One Summer: America, 1927 (18 page)

It is a telling fact that the man who made more money out of baseball than almost anyone else was an enterprising Englishman named Harry Stevens, who came to America as a young man around the turn of the century, fell for baseball in a big way, and hit on the best idea of his life—namely, that fans might enjoy a hot snack in the course of a game. He experimented with various combinations of hot sandwiches and found that sausages in a roll kept warm longer than anything else he tried. He secured the right to sell his “red hots,” as he rather generously called them, at the Polo Grounds and almost at once began doing brisk business. It was Stevens’s products that the cartoonist Tad Dorgan dubbed “hot dogs,” in jocular reference to their supposed principal constituent. Stevens loved the term, and by the 1920s hot dogs were indelibly associated with baseball games all across the nation, and Stevens had the concession operations at all three New York ballparks and others as far afield as Chicago. He was also rich in a way that most baseball club owners could only ever dream of being.

In desperation, team owners resorted to economies that often made them look ridiculous. Most ballparks, for instance, insisted on reclaiming foul balls hit into the stands. A few enlightened owners, like Barney Dreyfuss of the Pittsburgh Pirates, let fans keep balls as souvenirs, but others were ferocious in defending what they saw as an important property right. Matters came to a head in 1923 at—appropriately enough, it would seem—Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, when an eleven-year-old boy named Robert Cotter caught a foul ball and refused to give it back. When it was also discovered that he had no ticket but had sneaked in, the Phillies’ management had young Cotter arrested and charged with theft. He spent a night in jail and was hauled before a judge the next day. The judge, to the delight of the city, ruled that it was entirely reasonable that a kid would want to keep a foul ball—particularly as Cotter had made a really good catch. After that, ballparks everywhere largely gave up trying to retrieve foul balls.

The paradoxical upshot of all this was that baseball at the time Babe Ruth came into the game was immensely popular but dangerously uneconomic—and of no team was that more true than the New York Yankees. In 1914, the year Ruth joined the Red Sox, it became known in
the baseball world that the Yankees were for sale if anyone wanted to buy them. They were not an enticing proposition. They didn’t have a single player of real talent, generally finished near the bottom of the standings, attracted poor crowds, and didn’t even have a home ground. They played in the Giants’ stadium, the Polo Grounds. Until recently they didn’t even have a fixed name but were known variously and casually as the Highlanders, the Hilltoppers, or the Americans.

The Yankees’ owners, William S. Devery and Frank Farrell, asked John McGraw of the Giants to help them find a new owner. McGraw approached two men who had never met but were keen on baseball: a New York beer baron named Jacob Ruppert and a businessman from Ohio who rejoiced in the name of Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston. Huston, sadly, was not as exotic or even as interesting as his name might lead us to hope. Born in 1866, one year before Ruppert, he had grown up in a middle-class household in Cincinnati, trained as an engineer, and made a fortune helping rebuild Cuba after the Spanish-American War. He liked to drink, was a bit of a slob, was always cheerful, and loved baseball. That was about all there was to him.

Ruppert, by contrast, was a more complex character. The scion of a wealthy brewing family, he grew up in a rambling mansion in the German-American enclave of Yorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the same neighborhood that produced, in more modest circumstances, Lou Gehrig and the Marx brothers—close to the yeasty smell of the Ruppert Brewery, which was the biggest in the nation, occupying an enormous site between Ninetieth and Ninety-Third Streets. It produced Knickerbocker, Ruppert, and Ruppiner beers, which, not incidentally, sold very well at ballparks.

Jacob Ruppert was a rather odd and solitary man. He lived alone in his big family house, attended by five servants. He served four terms as a congressman, from 1899 to 1907, for the Democratic Party, but then seems to have lost interest in politics. He spoke with a German accent—he called Ruth “Root,” for instance—which was a little puzzling because he had lived his whole life in America, as indeed had his parents. He collected jade, books, ceramics, dogs, horses, and art, and had
what was called “America’s finest collection of small monkeys.” Though not adventurous himself, he was keen on exploration and in 1933 would sponsor an expedition by Richard Byrd to the Antarctic. Ruppert’s most arresting peccadillo was that he kept a second home in Garrison, New York, where he maintained a shrine to his mother in the form of a room containing everything she would need if she came back to life. This may go some way toward explaining why he never married.

