The Selling of the Babe (37 page)

The Senators took a lead, then called on the great Walter Johnson to hold it. He couldn't and New York tied the game in the sixth. The game entered the eighth with the score still knotted 7–7.

Perhaps the greatest pitcher in the game, Johnson was finding it hard to adjust to the new ball, and he was scuffling for the first time since he had been a teenager. Although only thirty-two, he had already thrown more than 4,000 innings and some 50,000 pitches in the major leagues. Whatever the reason, for the first time in more than a decade he was almost human.

Peck led off the inning with a triple. Then Meusel rattled one around the outfield for another three-bagger to put the Yankees up by a run. That brought up Ruth.

The past and future of the game stood 60 feet, 6 inches from one another, the game's two greatest stars, one on the way up and the other one just beginning a slow descent down. The crowd fell silent, knowing they were seeing something they might never see again.

The man who had already given them a season's worth of memories in only two short months came through again. Ruth ripped the pitch, which rode a wave of cheers, deep to right, where it crashed off the facade atop the upper deck, his 12th home run of the season, and 12th of the month, another new record falling before him. The Polo Grounds almost came apart, the 50,000 fans to watch baseball there in one day a record, too.

My God, it was only MAY. Summer had yet to come. What might Ruth do then?

 

13

The Babe

“A Modern Goliath of the bludgeon is Ruth.… He has become a national curiosity and the sight-seeing pilgrims who daily flock into Manhattan are as anxious to rest eyes upon him as they are to peek at the Woolworth building or the bungalows of the impressively rich on Fifth Avenue.”

—
New York Times

By the time the calendar turned to June, it had all changed. Ruth had fulfilled all expectations and then some. Whatever questions or hesitations about his talents, they had been answered by a month-long performance that saw his batting average soar above .300, and his profile challenge that of any statue or monument in the nation's capital. This time his offensive explosion coincided with victory for his team. The Yankees went 19–8 in May, rising from sixth place to second, as Ruth hit .329 for the month with 12 home runs and 26 RBI, all of which resulted in an OPS of 1.384. He wasn't striking out as much anymore either, whiffing only 12 times while walking 18. It was already one of the greatest offensive months by any player in baseball history, but Ruth wasn't even warmed up yet.

True to form, he was already cashing in, but he wasn't so much seeking out a fortune as simply reaching out and grabbing cash as opportunities came his way like batting practice fastballs. Whatever he was selling, America was buying.

He hadn't been in New York a month before the United News Service gave Ruth his own ghostwritten column, likely penned by Marshall Hunt, in the
Daily News
. And by the end of May, as record after record began to fall before him, Ruth began to receive invites and entreaties from New York's upper crust, all curious and eager to see just what this Ruth fellow was about, the ultimate drawing card of drawing cards. They invited him to parties and viewed him like a specimen from another planet. Even other celebrities, movie stars and singers and dancers and actors, wanted to meet him. Politicians wanted to be seen with him, and everyone wanted an autograph: enterprising fans figured out that if they sent Ruth a check for any amount, he would cash it. Upon return, the endorsed checks for 50 cents or a dollar became family heirlooms.

Ruth didn't mind, the food was good, the liquor top-notch, and the women better dressed but just as accommodating as ever. It was different than it was in Boston, where the Brahmins, ever so class-conscious, rarely deigned to look his way or even acknowledge the existence of life beyond the Back Bay and west of Massachusetts Avenue. Ruth would soon learn, just as Harry Frazee had in reverse fashion, that unlike Boston, New York was a meritocracy. What you could do was more important than who you were. Money and fame mattered more than breeding and upbringing and where you went to school.

In New York, the upper crust didn't just invite Ruth out, they often came to him. Many evenings he didn't even bother to go out at all but held court in his suite at the Ansonia as dozens of newfound friends and admirers drank his liquor, ate his sandwiches, and fought for his attention. Even the press was welcome inside, a measure of the ease he felt being himself in their presence. The only one not enjoying everything was Mrs. Ruth, who was often left alone in a corner. The Babe was on an elevator going up fast and there just wasn't room for her on the car.

