The Selling of the Babe (20 page)

Yet given the way Ruth played over the next month, things might not have been as copacetic as the boys' biographies would have one believe. Almost immediately after that meeting, Frazee, Ruth, and Barrow had another one, and they told Ruth he'd better be ready to pitch, because that's what he was going to be doing. Ruth more or less returned to the rotation, playing the outfield or occasionally first base between appearances.

Unfortunately, for the next month he also started hitting like a pitcher, who usually batted last in the lineup because there was no place lower. But Barrow stubbornly kept Ruth in the middle of the order. And in the meantime, the Red Sox slumped and slid, falling from second place, only one game out of first, to as low as sixth, and as many as 10 games out of first place. And although teams have come from 10 games back early in the season to win a pennant, few of them have successfully vaulted five other ball clubs. Remember, the season was already truncated to only 140 games, leaving Boston even fewer games than normal to recover. The end result? The Red Sox were out of it early, and although nobody dared utter it at the time, Ruth bore much of the responsibility for that.

After his hot start, from April 26 through May 26 he hit a paltry .180 with only four extra base hits—including one home run, as the Red Sox went 5–11. To be fair, although he struggled on the mound giving up 13 hits and walking eight in one 11-inning relief appearance, he did pitch and win three of those ballgames. But at the plate he was pathetic, nearly the worst hitter in the lineup as he played the worst baseball of his major league career. By the time Ruth hit his next home run on May 30 and really started hitting again, the Red Sox were essentially finished for the 1919 season. To win the pennant they would have had to play more than .700 baseball for the remainder of the year, a pace only seven teams have ever maintained over the course of the season, a list that includes the vaunted 1927 Yankees. The 1919 Sox, even with Ruth, weren't '27 Yankees.

Even worse—at least for Harry Frazee—was that Boston's poor performance early in the season killed fan interest in the team. With four world championships in seven seasons, Sox fans were spoiled. They didn't care to come out to the ballpark to see a loser. So while the attendance for other major league franchises rebounded in 1919—on average, more than doubling, meeting or even exceeding prewar levels—that was not the case for the Red Sox. After a good start at the gate—the club drew over 50,000 fans in their first home stand over six games—as the team slumped on the road and returned to Boston well below .500, so did attendance. The combination of a losing team and the lack of Sunday baseball suddenly left Boston at a huge disadvantage. While pennant contenders Detroit, New York, Chicago, and Cleveland all either set attendance records in 1919 or threatened to, the Red Sox lagged behind. Oh, they got some bounce from the end of the war, increasing attendance from 249,000 in 1918 to 417,000 in 1919, but that worked out to only another 2,000 fans a game, still an average of less than 6,000 a day. Meanwhile, teams like the White Sox, Yankees, Tigers, and Indians—all contenders in 1919—averaged nearly twice that. It was hard to compete.

So what happened? Why did Ruth stop hitting? Well, he was carrying some extra pounds, but throughout the month of May, there was no indication that he was injured—the only damage he'd suffered was to his feelings. And it wasn't the burden of both pitching and playing in the field that bothered him either—he usually hit better when pitching. And while it is possible that the physical rigors of pitching and playing every day wore on him, it is interesting that at virtually every other level of baseball, from Little League through college and in adult baseball and semipro baseball, it is not uncommon for some position players to also serve as pitchers and vice versa. Only in professional baseball, where pitching arms are treated like cut glass, do pitchers have a single mission, and the reason for that is as much due to economics and tradition as it is to physical health or fatigue. If a pitcher gets hurt running the bases, the manager, not the player, takes the hit.

The truth probably lay somewhere between his attitude … and the baseball. Ruth had made his preference clear—he didn't want to pitch anymore, he just wanted to play in the field and hit. Given his self-regard and self-centered, immature nature, it's not beyond the realm of belief that Ruth might have moped his way through the month giving less than his best effort. There were also occasional instances when the press intimated he might not have been giving his all in the outfield, and he made several poor throws, previously never a problem for the strong-armed Ruth. He was a brooding little boy, eating his spinach but making it clear he didn't like it and ruining the meal for everyone.