Wealth and a love of baseball were about all that Ruppert and Huston had in common. Despite these drawbacks, on the last day of 1914, Ruppert and Huston each paid $225,000 for a half share of the Yankees—a staggering sum bearing in mind that Devery and Farrell had bought the team for $18,000 only a decade before. McGraw was elated, as well he might be. To any dispassionate observer, Ruppert and Huston were idiots.

As it turned out, they couldn’t have come into baseball ownership at a worse time. One bad thing after another befell major league baseball in the following years. First, competition from the Federal League clobbered revenues. Attendance in American and National League parks dropped by a quarter during the two years of the Federal League’s existence. Then America’s entry into the First World War depressed attendance further. That was followed by the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed millions across the world and left most people severely disinclined to gather in public places. At the same time, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the 1918 major league season would be reduced to 130 games as a gesture toward the war effort. Total attendance that year fell to just three million—a decline of 50 percent from ten years earlier. Finally, in 1919, Congress brought in the Volstead Act, which declared that Prohibition would begin in January 1920. That would remove beer sales from ballparks, eliminating a crucial source of revenue.

Many teams barely clung on. No owner was in a more parlous state than the soon-to-be-notorious Harrison Herbert Frazee of the Boston Red Sox. Harry Frazee was really a theatrical impresario, but he loved
baseball, too, and in 1916 with a partner named Hugh Ward, he bought the Red Sox—then the best team in the game. They paid $1 million, far more than they could afford. Very quickly Frazee and Ward found themselves struggling to meet loan payments.

In the first week of January 1920, facing imminent default, Frazee did something that Red Sox fans spent the rest of the century obsessing over: he sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 in cash and a loan of $350,000. Although not so well noticed by history, but just as devastating to the team, Frazee offloaded sixteen other players to the Yankees between 1918 and 1923. The Yankees even acquired his general manager, Ed Barrow. In a sense, the Red Sox franchise transferred to New York. Frazee sold out altogether in 1923. Coincidentally, Huston would sell out to Ruppert in the same year.

Even more unnoticed by history was the timing of the Ruth deal. It is not at all a coincidence that the New York Yankees purchased Babe Ruth in the same month that Prohibition came into effect. Jacob Ruppert at the time of the Ruth sale was three weeks away from losing his brewery business. He urgently needed an alternative source of income. Now he was going to find out if it was actually possible to get rich from owning a baseball team, and he was going to do it by staking nearly everything on the most brilliant, headstrong, undisciplined, lovable, thrillingly original, ornery son of a bitch that ever put on a baseball uniform.

It would be quite a ride.

*
Ruth in 1918 actually hit 12 home runs, but one was a walk-off homer, and in those days the person who hit a game-winning home run was awarded only the number of bases needed to score the winning run, so Ruth’s 12th homer was recorded as a triple.

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Before Babe Ruth changed everything, a home run in baseball was a pretty rare event. John Franklin Baker of the Philadelphia Athletics became known to posterity as “Home Run” Baker not because he banged out lots of home runs, but because in the 1911 World Series he hit crucial homers in two successive games. The rest of the time Baker didn’t hit that many home runs—just two all season in 1910, for instance. Even so, he was one of the game’s preeminent sluggers, and the name “Home Run” didn’t seem silly to anyone.

In baseball’s deadball era, as the period before 1920 is commonly known, teams didn’t look for rocketlike hits and big rallies, but manufactured runs “scientifically,” by slapping out singles and moving runners along by any means possible—through bunts and walks and other patiently incremental strategies. Some teams actually practiced getting hit by pitches. Scores tended to be low but close.

