The Selling of the Babe (23 page)

It was as if once Ruth realized that, he was even more inspired. The Red Sox went to Detroit and Ruth started hitting as he had while barnstorming back to Boston in the spring, cracking four home runs in three days. Ty Who? In the papers, Ruth and the word “another” seemed to appear in every other sentence. With 23 home runs, he was poised to knock Cravath and his modern N.L. and major league mark off the pedestal.

But once he did that, what then would fans have to look forward to the rest of the year? Unlike today, batting records, apart from batting average were almost unknown in 1919, and given the evolving nature of the games and it organization, there was little consensus as to what an actual record in a category truly was. Now sportswriters scurried through clip files and record books and soon unearthed two more marks to take aim at, Buck Freeman's 25 home runs hit with Washington in 1899, which was widely considered the NL record in its own right prior to 1901, and Ned Williamson's obscure mark of 27 struck with Chicago back in 1884. Both records had been given mighty assists from fences set at friendly distances, particularly Williamson's, but were home runs nevertheless. Ruth's pursuit gave all such records new currency and introduced them to a new generation. Every home run Ruth hit made baseball history come to life again.

As the
Globe
noted when the Red Sox returned home, “there will be some big crowds out and many will go simply on the chance of seeing ‘Babe' Ruth add to his already long string of home runs.” Ruth was suddenly such big news that when other players homered sportswriters scrambled to squeeze in a Ruth reference either in the story or the headline. After the White Sox' Eddie Collins hit a home run to beat St. Louis, one headline termed it a “Babe Ruth Act,” as if Ruth had a trademark on home runs and others now had to give him credit when they encroached on his territory.

Ruth cooperated with the daily drama and failed to break Cravath's modern N.L. record on the road, building the anticipation in his adopted home city. As if afraid the recent Ruth fetish might end before they could do anything about it, the Red Sox labored to take full advantage of the frenzy. When the Red Sox returned home, although already assured of a good Labor Day crowd, they announced that Ruth would be on display during the doubleheader, not just to try to match and break Cravath's record, but that he would pitch as well. Given the way things were going, fans had to wonder if he would throw a no-hitter just for the hell of it.

The Sox didn't need Ruth to pitch; the pennant race had been over for months and it really didn't matter who took the mound for Boston anymore, but for the moment, the name Ruth attached to almost anything made money and if having Ruth pitch guaranteed a sellout, Ruth would pitch. If selling peanuts had done the trick, they'd have had him do that, too. As one newspaper noted clearly, the 30,000 fans in Boston that day were “lured by the reputation of Boston's home run king,” and nothing else. Ruth, at last, was starting to pay for that big contract.

And maybe there was one more reason. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that the Red Sox had already have been thinking about trading Ruth, and wanted to showcase him and prove that, yes, he could still pitch, too. That would make him even more valuable. The prospect of a slugging starting pitcher turned outfielder on his off days was tantalizing, if not to Ruth, then to everyone else.

It was obvious: Ruth was now the reason for the season. In the National League, the Cincinnati Reds surprised everyone and, after hanging around for much of the year, surged away from the field in August and by September locked up the National League title, stripping the pennant race of real drama as only the Giants retained even a distant hope of catching up, one they would not fulfill. And in the American League, the White Sox caught the Yankees in early July and then held the lead like a plow horse plodding forward, increasing it in small increments. By September, they were already taking money on a Chicago-Cincinnati World Series.

Ruth immensely enjoyed the attention, which he found made him more popular than ever before. He responded to the spotlight, the almost orphaned and abandoned little boy finally getting his due, grinning widely, tipping his hat and waving at the crowd at every opportunity.

