The Selling of the Babe (6 page)

The reporters weren't being too cute: press was important. The Red Sox planned to barnstorm their way back north, and anything that could drum up publicity mattered. The alligators were good copy, and most reports made sure to mention the farm. Crowds were important and word traveled fast. While not quite the attraction of the local casino, seeing Ruth scatter a group of gators with a baseball was a draw, even if it was little more than a routine fly. The crowds at Boston's morning workouts began to increase and attendance at the exhibitions between the Sox and Brooklyn were almost on par with turnout at the racetrack. Ruth was the primary reason.

He loved the attention and played to the crowd every chance he had. When he took batting practice, he made no pretense of trying to do anything but hit the ball as high and far as possible—as a pitcher, he didn't have to. Years later, the Tigers' Ty Cobb noted that this was a huge advantage for Ruth, saying, “He could experiment at the plate. He didn't have to get a piece of the ball.… No one cares if a pitcher strikes out or looks bad at bat, so Ruth could take that full swing.” And that's exactly what he did, and had been doing since reaching the big leagues, often using an oversized bat that weighed as much as ten or twelve ounces more than the bats many other players usually used.

The result in four big league seasons so far had been 68 strikeouts in 361 major league at bats, something that made the game's wise old heads shake their heads. Striking out nearly 20 percent of the time was unacceptable—for anybody, regardless of the result the other 80 percent of the time. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1918, Boston's fledgling pitching corps complied and grooved the ball for Ruth as the writers breathlessly noted his accomplishment and whether he made contact or not. They also noted that most of the veteran players made sure to wait and take their batting practice off the new recruits instead of Mays, Ruth, or the other front liners who trickled in every day.

On March 20, Ruth managed to scatter the gators four more times during batting practice. Each one meant a lost baseball, leading Harry Frazee to mutter, “This is getting painful,” a reference to the cost of a replacement ball. Burt Whitman of the
Boston Herald
took to referring to Ruth as “the Colossus,” and a cartoon in the
Boston Post
showed Ruth pestering Barrow to play in the field, but that was as much a reference to his enthusiasm as his batting prowess. (Note: the
Boston Herald
and
Boston Journal
merged in 1917 and were known in 1918 as the
Boston Herald and Journal
, becoming simply the
Boston Herald
in 1918. To avoid confusion I refer to it as the
Boston Herald
.)

Word of Ruth's performances continued to spread. The home runs might have been cheap, but nevertheless they were home runs, and no one else in camp was hitting them so frequently. Ruth had filled out and was now man-strong, topping 200 pounds. When the Sox and Brooklyn traveled to Little Rock for an exhibition only to have it be rained out, Ruth entertained the big crowd of soldiers by taking batting practice and swinging for the fences, dropping four or five balls over the barrier just for fun. According to one hyperbolic report, the balls landed thirty feet farther away than “the right field pavilion at the Polo Grounds,” a good poke if not a very specific one, as the stands were only 258 feet from home down the line but much deeper where the pavilion ended. The soldiers looked at Ruth just as he had once looked up to Brother Matthias, his mentor at St. Mary's, when he was hitting home runs one-handed.

The next day, 2,000 fans turned up for another exhibition at Whittington Park. With first baseman Dick Hoblitzell finally in camp and needing work, and both Carl Mays and Ruth scheduled to pitch, Barrow knew good business and stuck Ruth in right field to start the game. He didn't disappoint. In the third inning, pitcher Al Mamaux grooved one. Barrow had already told his men to swing and swing hard against the Brooklyn scrub and Ruth did, once again hammering the ball over the fence in right. If press reports are to be believed, this time the blast cleared not only the gators but both a street and a duck pond. Astounded witnesses called the drive the longest they'd ever seen at WhittingtonPark, some claiming the ball traveled 500 feet, something normally possible with the dead ball only if one included a considerable roll.