And then there was the baseball. Anecdotally, there's every indication that at the start of the 1919 season the old war-issue baseballs with the bad yarn and subpar horsehide were still in use. After teeing off on what might have been a different ball in the spring, the same swings Ruth took during the regular season simply weren't yielding the same results—and the pitching was better, too. There has to be some explanation—including his performance over the final two months of the 1918 season; in the last three months of regular season major league competition, Ruth had been just an average hitter. Over nearly 300 plate appearances, he had hit only two home runs, only one over a fence. That coincides nicely with when the subpar ball was first put into play and when, presumably the postwar ball, now wrapped tighter, made of better materials, and suddenly more lively—began to be used. Toward the end of May, it appeared that Ruth the “fearsome slugger” was running on reputation alone. The Babe had gone bust.

The fans noticed. In one mid-month contest, Chicago spitballer Eddie Cicotte toyed with him, making him look so bad as he struck him out twice in a 1–0 shutout that Chicago fans stood and jeered, laughing at his inept swings as he both missed badly and then awkwardly stumbled from the effort. A lot of wise guys around baseball looked at each other knowingly and nodded their heads: Ruth couldn't keep it up—they'd been right all along. As a hitter, Ruth was a flash in the pan, and now it appeared as if he'd fallen off as a pitcher as well. Ever since he'd entered the league, he'd been warned that his lifestyle would eventually catch up with him. Maybe that's what was happening now.

Then, just when it looked as if he might never awaken, be begun to stir. By then it was already too late for the Red Sox, the damage to their pennant dream and their financial well-being already done. Ruth crushed his second home run of the season in St. Louis on May 20, a long blast in Sportsman's Park that cleared the right field fence and landed on Grand Avenue, and over the last few days of May he started to heat up again. Although his power remained sporadic through the next month, giving him six home runs halfway through the season, at least he was finally getting a few base hits. Perhaps that new ball was becoming more commonly used.

Too little too late, at least in the standings. The Red Sox struggled to play .500 baseball. And when Ruth started hitting in June, everyone else stopped. When Boston fell to the Yankees at the Polo Grounds 7–4 on June 30, the Red Sox were in sixth place, 24–31, and already trailed first place New York by 12 games.

The only people making real money off Ruth were the Yankees—fans turned out in droves to see their club take three of five from Boston. Over the course of three days, including doubleheaders on Saturday and Monday, more than 70,000 swarmed over the Polo Grounds to see their first place club—and Ruth. He was making his first appearance in New York since Opening Day, and fans there remembered what he had done then. He didn't disappoint, driving what was called “the longest fly ever caught” at the ballpark in game one, backing Sammy Vick up again the fence in the deepest corner of left center, then about 450 feet from the plate, hitting a ball over the roof in right field in the second game—just foul—and then blasting a grand slam off Bob Shawkey in the first game of the final doubleheader. But it mattered not, as the Red Sox still lost the game. It was that kind of year.

The knives were coming out in Boston, where the same sportswriters that had been predicting that Ruth would set a home run record were now moaning that Ruth might never set the home run record for a season, making Ruth a victim of their own overly enthusiastic hyperbole. To this point in Ruth's career, he had hit only 27 home runs as a major leaguer, 17 since the beginning of the 1918 season. Fully one-third of those had been hit against the Yankees, eight at the Polo Grounds. So far only two—two—of his career home runs had been hit at Fenway Park. It was a small sample size, to be sure, but at this juncture, only in New York, at the Polo Grounds, did Ruth even remotely resemble the hitter he would soon become, or player we see him as today. In real time, Ruth's 1919 season had been a dismal failure; he hadn't come close to earning his salary, his reputation far outstripping his performance.

Now that it really didn't matter anymore, in a lost season, Ruth started getting really hot. With the season essentially over, Frazee and Barrow finally acquiesced to his wishes and his complaints about a bum knee he had wrenched in early June, and relieved him of mound duty. Over the final three months of the season, he would pitch only seven times.