He started game one of the doubleheader, and after barely pitching for the past few months apart from a few emergency appearances after the Mays sale, energized by the crowd, Ruth threw what would become the last really good game of his career. The crowd screamed at every pitch, a throng so vast that not only did they fill the stands, but they also filled the spaces under it. For the 1912 World Series, the Red Sox had added several rows of box seats in front of the grandstand, which stopped several feet above the playing field. Beneath the original seating area had been a space about three feet high, open to the concourses underneath the stands, separated from the field by only a wire fence. In the 1912 season, during the famous pitching duel between Joe Wood and Walter Johnson, before the new box seats were built, the crowd had pushed their way into this cramped space to watch the game from virtually ground level. Late in the 1919 season, as the Red Sox played on the road, work crews tore the new seats out, which were now warped and rotten. That was becoming a problem almost everywhere at Fenway. Except for the center field bleachers, the right field pavilion down the first base line, and the main grandstand, the rest of the park, more than 10,000 seats hastily constructed of wood just before the 1912 World Series, was falling apart, increasingly dangerous to use.

The deconstruction once again revealed the space beneath the stands. Ruth proved such a draw, and the crowd so enormous, that now boys and young men looked at the empty space and saw a viewpoint much preferable to their own tickets in the upper reaches of the stands. The result was that when Ruth took the mound, he did not only see the stands stacked with people, he also saw a horde of fans under the stands, from the ground up, packed with a new generation of worshippers who considered him both their peer and hero, faces pressed against the fence and stacked atop one another like cordwood.

In most instances, such an overflow crowd would have caused the Red Sox to string ropes in the distant reaches of the outfield in right, and center, and in front of Duffy's Cliff, and allow fans to stand on the slope itself. Tiered like a stand of bleachers, it was possible for ten or twelve rows of fans to stand and see over each other's heads. But on this day, either caught unprepared by the first such crowd in years, or aware of the historical nature of the day, the Red Sox allowed no one on the field and instead crammed the overflow into the aisles, creating thousands of extra standing room seats and forcing fans in the stands to stay in their places for virtually the entire game. There would be no cheap home runs over the ropes on this day. If Ruth—or anyone else—hit a home run, it would be earned.

With the crowd hanging on every pitch, Ruth seemed to toy with the Senators, allowing his share of hits and bending, but not breaking, apparently able to summon the old magic at will to keep Washington from scoring. After all, a year before Ruth had been the choice to start the most important games of the season. So it was again, albeit with something else entirely at stake.

Whenever Ruth came to bat, the crowd roared on each pitch, surging back and forth in great undulating waves as a stumble on one side of the park flowed through to the other as shoulder pressed shoulder and each head jockeyed for a view. Like a master showman, Ruth seemed to tease the crowd, slamming a third-inning triple to center to drive in a run and send the crowd into a frenzy, a ball that had no chance of leaving the field but was hit so hard it seemed to promise better things to come, and then coming around to score the second run to stake himself to a 2–0 lead. A later single gave the crowd something else to admire, and after giving up a lone run in the seventh, Boston took the first game 2–1, Ruth scattering 11 hits for the win, and figuring in every Red Sox score. It was a glimpse of what had been for a brief time in 1918, a player dominant on both the mound and at bat, valuable beyond any measure of any player either before or since.

But Ruth had still not accomplished what the crowd craved, and in game two he took his place in left field as Russell, acquired in the Mays deal, pitched for the Red Sox. Although later held up as an example of the “rape” of the Red Sox by the nefarious Yankees, the deal had actually worked out well for the Sox, at least over the remainder of the 1919 season. After going to New York, Mays went 9–3 for the Yankees, who collapsed in the second half and fell out of the race. Russell, for Boston, went 10–4 for his new club, in many ways outperforming the player he was dealt for, easily pitching the best stretch of baseball in his career. As author Steve Steinberg's research later ascertained, that would prove to be a pattern in the deals between Boston and New York over the next few seasons: they were usually equitable at the time they were made, and Boston received value in return. But history is written by the victors, and since the Yankees went on to become a dynasty, the deals now appear to tilt dramatically in New York's favor, although by most measures the numbers tell a different story. Only a few deals would be truly one-sided, and even those mostly made sense at the time.

On this day no one cared about Russell; it was Ruth's stage and he was learning to command it like no one else, feeding off the attention that eluded him as he grew up on the streets of Baltimore.