It helped that Ruth could, to a degree, play and look the part. In Boston, he had favored straw hats; in New York he wore a stylish driving cap, a camel hair coat, a brand-new silk shirt every day of the week, had his shoes polished, drove a sleek Packard, and smoked expensive cigars. Among the high and mighty Ruth's crude manner and off-color way of speaking were considered deliciously scandalous, something one had to witness in person, an experience to collect like a rare orchid.

With fame, came fortune and opportunity. His longtime advisor, Johnny Igoe, now way over his head, began to lose his grip on Ruth. He didn't belong to anyone anymore: he belonged to the world.

From the start, Ruth began to separate himself from his teammates. On the field, he was a central part, a key figure, the first straw that stirred the drink, but that ended outside the lines. Before summer began, he stopped taking a roommate on the road, and although the Yankees paid for the players' food and hotel at the rate of $7 a day, Ruth already had higher standards, greater needs, and special dispensation. He took care of himself, usually paying for and staying in suites alone rather than splitting a room with another player. Eventually, he even had a private phone line installed next to his locker at the Polo Grounds. He was special, different.

Of course, the public knew little of this. He was presented to them as a big, guileless, overgrown kid. In Boston, where Ruth ran with the rabble, his exploits, for better or worse, were also better known; if he was drunk in an alley the night before, everybody knew it by noon the next day. In New York, it was different. In New York, a celebrity could still have privacy, protected by a cooperative press and culture built around discretion.

No one could get enough of him, and on June 1, after four games in three days and another doubleheader scheduled the next day, the pitching staff was stressed so the Yankees pressed Ruth into service on the mound against Washington.

He didn't tell the Yankees no. The day was all Ruth, his full game on display. Despite some rust—apart from fooling around on the sidelines Ruth hadn't pitched since September—after giving up two first inning runs Ruth settled down and followed with three innings of shutout ball. By then, the Yankees led 12–2. At the plate, in the first inning Ruth, batting cleanup, hit what was described as “a ball so high it broke all the altitude records in baseball,” that fell just shy of the fence. He later legged out a base hit and cracked a double in the eventual 14–7 Yankee win.

The growing cacophony for all things Ruth only increased the next day, when Ruth followed with what might have been his greatest day in the major leagues to date, something that now seemed to be happening once or twice a week. In a doubleheader versus Washington, he slammed three home runs, giving him 15 for the season, and as the
Times
noted, “He is hitting them harder and sending them farther every day.” That was probably true, for as spring gave way to summer increases in temperature and humidity combine to make the ball carry, the warm air and moisture increasing lift. There was open speculation that it was only a matter of time until he homered to dead center field in the Polo Grounds, where no one had gone before, or even come close, except for Ruth.

The Yankees split the doubleheader, but first place now seemed only a matter of time, a collateral outcome of Ruth's prodigious slugging. But he wasn't the only one getting the job done. Ruth's home runs were only three of eight struck that day, including three by the Senators. The press called it a “home run epidemic.” Over a seven-game stretch in late May and early June, the Yankees as a team collected 92 hits, 39 for extra bases, and averaged 13 hits and nine runs a game. A few years before that would have been almost a month's work.

The offensive explosion was even the subject of a column by Grantland Rice, who did not often take much of an analytical view. He concluded that “the amazing growth of home runs this season is due to a brace of combinations,” citing a “ball made up of better ammunition” due to “better wool,” and a late spring that he believed left pitchers behind the hitters. The acerbic and cynical Ring Lardner provided an alternate view, writing, “the masterminds that control baseball say to themselves that if it is the home run the public wants to see, give them home runs. So they fixed up a ball that if you don't miss it entirely it will clear the fence, and the result is that the ballplayer that used to specialize in humpback liners to the pitcher is now amongst our leading sluggers.”

