The Selling of the Babe (33 page)

You could almost hear the relief. The
Daily News
, only one year old and the latest arrival on the street in New York's newspaper wars, had bet heavily on Ruth. The tabloid didn't just want him to succeed; like Ruppert, they needed him to. In a first, and as a measure of the impact Ruth was expected to have on circulation, they had assigned a single reporter, Marshall Hunt, to cover Ruth. He was the beat, the ballplayer, and not his team. Hunt was to write about Ruth, and only Ruth, every day. That had never happened before, and hardly ever since, a situation more akin to the recent assignments of some Japanese reporters covering stars like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. There was the full expectation that more people would be interested in the Babe than they would be in the Yankees.

That was starting to appear to be the case. Although the Yankees were playing well, “the old hoodoo” had also taken hold. Baker was gone, and he was soon joined by infielder Chick Fewster, who was beaned and fractured his skull. Players were beginning to notice that not only did the new ball travel farther, but when it hit you now, it really stung. Bob Meusel was looking pretty good at third, and hitting better than any man on the team, including Ruth, but all was not well on the good ship Yankee. There was almost an insurrection.

Second baseman Del Pratt took offense at the distribution of third place money from the year before, which had finally been released by the National Commission and earned each veteran of 1919 another 450 some odd dollars. He had learned that several nonplayers and a few players he felt undeserving had been awarded shares, and Pratt got everyone all riled up about it. The Colonels eventually reached into their own pockets to make up the difference, each player getting an additional $37, but so much for team camaraderie. Ruth, once again, stayed out of it. He was new to the team, it wasn't his battle, and he stuck his neck out for no one but himself.

Everyone hoped the hit would prove to be the finger pulled from the dike that sparked the deluge; the press was getting a little tired of having to make things up about Ruth. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The home runs that had come so easily just a few months before, in 1919, were now somehow out of reach. When Ruth came to bat, it was as if all the fences had been moved back.

The Yankees broke camp on April 4, leaving Jacksonville by train with the Robins, as the two clubs planned to play their way north, with two dates in South Carolina, one each in North Carolina and Virginia, then spending a weekend in Brooklyn before the Yankees opened the season in Philadelphia against the A's. Perhaps Ruth would get hot on the way, just as he had in Baltimore the previous year.

He did and he didn't. By the time the games started, the tickets were already sold and what Ruth did didn't matter much to the Robins, who were likely a little tired of all the attention Ruth and the Yankees were getting, whether Ruth hit a home run or not, and they pitched around him when they could. But sometimes they missed.

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, hometown of Ernie Shore, the two teams squared off on a temporary field tucked onto a fairgrounds, a racehorse track beyond the outfield, far in distance. Nearly 6,000 fans turned out for the game, and before it even started the umpires decided the overflow crowd required a special set of ground rules. Since there was no fence, any ball hit into the crowd strung behind the ropes would be a ground rule double. It wouldn't matter how far Ruth hit one; a ball hit half a mile would only count as a double.

He didn't do it all at once, but cumulatively, he came close. Amid a swirling wind kicking up dust devils in the infield, Ruth hit one the
Tribune
described as “so far over the heads of the people in left center it cleared both fences of the half-mile race track.” Ernie Shore's cousin, K. E. Shore, promised to mark it off the next day, but the estimate was almost 600 feet. Later in the game Ruth hit another, shorter blast for another double that still would have made the stands at the Polo Grounds, and then in the ninth inning hit one even farther down the line in right, only to have the umpire call it foul, which sent the crowd howling. The press didn't hold back: “BABE RUTH ROBBED OF TRIO OF HOMERS,” read the headline, although they wisely neglected to mention the wind. Why ruin a good story? Besides, both clubs would be in New York in a few days and there were still tickets to sell there.

After one more game, in Lynchburg, Virginia, accented by a Ruth triple, the teams made it to Brooklyn. There was a time when you could have made a lot of money on a bet that asked the question “Where in New York did Babe Ruth play his first game as a Yankee?” The answer isn't Yankee Stadium, which did not yet exist, or the Polo Grounds, but Brooklyn's Ebbets Field in the first of two exhibition games on April 11, 1920.

