The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (33 page)

“Can Falstaff be playmates with Volstead?” one headline asked. That was the true matchup.

“They were on the bench recently,” Rud Rennie wrote in the
New York Herald,
describing the two men. “Ruth squirting tobacco juice and advising the other team’s catcher, who had just missed a foul ball, to look on the ground for it; Gehrig at the other end explaining to a friend how he speared eels at night. A group of photographers approached the dugout and said they wanted a picture of Lou and the Babe. They asked Lou. ‘It’s all right with me,’ said Lou, ‘if it’s all right with the Babe.’”

The deference always did exist. The master always was the master. Gehrig, good as he was, always looked at Ruth with a certain wonder, studying him to see how a star should act. The baseball was easy for Gehrig, but the rest of this star stuff seemed incredibly hard.

The competition went straight into September. The two men were tied at 44 homers apiece as they reported for a doubleheader in Boston against the God-awful Red Sox. In the fifth inning of the first game, Tony Welzer on the mound for the Sox, Gehrig unloaded a shot into the right-field bleachers to take the lead at 45 in what now was called everywhere “the Great American Home Run Derby.” In the sixth, Ruth came back at him. With two men on base, Welzer tried a change of pace on the Bam. The Bam was waiting for it. He ran up on the ball and—in the
Times
—“dealt the sphere a fearful blow,” sending it into the center-field bleachers, a shot instantly considered the longest homer in Fenway history. The two men were tied at 45.

In the next inning, poor Welzer still on the mound, Ruth connected again. This was a tall fly ball that sneaked into the stands close to the right-field foul pole. Ruth 46, Gehrig 45. Finally, in the seventh inning of the nightcap, Ruth broke up Charlie Russell’s shutout with another fly ball down the right-field line that snuck into the stands. Gehrig, the next batter, followed with a shot to left-center, longer and harder hit than Ruth’s homer, that stayed in the park for a triple.

And yet somehow, just like that, the chase was done.

Gehrig, like any good rabbit, now peeled off to the side. He would hit only two home runs for the rest of the season, ceding the stage to the well-paid leading man. He had done his job as a credible Volstead, but now Falstaff had all the speaking lines. The battle became a chase between the big man and his younger self, wholly as fascinating as the battle against his teammate. The Babe was seven games behind his 1921 pace at the end of his work on September 6. He had 22 games remaining in which to hit 13 home runs.

This seemed almost impossible. Then again, he hit two more the next day at Fenway, numbers 48 and 49, to close out the Yankees’ road schedule. Maybe it wasn’t impossible. All of the action for the rest of the year would be at the Stadium. John Kieran of the
Times
was moved to poetry by the chase.

With vim and verve he has walloped the curve from Texas to Duluth,

Which is no small task, and I beg to ask: Was there ever a guy like Ruth?

As each succeeding series passed, the big man whacked away at the numbers, getting one home run against the Browns, two against the Indians, two more against the White Sox, two against the Tigers, but then he stalled with only one against the A’s. When he hit the final three-game series of the season against the Senators, he needed three home runs in three days to reach 60. Two, of course, would tie the record.

On September 29, he took care of business quickly. In the first inning, down two strikes in the count, he caught Hod Lisenbee trying to sneak a curve past him for strike three and neatly deposited number 58 into the right-field bleachers. In the fifth, with the bases loaded, Senators manager Bucky Harris brought in a 25-year-old kid up from the New Haven Pilots named Paul Hopkins to face Ruth. This was Hopkins’s first appearance in a major league uniform, and the first batter he ever faced. When he looked toward the Yankees’ dugout to see who was coming, he thought, “Oh, my.” He also thought he could get Ruth out because he was 25 years old and he thought he could get anyone out.

The rookie threw a succession of curveballs at the Bam and saw two of them turned into monstrous foul balls, one down either line. With the count at three and two, he threw what he thought was the best curveball of them all.

“Real slow and over the outside of the plate,” Hopkins recalled for
Sports Illustrated
almost 70 years later. “It was so slow that Ruth started to swing and then hesitated. He hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he came through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second. Put everything behind it. I can still hear the crack of the bat. I can still see the swing.”

