The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (7 page)

“He didn’t drink when he came to Boston,” Hooper said. “And I don’t think he’d ever been with a woman. Once he found out about it, though, he became a bear.”

On July 30, 1914, an important event happened in Chicago. At the American League offices, Red Sox owner Joe Lannin made another purchase, picking up the Providence franchise in the International League for $75,000. Ruth had a place to go. He pitched and won a couple of exhibition games in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, for the Red Sox at the start of August, his first action in almost a month, and on August 18 he finally cleared waivers and reported to the Providence Grays, also known as the Clamdiggers.

He wasn’t excited about the change, especially with Helen Woodford in his social plans, but Providence was the perfect place for him. He not only returned to work but returned to tons of work. The Clamdiggers were in a chase for the pennant, and he soon was pitching every third or fourth day. In his first start, 12,000 people overflowing the stands at Melrose Park, he pitched nine innings and helped win his own game with a triple in the bottom of the ninth that traveled so far that “a thousand straw hats were lost in the wild demonstration of joy that signalized the longest hit ever made at the ball park,” according to the
Providence Journal.

In six weeks he won nine games, lost three. In one stretch he pitched four games in eight days. He was 12-for-40 at the plate, a .300 average. He hit his first professional home run in Toronto, a shot that went over the right-field fence at Hanlan’s Point Stadium and landed in Lake Ontario. The Grays/Clamdiggers took the International League pennant and finished with an exhibition against the Chicago Cubs at Rocky Point Park in Warwick, Rhode Island. Ruth pitched a complete game, an 8–7 win, and hit a home run that landed this time in Narragansett Bay. A small boy fell into the water trying to retrieve the ball.

And then the Babe went back to Boston.

The city was afire with baseball interest, but that interest did not involve the Red Sox. The Boston Braves, the other team in the city, were in the midst of pulling off the greatest comeback in baseball history. Losers of 18 of their first 22 games, in last place on July 4, they now were running away with the National League pennant. Their home games had been switched, with Red Sox owner Lannin’s consent, to the newer Fenway Park with its greater capacity, and the team was known as “the Miracle Braves.”

Ruth rejoined the Red Sox in the play-it-out stage, the A’s already champs by a wide margin, the Red Sox locked into second. He pitched two games in the last week, winning one, losing the other, and was done. It had been quite a year.

The boy who had left the closed environment of St. Mary’s School on March 2, 1914, to take his first train ride had now lived in three different cities and played for three different teams. He had traveled to at least a dozen cities, slept in starched sheets, sat in hot tubs and smoked a cigar whenever he wanted. He had won 26 games and lost 8 in the International League. He had won two and lost one in the American League. He had hit one professional home run, but none in the United States. Elevators no longer were a great mystery.

Somewhere in all of this he had asked Helen Woodford to marry him, and somewhere she had said yes, and he bought a car and they drove down to Ellicott City, Maryland, and said “I do” to each other on October 17, 1914. Some people said they already were married, had done the deed in the middle of the season in Providence, but that didn’t matter. They were too young, 19 and 16, to get married in the first place, doomed to failure, but that was part of being young.

There is no record of a honeymoon. He and Helen went to Baltimore and—the fog comes in here again—spent the winter over his father’s bar on Conway Street at the edge of Pigtown. His father? Had he made peace with his father? How had that happened? His father had remarried. Had that settled the situation? Fog.

Yes, quite a year.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
N THE NIGHT
of May 6, 1915, a black-tie banquet was held at Carnegie Hall in New York City as the Civic Forum awarded its gold medal to 68-year-old Thomas Alva Edison. The inscription on the medal was “Inventor and World Benefactor.” President Woodrow Wilson and ex-presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft sent congratulations, as did Alexander Graham Bell. Guglielmo Marconi and a host of dignitaries spoke.

The list of Edison’s accomplishments ran long, from the electric lights that illuminated the evening to the movie cameras that recorded the speeches to the phonographs that sat back at every home. The white-haired old man, who declined to speak, listened quietly to the compliments delivered in the environment he had altered, if not fully created.

“He has made more men and women and children laugh than any other man, and has made it possible for more people to be amused than has anyone else in the history of the world,” former New Jersey governor J. Franklin Fort said. “Nothing is impossible to Edison…he is an uncrowned king among men.”

In the Bronx that very afternoon, a subway ride from these proceedings, the start of another advance in amusement and laughter had begun. Babe Ruth, destined himself to be another uncrowned king among men, had begun to reinvent the home run four games into his second professional baseball season.

The moment wasn’t exactly on a par with the creation of the lightbulb or Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” but in the measured confines of baseball it was the start of a seismic shift that eventually would turn the game upside down. In the third inning, leading off, batting ninth in the order, no one on base, Ruth measured the “rise ball” of New York Yankees pitcher Jack Warhop and clocked it into the right-field stands at the Polo Grounds for home run number one in his major league career.