Now that Ruth was in New York, the struggles that the newspapers had done their best to bury were forgotten. In the
Tribune
, Bill McGeehan warned baseball that given the “war between the Yankees and Ban Johnson,” the rumors of scandal percolating about the 1919 World Series, and the “spirit of Bolshevism” among the players, the health of the game was at stake.

The solution was already in town. No less an authority than the
New York Times
beat the drum for Ruth. In an un-bylined opinion piece entitled “Baseball Park, a Stronghold of Free Speech,” the author concluded:

The paper chronicles every move of Babe Ruth. The public reads that he is a big overgrown irresponsible boy. The sporting page tells us just what an odd duck he is. He pokes the ball harder and further than any of the sluggers of bygone days. Naturally there are any number of men who would willingly pass up an important business engagement to get a peek at an individual so important. What better excuse for taking the afternoon off? That is what many a man is looking for on hot afternoons in Summer.

In Brooklyn, anyway, a capacity crowd decided “Why wait till summer?” and a raucous 15,000 jammed the ballpark to see Ruth. No one else even mattered.

From the start, Ruth had their full attention, first in the form of raspberries and insults as they gave a Brooklyn welcome to the big star. He hit fourth, played center field, and came up in the first with Roger Peckinpaugh on second base, facing pitcher Sherry Smith. The crowd howled, half hoping to see Ruth bust one out, and lacking that, at least strike out. That's the way it was with Ruth, all or nothing, and anything in between, be it a ground ball, a single, or a triple, somehow seemed a disappointment.

This time he disappointed, lofting a routine fly ball to right field, only this being Ruth, the routine often became something else again. Amid the howling of the crowd, neither outfielder Hi Myers nor Bernie Neis could hear the other calling for the ball. Both played spectator and watched the ball drop for a single as Ruth laughed his way to first. Later in the game, as the Yankees rolled to an 11–0 win, Ruth tripled off the wall in deep left center, and walked twice. Nevertheless, he received the biggest cheer, termed a “joyous moment” in one account, when he struck out.

But the big news came with two out in the ninth. Hi Myers rolled a slow ground ball to Del Pratt at second base. He bent to field it, missed, and by the time he looked up, half of Brooklyn was on the diamond.

Assuming the game was over, much of the crowd vaulted onto the field. Most of them made their way toward Ruth.

He wasn't in any danger. They just wanted to see him up close, hear him talk, slap his back, walk the same earth and breathe the same air he did. For a moment, the umpires tried to clear the field, but it was impossible, the fans weren't leaving until Ruth did. After a short consultation with Huggins and Brooklyn manager Will Robinson, they called the game.

They managed to finish the next one the following day—this time Ruth only managed a single—and then the Yankees prepared to leave for Philadelphia. Ruth had been a little overwhelmed by the move to New York, but not so much that he hadn't managed to improve his lodgings. In Boston, he kept a reasonably sized apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, close enough to Fenway he could walk. In New York, he secured an eight-room apartment at the luxurious residential Hotel Ansonia on the Upper West Side, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets.

For Ruth, only a few years removed from the dormitory at St. Mary's, it was quite a step up. The Beaux Arts building featured a Parisian mansard roof, once had a rooftop farm, and was the first air-conditioned building in New York, turrets reaching to the sky on every corner. He wasn't the only ballplayer in the building, either. The White Sox' Chick Gandil kept a place there, as well. And it was only a quick drive to the Polo Grounds, although there were beginning to be so many cars in New York there was no such thing as a quick drive anymore, but Ruth couldn't risk the subway. In the daytime, he was impossible to miss. At night, he could move around more or less anonymously, but in the daylight it was already hard for him and getting harder.

He was only twenty-five years old, but it seemed as if he had been around almost forever. It was as if the entire sport, the entire nation had been waiting for him and hadn't even realized it until he'd shown up.