There was a good reason for this. Hitting a baseball is hard, and in many ways it was harder in Babe Ruth’s day than it is now. A baseball thrown at 90 miles per hour hits the catcher’s mitt four-tenths of a second after it leaves the pitcher’s hand, which clearly does not allow much time for reflection on the batter’s part. Moreover, in order to get his bat to the plate to meet the ball’s arrival, the batter must start
his swing at two-tenths of a second, when the ball is still only halfway there. If the pitch is a curve, nearly all its deviation will still be to come. Half of it will occur just in the last fifteen feet. If the pitch is some other sort—a fast ball, change-up, or cutter, say—the ball will arrive at a fractionally different instant and at a different height. Because of friction, the ball will also lose about 5 miles per hour of speed during the course of its short journey from the pitcher’s hand. In Babe Ruth’s day, pitchers had an additional advantage in that the mound was fifteen inches high instead of the modern ten. That makes a difference, too.

So the batter, in this preposterously fractional part of a fraction that is allotted to him for decision making, must weigh all these variables, calculate the place and moment that the ball will cross the plate, and make sure that his bat is there to meet it. The slightest miscalculation, which is what the pitcher is counting on, will result in a foul ball or pop-up or some other form of routine failure. To slap out a single is hard enough—that is why even the very best hitters fail nearly seven times out of ten—but to hit the ball with power requires confident and irreversible commitment.

It was this that Babe Ruth did as no man ever had before. Ruth used a mighty club of a bat—it weighed fifty-four ounces—and gripped it at the very end, around the knob, which enhanced the whip-like motion of his swing. The result was a combination of power and timing so focused and potent that it generated eight thousand pounds of force (scientists actually measured it in a lab) and, in the space of one-thousandth of a second—the duration of contact—through the miracle of physics it converted the sizzling zip of an incoming 90-mile-an-hour baseball into an outgoing spheroid launched cloudward at 110 miles an hour.

The result was like something fired from a gun. It was hypnotic and rare, and now here was a man who could do it pretty regularly. Babe Ruth’s home runs were not merely more frequent, they were more majestic. No one had ever seen balls travel so loftily and far.

“During batting practice all the Cleveland players stopped what they were doing just to watch him hit,” Willis Hudlin, a pitcher for the Indians
at the time, recalled more than seventy years later for
Sports Illustrated
. “He’s the only guy the players ever did that for.”

No other player had ever brought this kind of excitement to the game. When Ruth came to the plate, the whole ballpark fell silent. “Even the peanut vendors paused in their shouting, and turned to watch,” noted one observer. With Ruth at bat, as Marshall Smelser put it in a 1993 biography, the game became a contest “between two men instead of eighteen.”

In 1920, his first year with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs—more than any other
team
in the major leagues. He batted .376 and led the league in ten batting categories. It was almost impossible to imagine anyone ever having a better year—or, come to that, a more timely one. Baseball was about to be sent reeling by its greatest scandal, the throwing of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago “Black Sox,” an event that, when it was revealed in the fall of 1920, wholly undermined people’s faith in the game. Ruth’s colossal swatting was the greatest distraction in sporting history. He didn’t just transform the game, he very possibly saved it.

In 1921, impossibly, Ruth had an even better year than in 1920. He hit 59 home runs—a number so high as to be beyond the reach of any meaningful adjective—and scored more runs, had more extra base hits, and racked up more total bases than any player ever had before. He led the league in runs batted in and bases on balls, and had the third-highest batting average, at .378, just behind Harry Heilmann and Ty Cobb—whose batting averages, it is worth noting, would almost certainly have been a couple of points lower had Ruth spent the season pitching against them, too.
^*
Ruth also stole seventeen bases and led the Yankees to their first league championship. This was the best season that any player had ever had.

Curiously, it wasn’t just Babe Ruth who was hitting home runs in volume as the 1920s began. Suddenly balls were flying out of parks all over
the place. From 1918 to 1922, American League home runs traced an unexpectedly impressive trajectory, as a simple summary shows:

1918— 96

1919— 240

1920— 369

1921— 477

1922— 525

For the major leagues as a whole, the total number of home runs went from 235 in 1918 to over 1,000 in 1922—a quadrupling in just four years, a wholly unprecedented level of change. So what happened? Well, quite a lot actually.