Warhop, a tiny man, was a figure from baseball’s past. One writer said that he was so small the grounds crew at the Polo Grounds cut the grass down an inch and raised the pitching mound two inches just so the paying customers could see him. He was in his eighth and final big league season, 31 years old, a craftsman, a manipulator with a submarine delivery that unleashed the soft and dead 1915 baseball. He was a coy strategist, a participant in the chesslike game that baseball always had been.

The Babe—“built like a bale of cotton” was one description—was the arrival of the baseball future. Chess? He would turn the table over, let the pieces clatter to the floor. That was how he would end games. Strength and brawn had stepped to the front.

No one knew, of course, at the time of his homer—certainly not the Babe—that this was a first baby step in that direction. Like most home runs of the era, it seemed to be another odd confluence of physical forces wrapped in a good bit of luck. No one
tried
for home runs, they just happened—something like lightning striking the oak tree on the lawn.

The leading home run hitters a year earlier had been Frank “Home Run” Baker of the A’s in the American League with eight and Gavvy Cravath of the Philadelphia Phillies with 18 in the National. The Red Sox as a team had hit 17. The total number of home runs in the American League was 160, an average of 20 per team.

The balls were not made for home runs. They also were scuffed up, roughed up, spit upon, and used for as many as 100 pitches in a game. The bats, heavy and thick through the handle, were not made for home runs. The mind was not made for home runs. A line drive was perfection. A fly ball was a mistake. A bunt was a grand strategic tool. Batting average was the true test of a player’s worth.

“The little things of baseball are all important,” F. C. Lane declared in
Baseball America
in 1913, a statement of strategic thinking. “And whether or not they seem sensible to the veteran player, who is inclined to view all scientific analysis of his work as so much bunk, there is in reality no more fascinating theme in the whole range of sport.”

Frank Baker, whose “Home Run” nickname came from a pair of important home runs in the 1911 World Series, never hit more than 12 in a season. He was asked years later how many he might have hit if he had played a year under the conditions that developed.

“I’d say 50,” he said. “The year I hit 12, I also hit the right-field fence at Shibe Park 39 times.”

The home run was such an oddity in 1913 that just that day in Boston, Gertrude Halladay Leonard, chairman of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, had issued a curious proposition for the members of both the Red Sox and the Boston Braves.

For the two-fold purpose of showing our sincere interest in the good work of our home teams and of identifying the home teams with the equal suffrage movement in Massachusetts in the minds of all lovers of our national game, we desire to make the following offer, good for the entire season:

For every home run made on the home grounds by a home player during this season the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association will mail a check for $5, payable to the player.

Five bucks for catching lightning in a bell jar. Five bucks for hitting a ball over the fence. The suffragettes—the “suffs”—were looking for some publicity and some support in their effort to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, women’s right to vote, which was part of the coming state elections. Little did they know they were on the first floor of a second cultural revolution.

The announcement of the beginning was in the
New York Times
the next day.

“Mr. Edison has been of great service to his country and to the world,” the
Times
editorialized on page 12. “Besides his improvement in the means of telegraphic communication, the incandescent lamp, the phonograph in all its forms, and the kinetoscope, which made the moving picture possible, are directly due to his wonderful skill as an originator or adaptor.”

“He [Ruth] put his team in the running by smashing a mighty rap into the upper tier of the right-field grand stand,” the
Times
said on page 11. “Ruth also had two other hits to his credit.”

Twenty-seven days later, back at the Polo Grounds, the confrontation was repeated, Warhop on the mound, Ruth at the plate. In the second inning, man on first, Ruth unloaded a longer, higher shot into the right-field grandstand. This was number two. Yankees manager Wild Bill Donovan ordered him walked intentionally his next two times at the plate. The amusement of men, women, and children had begun.

The May 6 game, the day he hit his first homer, also had a more immediate consequence for Ruth: it put him into the Red Sox pitching rotation. A spare part in spring training at Hot Springs, Arkansas, destined to pitch during stretches of doubleheaders and from the bullpen, he had been given the start that day owing to injuries (Carl Mays, Dutch Leonard, and Smokey Joe Wood) and ineffectiveness (Ray Collins). A well-regarded pitching staff had become vulnerable during the first month of the season.

Ruth’s complete-game performance in 13 innings against the Yankees, even though it ended with a 4–3 loss, was enough to give manager-catcher Bill Carrigan confidence in him. He moved into the rotation and stayed.

The pitcher who had emerged from that first professional year in Baltimore-Boston-Providence-Boston was not a Jack Warhop stylist. The players who faced him said that he threw with an easy three-quarters delivery and threw hard. He definitely was a fastball pitcher. His fastball had a late hop, a jump when it crossed the plate. He had a solid curveball, mixed in a changeup every once in a while, and had just enough wildness to make a batter feel uncomfortable. He was not afraid to throw at a person’s head—Carrigan would yell from behind the plate when it was coming—and was not afraid of consequences.