The game was close as Russell and the Senators' Jim Shaw each kept the crowd on their feet. The score was tied at one apiece when Ruth came to bat in the seventh with teammate Braggo Roth on base. Shaw tried to slip one past Ruth on a 2–2 count. As the
Globe
noted, “the ball never got by.”

Ruth turned on the pitch and hit it on a line, some 20 feet fair, down the right field line, not a towering shot that inspired awe, but a bullet that seemed both fearsome and dangerous. It burrowed into the crowd just a few feet over the fence and disappeared. Ruth had tied Cravath.

Now the crowd really went off, the ovation described as lasting nearly ten minutes, straw hats spinning down onto the field thrown by exuberant fans.

A young boy—it was always a young boy—vaulted over the barrier from the stands down the third base line and raced toward Ruth, reaching him after he crossed the plate. In Ruth's era, that was not a sign of danger but of devotion. Rarely has there been a player both so adored and so approachable. The big man bent over the youngster so he could hear what he was saying, and then the youth passed him something that Ruth accepted. What it was is lost to history. What it represented was the scepter of royalty. Ruth was now anointed the Home Run King, a crown he retains to this day. Although others have usurped many of his numbers, no one has ever approached his sovereign status. They kept cheering after the game resumed, reminiscent according to some of the way the crowd at Harvard and Yale tried to out-cheer each other at football games, as the fans in left and right battled to make more noise than each other. But this was not for one team over another, but one man over mortality.

The game did not matter. The blast gave Boston a lead they would not relinquish and the Red Sox won 4–1. Wrote Boston sportswriter James O'Leary, “It is not often that man has an opportunity to perform so well in the presence of so large a crowd and when he has the opportunity he rarely has the ability to deliver the goods.” That was the player Ruth was becoming, someone who suddenly seemed able to dial up such performances on command.

Now it was on to the lesser records, those once obscure but now made famous by Ruth's approach. A few fans had been aware of Seybold's American League mark, and once that was bettered, Cravath's National League and modern major league mark gained currency. Now fans learned of Freeman, a name their fathers or grandfathers remembered from a generation before, and his mark of 25 home runs.

The Red Sox salivated at the prospect of the crowd that would turn out the next three days to see Boston play the Yankees—er, make that Ruth confront history. It was not unthinkable to expect another 20,000 or 30,000 fans for each game, a windfall that would put Frazee in what was then termed the clover, rolling in a field of rich green cash. In one week, he could sell as many tickets as he had in the last two months. And with a couple weeks left in the season …

It was a time unlike any other in baseball history, an apparently once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for record after record to tumble all at once like dominoes. That is something that in the entire history of the game would happen only a handful of times—DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941, and 1998's now tainted battle between enhanced home run totals of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. For fans, it was one of those “have to be there” moments, worthy of retelling for the rest of your life.

Ruth was game, and so were the fans. But the weather was not. Over the next three days, it rained and it rained and it rained. As it did, the fortunes that Frazee hoped to reap spun down the drain, waterlogged, sodden, and lost for all time, perhaps $100,000 worth of receipts. With them may well have gone any chance for Ruth to remain in Boston.

Boston went to Philadelphia, where A's fans, saddled with a losing team as Connie Mack chose to lose on purpose and save money, were not quite as enthusiastic, but Ruth still responded. As the Red Sox warmed up before the game, a fan got Ruth's attention and asked him if it was easy to hit home runs. Thus challenged, and feeling invincible, Ruth stepped to the plate, beckoned for a pitch, and hit the first one he saw over the fence and onto the front porch of a house on 20th Street.

At least that's what the paper said. Increasingly, it was becoming ever more difficult to separate reality from hyperbole. But then again, when he came to bat for the second time that day, he sent the first pitch he saw in a similar direction to match Freeman's mark, then nearly added another later in the game when he a hit a drive that caromed of the top of the wall and ricocheted back for a double. Then, as if exhausted from circling the bases, he added three singles. The first report in the
Globe
didn't even mention the score. The headline only read “Babe Ruth Equals Home Run Record.” The final was 15–7, Boston, and for much of the rest of the season whether or not Ruth hit a home run meant more to the headline writers that anything else.