Recounting the narrative in the next morning’s
Daily News,
Marshall Hunt wrote, “There was a moment of hushed expectancy as the count became three and two on the captain of the home run industry. There was that ominous sound of a heavy instrument, swung with vast force, meeting a pitched ball from the right arm of Master Hopkins. There was a shriek as the white pellet whistled its course into the right field bleachers, and as the mammoth character legged his way around the bases, pursuing his three comrades, there came a symphony of rejoicing from the clients such as these sagging ears have not heard in many a year.”

The 60th almost followed on Ruth’s final at-bat of the day. He clocked another shot to right that was caught by rookie outfielder Red Barnes against the fence. Earlier in the game, he had tripled, the ball caroming off a railing and back into the field. He conceivably could have hit numbers 58, 59, 60, and 61 in the same afternoon.

The Washington pitcher the next day was Tom Zachary, a hard thrower. Zachary was a Quaker and had served in a noncombatant division in the Red Cross during the war. He was one of the few players who had pitched under an assumed name in the big leagues, appearing in two games for the A’s in 1918 under the name Zach Walton in an attempt to keep his college eligibility. He might have wished he had appeared in this game as Zach Walton.

In the eighth inning, the game tied at 2–2, and with Koenig on third, he faced Ruth for the fourth time of the afternoon. Ruth had walked once and singled twice, driving home the Yankees’ two runs. Zachary’s first pitch was a called strike. The second was high, a ball. The third was over the plate, a fastball. Ruth pulled it directly into the right-field stands, halfway to the top. Number 60 was done. Zachary threw his glove to the mound and complained to the umpire that the ball was foul. His words were blotted out by the noise from a small but exultant midweek crowd of 10,000. Number 60 was done.

“While the crowd cheered and the Yankee players roared their greetings, the Babe made his triumphant, almost regal, tour of the paths,” the
Times
reported.

He jogged around slowly, touched each bag firmly and carefully and when he imbedded his spikes in the rubber disk to record officially Homer 60, hats were tossed into the air, papers were torn up and tossed liberally and the spirit of celebration permeated the place.

The Babe’s stroll out to his position was signal for a handkerchief salute in which all the bleacherites to the last man participated. Jovial Babe entered into the carnival spirit and punctuated his kingly strides with a succession of snappy military salutes.

He had hit 17 home runs in the month of September, a record for any month. The 60th was his third home run of the season off poor Zachary, but he had hit four off both Rube Walberg of the A’s and Milt Gaston of the Browns. He had hit home runs in every park in the eight-team league, at least six homers against every team. He had 11 against his old friends the Red Sox, eight at Fenway Park. For all the talk about how Yankee Stadium had been designed for him, he had hit 32 of his shots on the road, 28 at home. He had pulled 39 of them into the right-field stands and hit only four to left. He had one inside-the-park homer, number 27, a shot to the flagpole in center field in Detroit.

His three bats had become characters in the drama and in the press were named Black Betsy, Big Bertha, and Beautiful Bella. They were black, blond, and red. He used Black Betsy to hit number 59, Beautiful Bella for 60. The weight of the bats varied with the press accounts, some of which declared each weighed 52 ounces. Ruth actually never used a bat heavier than 42 ounces, and as his career progressed, he went to lighter and lighter bats.

Ruth, in the clubhouse, said, “Sixty! Let’s see some son of a bitch try to top that one!” but there was no grand celebration. The Yankees had one more game left with the Senators the next day, and the feeling was that he would hit one, two, or three more to close the show. He didn’t. Gehrig hit a final home run to close with 47, and the Yankees recorded their 110th win against 42 losses to capture the pennant by 19 games, but Ruth went hitless in three appearances. Sixty was the new number on the wall. The record of records. This was his flight across the Atlantic.

“A child of destiny is George Herman,” Paul Gallico wrote in the
Daily News.

He moves in his orbit like a planet. He sneaked up inevitably on his own home run record. One moment we found him engaged in a home run race with young Gehrig, in which he seemed to be getting the worst of it, and in the next he had passed the fifty mark with enough games left to accomplish his lifetime ambition.

I even recall writing pieces about these two and saying how Gehrig would soon break Ruth’s cherished record, and feeling kind of sorry for this old man having this youngster come along and steal all his thunder, and now look at the old has-been.