It made no difference, because when he did pitch, he wasn't the pitcher who had once been one of the best in the game. He lacked control, was often hit hard, and rarely struck anyone out. He was still a battler, but he wasn't anything special, depending on his curveball to get batters out. Less than a year before, he had still been, arguably, a star, a World Series record setter. Now he wasn't even the best pitcher on the Red Sox staff. Herb Pennock, Sam Jones, and Carl Mays all had been more dependable and productive.

This time, instead of leaving for the shipyards, the Red Sox players were simply looking to jump ship. The mood on the team turned turpentine as they all took Ruth's lead and it became every man for himself. Ruth, clearly, didn't have to follow the rules, so no one else felt they did either. Now that Ruth wasn't pitching anymore, it was clear that Boston was throwing in the towel. What little camaraderie that remained on the team soon turned sour.

A brief four-game win streak over the A's gave some hope of a turnaround, but on July 5, despite two Ruth home runs, the Sox dropped a doubleheader and began another skid. So far, since Opening Day, Ruth had homered in only two Boston victories. The rest of his blasts had been wasted.

The Red Sox weren't just losing, they were playing poorly and it wore on everyone. Pitcher Carl Mays, frustrated by nonsupport, threw a ball into the stands at a fan who was heckling him. Ban Johnson jumped to fine him $100, and when he refused to pay, Mays was briefly suspended—the Red Sox eventually paid his fine. His loss, coupled with Ruth's removal from the rotation, left the Red Sox seriously undermanned. The Red Sox went into St. Louis and even dropped three in a row to the St. Louis Browns, Ruth costing Boston one game when he botched an easy fly ball. The Browns had long been also-rans in the American League, but it appeared the Red Sox were ready to give St. Louis some competition in that regard.

Everything came to a head in Chicago on July 13, setting off a series of events that, as much as anything else did, eventually led to Ruth's exit from Boston. And that's important to realize: it was not one reason alone or one single event that led to the selling of the Babe. It was a confluence of events, circumstances, coincidences, accidents, and fate. This portion of the story all started with a simple ground ball—Ruth wasn't even involved but standing in left field hundreds of feet away.

With Mays back on the mound for Boston after the suspension, and one out in the first inning, Chicago's star second baseman, Eddie Collins, singled. The next batter hit a double play grounder to Boston second baseman Red Shannon. Yet instead of throwing to second, or even to first, Shannon inexplicably held the ball and both runners were safe.

Perhaps he lost track of the number of outs and froze with indecision, or just couldn't get a grip on the baseball, but afterward, Carl Mays became unglued. Arguably the best pitcher in baseball history not to be a member of the Hall of Fame, since joining the Red Sox in 1915 he'd won more than 70 ballgames, his unique, underhanded “submarine” delivery proving almost unhittable when he was hitting his spots. But as a personality, he was just as much a cipher.

Reserved and remote from his teammates, Mays was a loner, dark and dour, a player the other Red Sox considered an odd duck, arrogant, suspicious, and standoffish, someone who exuded the attitude that he felt he was smarter and better than his peers. Socially awkward, yet supremely confident in his ability as a pitcher, Mays didn't think twice about openly criticizing his teammates when they made mistakes, then wondered why they didn't care for him. One noted that he had the disposition of a man living under the spell of a “permanent toothache.” They appreciated him for his talent—Mays had proven himself in the World Series, but he didn't really have a friend on the team—or in the game. He may well have been the most disliked man in the major leagues—and this was before he became notorious for throwing the only pitch in major league history to kill a man when in 1920 he threw the pitch that sent Indians shortstop Ray Chapman to the grave.

After Shannon's miscue, Mays stomped around the mound, making his displeasure obvious. Shannon had erred, to be sure, but no player ever likes being shown up on the field. Angry, Mays began to throw harder. That was a mistake. When he was right, his submarine pitch dropped to the batter's ankles and resulted in ground ball after ground ball. But when he got angry and overthrew, the ball stayed up, and straight, and was easy to hit. The White Sox jumped on him and scored four runs Mays felt he didn't deserve to give up.