The Selling of the Babe (11 page)

Everything was up in the air. Reporters tracked Ruth down in Baltimore while Barrow sent a representative, likely veteran Heinie Wagner, to Baltimore to talk sense to his star. In the meantime, the shipyard began to advertise Ruth's appearance—they planned to have him pitch—and Frazee, never one to take a breach of contract lightly, threatened legal action against the shipyard. After all, he did have Ruth under contract.

Over the next twenty-four hours, all parties tried to stake out their position. Ruth's feeling were hurt and he complained that when he didn't take the first pitch, Barrow had called it a “bum play.… I thought he called me a bum and I threatened to punch him,” admitting “I couldn't control myself,” and complaining that the Red Sox had been mistreating him for weeks and intimating that a boost in salary might make him feel better.

Frazee for his part, was ready to sue the shipyard “for heavy damages,” and added, “I think I will win.” Barrow, for his part, stayed mostly silent, and when he did speak tried not to escalate the confrontation. “He's not here,” he said of Ruth, “that's all I know.”

The Boston papers, while not making a public statement, were not happy, and directed their disaffection at Ruth. Paul Shannon of the
Post
, probably the leading baseball writer in the city, was blunt: “Not a single player on the team is in sympathy with him. The Red Sox first and last are disgusted with the actions of a man whom they say had his head inflated with too much advertising and his effectiveness impaired by too much babying.” To a man, they realized that whatever Ruth gave them at the plate was undercut by what they lost by not having him on the mound, and right now they needed pitching. Besides, the circumstances of the war were tough on everyone. Ruth wasn't special—at least not that special, not yet. What was special was his utter lack of concern for anyone but himself.

There is a long history of ballplayers, even star ballplayers, jumping a team in midseason, usually over a contract issue or some disagreement over discipline, but few instances were more crass or self-centered than Ruth's threat to join the shipyard. While Ruth, personally, would hardly pay a price for the indiscretion, his behavior, like Joe Jackson's earlier threat to play shipyard ball, reinforced the notion among the public that most ballplayers were selfish slackers. During a season in which interest was rapidly dwindling, his actions hardly helped. And as much as they detested his behavior, even his own teammates found it difficult to be angry with Ruth directly; he was so self-focused and unaware it was almost comical. They were just part of the ongoing parade of his life—nameless and almost faceless. All you could do was shake your head half in disgust and half in wonder that he could possibly be so oblivious.
The Sporting News
later summed it up nicely, describing Ruth as “only a big boy [who] views things through youthful lens, and is utterly reckless of consequence.”

But by the time the news reached Boston on July 4th and the headlines were screaming about his departure, Ruth was already back in the fold. He wasn't keen on pitching and had already returned to the team with a promise that things would be worked out.

Barrow gave him the silent treatment, as did many of his teammates, who in this instance were finally beginning to hold him accountable, and Ruth sat in game one of the doubleheader, a sloppy 11–9 win over the desultory A's. Ruth nearly walked out again, but between contests he and Barrow had it out and the manager told him bluntly that if he wanted to play he'd have to follow the rules and stop putting himself above the team.

Ruth had heard similar admonitions after indiscretions at St. Mary's and reacted the way he always did, with boyish petulance and a trembling promise to do better. Installed in center field for game two, he knocked in the tying run but made a weak throw to the plate on a sacrifice fly in the 11th, and the A's won 2–1.

The next day Ruth pitched for the first time in almost a month. He won 4–3 in 10 innings despite coughing up a lead in the ninth. “I like to pitch,” Ruth later told
Baseball Magazine
's F. C. Lane, claiming his only objection was that “pitching keeps you out of so many games,” although he wondered how many seasons he could do double duty. He would play the rest of the year—somewhere, usually in left field or first base—and eventually take a turn in the regular rotation, and after reminding everyone that “my wing was a little off,” Ruth's complaints about a sore arm or wrist soon faded.