Still, his performance was more a novelty than anything else. There were no serious calls for Ruth to change position. It wasn't as if he was unstoppable. Only the home runs stood out. The Robins veteran Rube Marquard, known for his fastball, kept him quiet in one exhibition, striking him out three times. Ruth only connected off his replacement, and even that drive was reported to be wind-aided. By the end of the month there were finally enough players in camp to play intra-squad games between the “Regulars” and the “Yannigans,” which kept Ruth on the field, but in exhibitions against Brooklyn Ruth resumed his mound duties, and as the pitchers got into shape, his home run swing began to prove less effective.

By the time the Sox broke camp in early April and began to wend their way north, playing exhibitions in Dallas, New Orleans, Chattanooga, and elsewhere, Ruth's early spring performance was already becoming something of an afterthought. It was akin to that of the prospect who gets off to a hot start only to be forgotten as soon as the pitchers start throwing curves.

Barrow was beginning to settle on a lineup and there was little question that Ruth was back where he belonged—pitching. His performance at the plate was certainly valuable when he came through, but nothing the Sox felt they could depend on or cause them to flout tradition.

But it was nice to have a pitcher who could hit a little. Smoky Joe Wood, the Boston fireballer who won 34 games in 1912 before a sore arm drove him to the outfield, had always been a good hitter, and more than one sportswriter had chided the usually weak-hitting Washington Senators for not making better use of Walter Johnson's bat. In most years, he was one of their better hitters. But then as now, conventional baseball wisdom held it was far too taxing to pitch every fourth or fifth day and still play regularly between starts. No major leaguer has ever done so on more than a temporary basis, and only a scant few, such as Red Lucas, have even been used regularly as pinch hitter.

Yet one more factor made it somewhat difficult for the Red Sox or anyone else to see what they might have in Ruth. While today all manner of analytic tools and formulas measure not only batting average, but also power and a player's total value, none of these were available in 1918. When observers spoke of Ruth's hitting, they primarily meant only his batting average, not home runs and strikeouts. Even such a commonplace statistic as slugging percentage, which measures power by dividing total bases by at bats, was unknown. Most baseball men considered taking a base on balls almost a sign of weakness and sacrifice bunts and stolen bases were valued all out of proportion to their true contribution to the scoring of runs and the winning of ballgames.

In combination, all this rendered Ruth's gifts as a hitter partially invisible, obscuring the value of his doubles and triples and walks, while giving too much prominence to his strikeouts. And in the context of the era, even the home run was viewed with suspicion, such an irregularity that it was considered pure folly to hope for one, much less to expect a player to hit one on command, even in batting practice. A home run then was the baseball equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in football today; a wonderful surprise when it happens, but hardly worth counting on.

The only observers who wished for that were members of the press. They were beginning to realize that Ruth's home runs sold papers. A column by the
Herald
's Bob Dunbar, a fictional scribe whose byline was ghostwritten by younger staffers and generally included the kind of hometown pap that others would not allow to see in print under their own name, noted that fans were “disappointed when they don't read that big Babe hit a home run.”

The Red Sox worked their way back toward Boston, generally thumping Brooklyn with ease, taking their preseason series seven games to five. Once the weather turned cold, forcing the cancellation of a game in Chattanooga due to snow, they returned to Boston five days before the start of the regular season, more or less set on their lineup.

Frazee's acquisitions had come through, as Stuffy McInnis took over at third for Gardner, Amos Strunk patrolled center field, Wally Schang earned the starting nod behind the plate, and George Whiteman, the thirty-three-year-old minor leaguer Barrow nabbed from the International League, took over in left. Holdovers remained in Harry Hooper in right field and Everett Scott at shortstop, while veteran Dave Shean, acquired in a trade late in the spring after it became clear Johnny Evers now only acted like a crab instead of moved like one, played second, with Dick Hoblitzell winning the first baseman's job. Pitchers Dutch Leonard and Carl Mays joined newcomer Joe Bush as part of the club's strength: the pitching staff. And at the center of it all, still Boston's number one pitcher, was the same man who had occupied that spot the year before, Babe Ruth.