He was unmistakable. Like no one else. And he hadn't even played an official game yet as a Yankee.

 

11

A New Day

“You've probably heard the good news by now, but if you haven't here's our lay: Babe Ruth went on a batting spree in Harlem Hollow.”

—Damon Runyon,
New York American

Ruth had little time to settle in to New York before boarding the train with his teammates for Philadelphia. Once they arrived, things did not quite go as planned.

It was cold in Philadelphia and chilly, but sunny. Still, 12,000 fans turned out for Opening Day to watch their ball club, which had finished last in 1919 and was little better in 1920. Most of the crowd abandoned the grandstand for the bleachers before the game even if they paid for more expensive seats. Part of the reason was the sun, which made it warmer out there than huddled in the shade of the stands, but the other reason was Ruth. From the bleachers you could see him up close, and there was always the chance he would hit one in your lap. It wasn't until Ruth and the lively ball, after all, that it made any sense for young boys to bring their gloves to ballgames. Ruth debuted for the Yankees playing center field and hitting fourth.

Everything started out swell. During batting practice, he dropped three balls over the fence as if on command and fans looked forward to more of the same once the game began.

They got it in the first inning, not off the bat of Ruth but the hitter that preceded him, Wally Pipp. If Ruth was having a hard time finding his range with the lively baseball, the same could not be said of many of his teammates and others in the league.

They had all noticed—it was hard not to. The ball jumped off the bat in ways it never had, or at least in ways they had not noticed until the second half of the 1919 season. Now everyone was starting to realize this was a permanent change, and not just due to the vagaries of manufacturing after the war. Once Ruth got going, there would be no turning back.

It wasn't just the home run that Ruth was popularizing. He was also taking the stigma out of the strikeout. Even before the pitching distance settled in at 60 feet, 6 inches and pitchers started throwing overhand, the strikeout had been considered the ultimate embarrassment, the batting equivalent of tripping over a base or throwing the ball over the backstop, something to be avoided at almost any cost. Guys like Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb, and others took pride on keeping their strikeouts down to only 20 or 30 a season. It was considered better to ground out, pop out, or fall prostrate over the plate and fake a heart attack than strike out.

Not anymore. Fans found Ruth's strikeouts exciting—and he didn't much care if he struck out, either. Ruth figured it was all part of the process, one that might result in a home run the next time. Every swing and miss resulted in a correction in the following at bat.

No one paid closer attention to that than Ruth's Yankee teammates. He was conducting a clinic in a new way of hitting every time he picked up the bat. Not worrying about strikeouts gave them license to swing and swing hard. And they did. As a team, even without Ruth's contribution, their strikeouts would skyrocket in 1920, but so would their power and number of long hits. The same would hold true for almost every other team.

The crowd buzzed as Pipp toured the bases, and it buzzed some more when Ruth stepped in, but he could only manage a sharp single. His next time up, he again drew the biggest cheer of the day with—what else?—a strikeout. Entering the eighth inning the score was tied 1–1 as Shawkey of the Yankees and the A's Scott Perry were each on their game.

Then Shawkey wobbled, giving up a couple of base hits. One runner was cut down at home, but with two outs Joe Dugan lifted a fly ball to center field.

“The situation,” offered the
Daily News
the next day, “was much like the climax of a novel for school boys in which a college hero catches the ball and by a phenomenal heave chucks the pellet home and then by a series of clever plays the college nine is terribly defeated.” But that didn't happen. Ruth circled under the ball … and dropped it. Both runners scored and Ruth cost the Yankees a win in his very first official appearance as the A's held on 3–1.

It didn't help when Ruth followed that performance by striking out three times the next day. “The crowd went wild,” reported the
Tribune
. “To see the prince of all sluggers breeze three times is something hostile fans has hardly dared hope for.” In Philadelphia, they knew they wouldn't have much more to cheer about. To top it off, before the game Ruth had been called to the plate and awarded a small brown derby hat before he then went out and completed the “hat trick.” Some start.