Over the next few weeks Barrow leaned heavily on Mays, Bush, and Jones and the Red Sox surged, playing their best ball of the year, and Ruth even chipped in with a five-inning shutout. It probably helped that a little over a week later Harry Frazee agreed to adjust Ruth's contract, adding a $1,000 bonus with another $1,000 due if Boston won the pennant. But day by day, what was happening on the field seemed to matter less and less and it seemed more likely there would be no pennant to win in 1918.

Ban Johnson's bombastic bullying as he tried to convince the powers that be that baseball was essential to the nation's morale was not only getting nowhere but, like Ruth jumping his team on the precipice of a national holiday, was having the opposite of the intended effect. In late June the National Commission sent Crowder a statement making a purely economic argument, claiming the “work or fight” order “will absolutely crush a business that has more than $8,000,000 capital invested,” and Johnson himself doubled down, whining that baseball had already suffered enough and had paid $300,000 in extra war tax. It was one thing to argue that baseball served a purpose keeping up morale during wartime—it was another to cry poverty. The impression that baseball was concerned only with its own well-being was reinforced.

On July 19, following an appeal in regard to Washington's Eddie Ainsmith, who had been drafted and appealed the ruling that playing ball was not considered “essential” to the war effort, Secretary of War Newton Baker, trumping a few local draft board decisions, definitively ruled that “the work-or-fight regulations include baseball.” He could not have been any clearer.

And Ban Johnson could not fall on his sword fast enough. Although nothing in the ruling ordered the major leagues to cease operations, and Baker even inferred that the game could continue, albeit by the “use of persons not available for essential war service,” Johnson declared that the season was over “except for cremation ceremonies.” He ordered an end to the season after the games of Sunday, July 21, saying, “We accept the ruling without protest.”

Except Johnson wasn't a king, and his use of the royal “we” was meaningless. He was just one of three members of the National Commission, one leg of a stool that also included chairman August Herrmann and National League president John Tener, both of whom served at the behest of the club owners. And they were none too eager to end the season, particularly Harry Frazee, whose team had opened up a six-game lead in the pennant race—a World Series financial windfall still offered the promise that he might turn a profit, or at least not lose as much money as it appeared. Besides, if they shut down the season, the club owners worried they'd still be liable to fulfill player contracts, leases, and other financial obligations. Ending the season was akin to going bankrupt without the promise of release from debt.

And while Johnson was clumsy in his relationship with politicians, Frazee was slick. His archives are littered with requests from the rich, the famous, and the powerful asking for tickets and other favors, including some from sportswriters who later claimed to detest him. Front-row tickets or an introduction to a certain young actress bought a lot of goodwill—at least for a while. Frazee called Johnson's order “not right and not necessary” and he led a brigade of owners to Washington to plead their case.

This time they ditched the economic argument and wrapped the game in patriotic fervor. In the theater, the show went on, regardless of the war, because Frazee and other theater owners had argued successfully that putting on a play was akin to volunteering to wrap bandages. Led by Frazee and other renegade owners, like Pittsburgh's Barney Dreyfuss, the only Jewish owner in the game, baseball now made a similar appeal. Rather than ask that players be made exempt and classified as “unessential” to the war effort, they simply asked that the order be delayed until the end of the season so the American Pastime could fulfill its duty. Frazee even floated the notion of taking the two pennant-winning teams overseas and playing the World Series before the troops in France. Hell, he'd have offered to have benchwarmers knit hats for the troops if that would have helped. In short, the option provided a way for the government to give baseball what it wanted while at the same time giving the public something they could swallow.

Wheels were greased, arms were twisted, whiskey was drunk, and envelopes may even have been exchanged, but the headlines on July 26 all told the same story: “BASEBALL GIVEN REPRIEVE.” Crowder didn't give baseball everything it wanted, but he gave them enough—or at least he gave Frazee enough. The “work or fight” order for ballplayers was stayed until September 1. The season could continue, truncated, but at least it gave the game another five weeks to try to make some money.