The World Series seemed to be nothing more than a curtain call for the Yankees and Ruth after what they had done during the season. It was finished in four straight games, the opposing Pittsburgh Pirates overwhelmed from the first batting practice when the Yankees lineup, especially Ruth, hit baseballs to strange places around and outside Forbes Field. Ruth had the only two home runs in the Series and was a factor in all four wins. He set nine Series records, all of them career records, most simply extensions of his previous records.

The Christy Walsh syndicate was at its best for the event, one Pittsburgh paper running ghostwritten articles by the Babe, Miller Huggins, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, Paul Waner, Rogers Hornsby, Honus Wagner, and Pirates manager Donie Bush. Another paper, at the risk of being overwhelmed, replied with articles by Pirates pitcher Vic Aldridge and boasted that Aldridge actually was writing the words himself. Lee Meadows, ten-year-old son of the Pirates pitcher of the same name, also was part of a ghostwriting enterprise. As an eight-year-old, he had “written” articles when the Pirates were in the Series two years earlier.

“Has his writing improved in two years?” someone asked the boy’s ghost.

“Whenever I point out some play in the ball game and ask for some significant impressions,” the ghost replied, “young Master Meadows would say, ‘I wish I had some peanuts,’ or, ‘Why don’t you buy me a hot dog?’”

Walsh had Ruth and Gehrig on the barnstorming road immediately to capitalize on the Series interest. They were scheduled the very next day to play a doubleheader in the Bronx but were rained out. Then they were off (okay, only as far as Brooklyn for the first stop) for 21 games, 9 states, 20 cities. They wouldn’t stop until they hit the West Coast, “the Batterin’ Babes” in blue uniforms, “the Larrupin’ Lous” in white.

An afternoon in Asbury Park, New Jersey, early in the tour was typical. The entire Asbury Park police force was called out to control a crowd of over 7,000. The game against the Brooklyn Royal Colored Giants was an hour late in getting started as the Babe waited at the Berkeley Carteret Hotel until a certified check was delivered from the promoter; then it was played in chaos.

Small boys wandered the field at will, walking out to Ruth to request his autograph or running to grab loose baseballs. Deal Lake was at the edge of the field, no fences in the way, and baseballs, fair and foul, found their way to the water. Ruth played the entire game with a fountain pen in hand or pocket to accommodate the autograph seekers. He carried boys off the field. He tried to steal one time, but the ball escaped from the catcher and was grabbed by a boy who was faster than the catcher. Gone. When Gehrig hit a homer in the eighth into Deal Lake, that was the disappearance of the 36th and final baseball. End of game.

On the tour, 13 of the 21 games ended before the ninth inning owing to some occurrence. Ruth, for the record, had 20 home runs. Gehrig had 16. They played, Christy Walsh claimed, to a combined audience of 220,000 people.

Back together in New York, the two sluggers went to the Army–Notre Dame game at the Stadium, guests of Knute Rockne, another Walsh client. During the winter, Ruth went to North Carolina to hunt birds, visited Herb Pennock’s house in Pennsylvania to hunt foxes, wearing the red coat and everything, spent a bunch of time with Claire and little or none with Helen, and settled into workouts with Artie McGovern after the first of the year. Artie boasted that his man was “five to ten years younger” than when he had first met him.

The world was just lovely.

An odd interview awaited the Home Run King when he reached St. Petersburg on February 26, 1928—traveling with Gehrig and three rookies on the Florida Express from Penn Station—to begin his toils anew. Carl Sandburg, America’s foremost poet, was at the Mason Hotel. While he waited, he told Westbrook Pegler he once had been a ballplayer until he stepped on a broken bottle, badly slashing his foot and ending his career. He didn’t have much use for baseball now. He said he planned to ask Ruth a series of questions about current events, about world matters, about life.

Pegler smelled the obvious setup. He asked Sandburg what the point of those questions would be.

“I didn’t exactly get the answer,” Pegler reported. “It was something about moron hero worship and dusting off an idol.”

The meeting took place on a sunny Florida day. The poet, a tall and slender man, too young to have developed his trademark white hair, delivered his sequence of spinning, curving questions. The Babe, the boy from St. Mary’s Industrial School, was predictably handcuffed. The results were published in the
Chicago Daily News
under the byline “By Carl Sandburg, Noted American Poet.”