Whatever the reason, the results were undeniable and Lardner's comments telling. Baseball's old guard may have looked at the power surge with suspicion, but they also realized there was no stopping it. The public—a different public from what filled the ballparks before the war, much younger and enamored with all things new—had already voted with their feet and spun through the turnstiles at a dizzying rate. Although baseball would go through some pains to get the Reach company to claim the ball had not been purposely doctored, at the same time they also never asked the company to go back to their old way of doing things. Reach wouldn't have done so anyway—they were in the business of selling baseballs, after all, and Ruth was helping them sell more than ever before. Baseball was expanding again. There were already seven new minor leagues in 1920, and from the sandlots through the schools everybody was playing baseball. Ruth and the home run were the reason. The game was not going to turn the clock back—or the ball—under any circumstance. Even old fans like Lardner, who found the new game crude and lacking the managerial strategy of scientific ball, recognized that. Going back to the old ball would be like abandoning the automobile for the horse and buggy, or giving up electric lights for coal oil lamps.

The Yankees kept up their impressive performance at the plate even as Ruth took a brief break from hitting home runs, going homerless in seven straight games, but it hardly mattered as he hit almost .500 and the Yankees scored more than 10 runs four different times. The only thing that seemed able to slow Ruth down were the New York police—he picked up his second speeding ticket, and the press took some delight in delivering a mild scold that just made Ruth seem like even more of a scamp.

Although he still got his hits, Ruth might have been bothered by something else. At nearly every at bat now, a newsreel film photographer risked death from foul balls by setting up just off the plate to record Ruth's swings.

At least Ruth thought it was for the newsreels. A few months later, a film would be released called
Babe Ruth “Over the Fence,”
a collection of his greatest swings spliced together with shots of the Polo Grounds crowd going apoplectic and Ruth touring the bases. Ruth knew nothing about it, and the Babe ended up suing on the grounds that the film violated his civil rights. What he was really mad about was that filmmaker Raoul Walsh had already offered him $10,000 to cooperate in a documentary on hitting, and the guerrilla film stole their thunder. Ruth eventually lost the suit,
Over the Fence
was lost to history, and the other film, unfortunately, never made. But this would hardly be Ruth's only experience with a movie camera.

The business of Babe Ruth was already in full swing and expanding. Although no one used the term at the time, Babe Ruth was a brand unlike any other. The whole business of celebrity endorsements, at least the way we look at celebrity endorsements today, was in its infancy, but the growth of popular culture, making movie stars and athletes famous beyond their business, was just taking hold. Ballplayers had long endorsed tobacco products and the like, but this was different. Babe Ruth's name on just about anything sold. All you needed was a photo of Ruth, some ad-agency-produced copy, a facsimile autograph, and voilà, instant sales.

It wasn't like Ruth had an army of lawyers vetting his offers. They usually weren't called in until after the fact. He sometimes signed away his rights for relatively nothing, and at other times, companies just used his name and image without permission, leaving it to Ruth to track them down and file a complaint. It was impossible to keep up.

Ruth also became an author—at least gullible young boys would believe he had. The A. L. Burt Company signed Ruth up and then hired some long-forgotten scribe to put words to Ruth's pen, the result being a children's novel,
The Home Run Kid: or How Pep Pindar Won His Title
. It wasn't Ruth's first foray into the literary arts. Ghostwritten copy was already being produced under his name in the papers, and over the years Ruth would “write” hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including no fewer than four autobiographies. No player of his era was more prolific.

Or more frustrating for biographers, for Ruth never even read much of the material, much less write it or vet it for accuracy. That was all done by sportswriters, produced under a filter to turn out a good “yarn,” and virtually useless in terms of history. Ruth wasn't a journal keeper or much of a letter writer, either. Most of the statements attributed to him are as spurious as the fake Ruth signatures that still flood the memorabilia market. Truth is, no one much knows what Ruth believed or thought or said about much of anything, and what little we do know has filtered down through anecdotes and a scant few oral histories. But there is no denying what he did on the field.