It was a big win for baseball but an even bigger win for Frazee and several other club owners, most notably Comiskey and Ruppert, who had supported him and found themselves in agreement with Frazee's estimation of Ban Johnson as not just biased against them, but inept. However, that still left the question of the World Series unanswered. Did that have to take place by September 1, or could they play it after the season ended?

Once again, Ban Johnson stepped in it. John Tener proposed to cancel the Series to play as many regular season games as possible, but Johnson favored a plan to end the season on August 20, which would allow the World Series to take place before the September 1 deadline.

Once again, Frazee led the insurrection. He entered into an alliance with several other American League owners and endorsed a National League plan to request permission to play the Series after the regular season. And he went public about the reasons why. “From now on the club owners are going to run the American league,” he said. “[Johnson] is in great measure responsible for the cloud under which baseball has lain this year. From now on his ‘rule-and-ruin' policy is shelved.”

Continued pressure and pleas from Frazee and other owners, agreeing to limit the players' pay and make additional financial contributions to the war effort and other concessions, eventually worked. The War Department extended the deadline to September 15 for the two championship clubs so the World Series could be played.

That wasn't nearly as significant, in the long run, as the rejection of Johnson. It was as if they'd deposed the Kaiser. Frazee had shown not only that baseball didn't need Johnson but it was better off without him, and Frazee didn't mind letting everyone know it. After nearly two decades atop the game, first as president of the insurgent American League, forcing the National League to its knees and into a shotgun marriage, then as the most powerful man on the National Commission, no one had ever successfully crossed Johnson—at least not for long.

Now Johnson's position as the most powerful figure in the game was shaken. John Tener resigned from the commission, due in part to the controversy over the Series, and was replaced by John Heydler, who would one day prove less compliant to Johnson's wishes. For the first time, there was open insurrection and talk of a coup, and all of it emanating from one man: Harry Frazee. From that moment onward, the simmering enmity between Frazee and Johnson went from simple dislike and disrespect to something approaching hate. Each was determined to oust the other from baseball, regardless of the consequences. In the end, their personal war would have nearly as big an impact on the game as the real war taking place in the trenches of Europe.

The impact on Babe Ruth would be part of the collateral damage.

 

4

Hijinks and Heroes

“Babe Ruth tried to win the bat from Whiteman before the latter started for Texas, but there was nothing doing, Whiteman and Ruth used this bat most of the season and it was considered the luckiest piece of wood in the bat pile.

—Eddie Hurley,
Boston Record

All the while, as baseball and the War Department debated the future and how everyone could get what they wanted and still save face, for much of July the Red Sox had been getting by with a pitching rotation of Mays, Bush, and Jones, with only the occasional appearance by Ruth or someone else. Buoyed by their yeomanlike work, in one stretch the Sox went 15–3 and opened up a lead on the rest of the league.

Although the three-man rotation was temporarily effective, it was not sustainable. They continued to win, but toward the end of the month, the staff was showing signs of cracking up. The answer was in the outfield. The Red Sox needed Ruth to start pitching again. Regularly.

This, time, when they asked, he answered affirmatively. The mysterious sore arm and wrist suddenly and miraculously healed. He wasn't being magnanimous, but the combination of the bonus adjustment Frazee made to his contract and the possibility of earning some World Series swag suddenly made pitching a more reasonable proposition. Besides, now that it was settled that the season was going to continue, the shipyard leagues were collapsing as a major league alternative, and Ruth had no other options. For the first time in months, his self-interest and that of the Red Sox were in alignment.

He'd also cooled at the plate. His last home run had come on June 30, and apart from a two-day explosion on July 11 and 12 against the White Sox, when he cracked four doubles and two triples, he was a mere mortal at the plate again. And even that explosion wasn't quite what it appeared—one double was a flare that fell in front of the outfielders and the other three opposite field hits to left against an outfield that was playing him to pull, while one of the triples landed on Duffy's Cliff and another rattled around the right field corner. None were the long drives Ruth had become famous for.