at most, only a handful of games in late September and early October before turning up back in Baltimore. He might have had another touch of flu or simply returned home to deal with his late father's affairs. At any rate, no one was trying to track him down and force him to “work or fight.”

Then, the war ended. A German offensive in the spring had stalled and an Allied counterattack in August pushed the Germans back and eventually made it clear that they could not win the war. In September, various Axis smaller powers began to stand down and sign an armistice, leaving Germany isolated. In early November, they finally capitulated. The worst war in the history of humankind to that point, killing 16 million and injuring more than 20 million more, lurched to an end on November 11, 1918.

When the world awoke the next day, it was utterly changed.

 

5

Out of Left Field

“Ruth made a grave mistake when he gave up pitching. Working once a week he might have lasted a long time and become a great star.”

—Tris Speaker

By the spring of 1919, America was a different place. Thousands of doughboys marched home both world-weary and now more worldly than before. Meanwhile, back home, the massive industrial effort that Americans put into the war changed almost everything. Women had entered the workforce and now their calls to vote gained traction. Airplanes flying overhead suddenly became commonplace. The world had gotten smaller overnight. The Victorian Era was dead. After years of nothing but death and destruction, Americans, particularly young Americans, wanted to forget, have fun, and cut loose.

Babe Ruth was the right guy at the right time, the symbolic leader of the party soon to get under way, the uncrowned King of what soon would become the Roaring Twenties.

Once the war was over, it didn't take baseball—and Ruth—long to start looking forward to 1919. Frazee and the other men who owned the game had taken a financial hit in 1918. Although the Red Sox had been the third biggest draw in the league, attendance, despite Ruth's prowess with a bat, had still tumbled by almost a quarter of a million fans from 1917. Now, no longer hamstrung by trying to make it appear that they supported the war effort while in reality acting in their own self-interest, all Frazee and the others wanted to do was make some money. So did the players. And so did Ruth.

Johnny Igoe, his financial counselor back in Boston, had his ear and while Ruth went through with the charade of being a steelworker, Igoe had been fielding offers. Not that he was particularly well qualified to do so, because he had little more than Ruth's trust and shared desire for cash to offer. Once he latched on to Ruth, he held on for as long as he could.

Nevertheless, Ruth was one of the few players who came out of the 1918 season in better shape than he went in—not at the waistline, but in earning potential. The press had touted him beyond proportion for his performance and by the end of the year Ruth, whether he deserved it or not, was the best-known player in the game. For those eager to forget the war and everything that went with it, he was also suddenly one of the most beloved. Ty Cobb? Joe Jackson? Walter Johnson? They were old news. Babe Ruth? In the parlance of the day, where new words were being coined every week, Ruth was “copacetic,” the cat's meow.

Igoe and Ruth—or at least Igoe—sensed a change in the air and decided it was time to make a grab for more. If Frazee had been willing to up Ruth's salary in midseason after he'd jumped the club, they figured that now, after another World Series win and with life returning to normal, he might be good for another fat raise. All sorts of people were reaching out to Ruth with crazy offers of one kind or another—boxing, vaudeville, and anything else you could conceivably charge admission to—and at the same time shysters of all stripes were approaching Ruth determined to separate him from all that hard-earned cash. Not that he actually had much—he still usually spent it as soon as he got it, and sometimes even before. Ballplayers weren't paid in the off-season and Ruth was likely already feeling the pinch.

And the men who ran baseball weren't helping matters much. Once more, they cowered before the future. Instead of returning to business as usual after the war, they chose to act conservatively and tried to get rich by pinching pennies and saving dimes instead of chasing after dollars.

Well, most of them. After helping to save the season and then winning the Series, Frazee was feeling expansive. There was a rumor he was looking to sell the Red Sox. His asking price was a million dollars, and if he got it the New York Giants were reportedly available and Frazee wanted to put together a group to buy them, a notion that made Ban Johnson recoil in horror. To him, the only thing worse than having Frazee in baseball at all would be having him as an owner of a National League team in New York.

But behind the scenes—or, actually, not too far behind the scenes at all—Frazee, sensing weakness in Johnson, was sounding out other owners about dumping the National Commission altogether. He favored a single commissioner, someone more independent, who wouldn't be beholden to a single team or league. Johnson, if not already thoroughly corrupt, was at least compromised by personal relationships with so many club owners. Increasingly, he seemed to be basing decisions not on what was right, or what was wrong, or what was legal, or fair, or best for the game. Instead, his calculation usually started with himself: Was it good for Ban Johnson? And then he asked who else would benefit, a friend or a foe? Since the World Series, he'd already made one decision, to withhold the world championship medallions, clearly made for reasons other than moral courage. When Frazee found out, he thought the Red Sox were being singled out for persecution.