“He looked like a prizefighter on the mound,” Del Pratt of the St. Louis Browns, later a teammate, said. “That was the way he was built.”

The batters he faced pretty much were nameless. The ADHD meant he had trouble with names throughout his life, busy-busy-busy, never taking time to remember them. He didn’t remember the names of most teammates, much less the opposition. (Anyone under a certain age was named “Kid,” pronounced “keed.” Anyone over that age was “Doc.”) Conferences before the game, the little meetings to discuss strategies, were meaningless.

Carrigan would try, gathering everyone together, going down the lineup of a team like the Detroit Tigers. Ruth would answer how he would attack each hitter.

“Bush…”

“Fastball up and inside. Curveball, low and away.”

“Vitt…”

“Fastball up and inside. Curveball, low and away.”

“Cobb…”

“Fastball up and inside. Curveball, low and away.”

“Crawford…”

“Fastball up and inside…”

And so it went.

He would recognize stances and quirks, remember who had done what in previous at-bats; he just couldn’t remember the names and dates. He played the games, didn’t talk about them, ran on high emotion, and, again, threw the ball hard. It didn’t matter who was hitting if the ball was thrown fast and to the proper spot.

On his bad days he was troubled by wildness, and also he tired sometimes in the late innings. He was emotional too when he worked, and that sometimes got him in trouble. (The day he hit his second home run and the Yankees intentionally walked him twice, he kicked a bench in frustration. His broken toe kept him off the mound for the next two weeks.)

“[Ruth] possesses a wonderful arm and a world of stuff, strength galore, and overwhelming eagerness to be in the game,” Paul Shannon of the
Boston Post
had written in a 1915 preseason analysis of the Red Sox. “The Red Sox have a splendid prospect, but one who lacks a knowledge of real ‘inside baseball.’ Manager Carrigan is confident that he can teach him, and if so he will be a great acquisition to the corps.”

That was exactly the way the season played out.

Carrigan tried to pitch Ruth mostly against the second-division clubs in the first two-thirds of the season—part of the learning—then let him pitch against the better clubs in the final third. Ruth delivered, pitching his best baseball in a pennant drive that at one point had the Red Sox winning 19 of 21 games.

He outlasted the famed Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, 4–3, easily beat the Browns, 4–1, pitched a terrific no-decision against the Tigers, leaving the game with a 1–1 score in the ninth, stymied the White Sox with a two-hitter. In late September, his relief-aided 3–2 win over the second-place Tigers pretty much clinched first place.

He finished the season with an 18–8 record on a staff that had five pitchers with 15 wins or more. His ERA was 2.44. He had 112 strikeouts, walked 84 batters. He also finished with a .315 batting average and four home runs. Number three was the only $5 shot for the suffragettes at Fenway, the second-longest home run ever hit in the park. Number four was in St. Louis, the longest homer in Sportsman’s Park history, over the right-field fence and across the street and through the window of a Chevrolet dealership. The league leader in home runs, outfielder Braggo Roth of the White Sox, had seven.

In the World Series against the Phillies, the home games played at newly opened Braves Field off Commonwealth Avenue to handle larger crowds, Ruth never pitched. It wasn’t a great surprise, although he was said to be disappointed. The Red Sox won easily in five games, and Carrigan said years later that he never pitched Ruth because he simply had other, better pitchers at the time. He preferred right-handed pitchers against the slugging Cravath of the Phillies. He rejected the longtime rumor that Ruth never pitched in the Series due to disciplinary problems.

The manager did not say that a disciplinary problem didn’t exist with the young pitcher.

The 20-year-old Babe Ruth (who thought he was 21) was a kid let loose in the adult funhouse in 1915. He was loud. He was profane. Nights ended only when morning arrived. There was no such thing as ordinary self-discipline or self-control. Joe Lannin had jumped his salary to a very respectable $3,500 for the season. Money removed the last of few inhibitions. He was off to fill in all the blanks.

Nothing mattered except the fun. Action. His first trip around the baseball circuit had been taken with bug-eyed wonder. Now he had an idea of what was out on the table—and it was time to grab.

He and Helen rented an apartment in Cambridge in the shadow of Harvard University, and the fog moved in tight around their relationship. They would do things together, be seen in public, go to bowling parties and events, but he clearly had an outside paper route too, one that did not include her. Very early there was an accommodation for infidelities. What did she think about that? Fog.

The later-distributed picture of his personal life was a mosaic of anecdote, rumor, speculation, exaggeration, and a headline every now and then. Exclamation points usually accompanied each addition. He liked to eat! He liked women! He used three swear words in every five words he spoke! There was a question about when he started drinking—teammate Harry Hooper said he never remembered Ruth drinking in Boston; other people did—but when he did start to drink, he liked to drink!