The club got in a day's work out at Harvard, giving Ruth a taste of the Ivy League, and one day before the season started, Barrow told the
Boston Herald,
“There is every reason to believe the Red Sox will be in the hunt.” As opposed to other clubs that had been forced to use what Barrow referred to as “emergency players,” he felt his club was made up of “high class material,” and offered that he expected the greatest challenge to come from the defending champion White Sox. Of his own team, he took particular note of his infield, and called his pitching staff of Mays, Leonard, and Bush, anchored by Ruth, “the best quartet in the league.”

For the record, Ruth collected nine hits in 21 exhibition game at bats that spring, including four home runs, most of it against subpar pitching in a ballpark with a short porch in right field. He had been very entertaining, but as yet there was no hint that Ruth would ever play even a single inning anywhere else but on the mound.

 

3

1918

“He was like a damn animal. He had that instinct. They know when it's going to rain, things like that. Nature! That was Ruth.”

—Philadelphia A's pitcher Rube Bressler

Just as he had the previous two seasons, when the umpire yelled “Play ball” on Opening Day, standing in the center of the diamond, grinding the ball into his hip with his enormous left hand was Babe Ruth. On the field, all seemed right with the Red Sox, but if there was reason to worry, one only had to look in the stands.

It was pathetic. Despite Frazee's off-season deals, barely 7,000 paying customers braved the chill April air for the start of the 1918 season, nearly 3,000 fewer than the year before. To pump up the crowd, Frazee even let a couple of thousand servicemen in for free. Yet despite the bunting that hung from the front of the grandstand and the roof, Fenway Park, only seven years old, was already looking shabby. The wall in left field and just about every other open space was covered with a motley collection of signage, much of it faded and peeling. The bulk of the crowd huddled in the concrete and steel grandstand and the covered right field pavilion, where a knot of several hundred gamblers turned out for every game and held sway, openly plying their trade like stockbrokers working the floor of the exchange. The rest of the park—the bleachers in center field and the stands in right and along the third base line hurriedly constructed for the 1912 World Series—were nearly empty. Constructed entirely of wood, after almost seven years the raw pine was splintered and warped from the summer sun and the winter ice. Only the poor and the brave—and those who could afford a new pair of pants—braved the ballpark's outer reaches and then only when a big crowd gave them no other choice.

In retrospect, Frazee had made a grave error when buying the Red Sox in not acquiring the ballpark. The Taylors gladly took Frazee's rent checks but were loath to perform any but the most cosmetic maintenance. The ballpark as first built in 1912, not to mention the jury-rigged, expanded ballpark with extra seats cobbled together for the that year's World Series, was nothing like the gussied-up, faux antiqued Fenway Park that exists today. It was spare and utilitarian. Within a few more years, portions of the wood stands would periodically be cordoned off, condemned as unsafe. In the meantime, it gave fans one more reason not to come out to the ballpark.

America was changing. For decades, America had turned its back on Europe and as it now awoke and looked around, it was beginning to realize the world was rapidly evolving. As men went to war, women went to work in their stead and began to act and think independently. In recent years, the spread of electricity and the affordability of the automobile had ushered in the greatest transformation in American society to date. Everything America had ever been suddenly seemed old and out of date.

That included the game of baseball. The recent failure of the Federal League underscored the trouble in the game. Baseball had thrived for years as the national pastime primarily because there was no alternative, really—nothing other than vaudeville and the theater to occupy workers' few spare moments. But the spread of electricity offered new outlets—the nickelodeon, recorded music, and nightclubs and dance halls. In less than a decade, the number of minor leagues had tumbled from more than fifty to only ten by 1918. Major league attendance had peaked at more than seven million in 1909 and then dropped steadily to barely half that. The game's long-term survival was hardly assured. Twenty years before, bicycle racing had been nearly as popular as baseball. Now, almost every city of any size sported an empty or abandoned velodrome. In a few years, the ballpark risked a similar fate.