The Selling of the Babe

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  Introduction

  Babe Ruth is arguably the biggest figure in baseball history, the one player who, since he first stepped on a major league diamond just over one hundred years ago, has cast a deep and still lengthening shadow over all things baseball, both its most cherished icon and one of its most transformative figures.

  Nothing has ever damaged or cheapened his legacy. Somehow, the more we learn about Ruth, even of his colorful and occasionally unsavory personal history, he is never diminished. Even those who have since challenged his records or even broken them fail to touch him. In comparison, their deeds seem smaller, while Ruth’s achievements, given his era, become even more impressive. He did not just break records—he created records where none existed before, for feats never imagined, for doing what no one thought possible.

  In a very real way, Ruth took a two-dimensional game, baseball, and gave it two additional dimensions, first by lifting it from the ground and launching it into the air, and secondly by giving baseball its history, by creating space in the game for history to live apart from the present, and for a limitless future to seem possible. He is the figure who took baseball from its distant, daguerreotyped past and made it into the game we still see on the field today. As much as any other figure in the game, he is both a pioneer and an enduring presence.

  Yet at the same time, Ruth is also elusive. Perhaps no other personality in sports has been so exalted, mythologized, and obscured by history. Ruth’s public persona, certainly by the time he made it to New York in 1920, and even for several years prior to that, has always been presented through a filter, a ghostwritten sieve that sought to smooth his rough edges, cloud his true behavior, and simplify his biography. There are thousands upon thousands of words credited to Ruth’s lips, but to paraphrase Yogi Berra, Ruth himself never said most of the things he said, and to pretend otherwise is to present a false portrait. His ghostwriters did his talking for him, his various autobiographies and columns under his own name written by others without any input on his part. Fortunately, in regard to Ruth, it is not so much what he said that intrigues us, but what he did, and how he did what he did, that is most captivating. This book focuses on the latter, rather than trying to parse through Ruth’s “statements,” to determine which are his and which are the words of others. How George Ruth became “the Babe” is the essential question we try to answer.

  But there is one thing that, even today, has towered over Ruth himself, something he himself created that nevertheless has cast a shadow over him, one so deep and so dark that at times it is barely even possible to discern the mighty Babe—or at least impossible to seem him clearly. Even Ruth is subservient to something more: the home run. Baseball’s biggest hit, perhaps sports’ most dramatic and instantaneous event, as first propagated by Ruth, became the most significant outcome in the game. Almost every other American sport has adopted the home run as a descriptive metaphor, “going for the home run,” as both the ultimate risk and the ultimate reward.

  Yet the home run wasn’t always there, at least not in the way it was when unveiled by Ruth. Although the home run has been a possibility since the very beginning of the game, for decades it was a rare and almost accidental occurrence, a happy accident no one would dare actually try to accomplish. Outfield fences were meant to keep crowds off the field, not to keep the baseball in, for the notion of hitting a ball over the outfield fence was, in most instances, absurd, the fences too distant and the ball too soft.

  And then came Ruth, the catalyst during a unique time and set of conditions, when baseball was moribund and war was changing America faster than any time before or since. Without warning, suddenly and unexpectedly, the home run became baseball’s most exciting and defining moment, disruptive, inspiring a profound change in the way the game was played and viewed and written about, dramatically impacting players and fans, leaving no one untouched. Even today, young boys still dream of being Ruth, and his story still touches them in a way no other ballplayer’s does.

  No one was more affected by the home run than Ruth himself. He was like a new species overrunning the environment and remaking the landscape. The home run at once both created him and defined him, making it almost impossible to extract Ruth from it, to view him separately, to see him clearly before that moment, even at a time when the home run had yet to determine the course of his life, or the course of baseball. The home run has rendered the earlier figure of Ruth almost invisible, so overwhelming that it has distorted his biography ever since.

  Nowhere is this more true than during the transition, during those few brief months from the beginning of the 1918 season through 1920, when Ruth evolved from George Herman Ruth, a pitcher of considerable ability for the Boston Red Sox, to the Babe, the Yankees’ mighty Bambino, a legendary and almost mythic Colossus of the game, the greatest home run hitter of all time, which according to a new definition, also made him the greatest player of all time. This makeover was so thorough, so complete, that it has been almost impossible to see Ruth in any other context, to separate the man and the player before the home run from what the home run turned him into: the Babe, the unbridled King of Swat. Previous biographers have usually become so enthralled with the results of this transformation, so blinded by the white heat of the home run, that the precise details of the change have almost been entirely overlooked. The sale of Ruth from Boston to New York is almost inevitably viewed with the kind of hindsight reality does not provide, leaving Ruth’s evolution during this time period, essential to understanding the dynamics of the sale, virtually unexamined.

  That is what this book does. By examining the selling of the Babe as both a historic event in real time and as a historical metaphor at this moment of change, when Ruth and the home run—together—changed everything, The Selling of the Babe explains why and how this happened, and why and how the figure of the Babe came to be. In these pages we learn what became of George Herman Ruth, precisely why he was sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees, and how an entirely new game, built around the home run, with Babe Ruth as the catalyst, was sold to the American public.

  It remains the most important transaction in the history of the game, touching everything, even today.

  Prologue:

  September 11, 1918

  In the eighth inning of the sixth and final game of the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, with the Red Sox nursing a 2–1 lead and only six outs away from their fourth world championship in seven seasons, the Cubs’ Turner Barber cracked a short line drive to left.

  Boston’s left fielder, playing shallow, tore in. As the ball sank toward a base hit, he did not hesitate. Instead of playing it safe, he lunged, left his feet, and stretched out for the ball. Bare inches from the turf, he gathered it in two hands, landed heavily, then tumbled, somersaulting over the rough ground, the worn, gray ball still tight in his glove.

  Ba
rber, visions of heroic headlines evaporating, kicked the dirt and turned toward the Cubs dugout. The crowd at Fenway Park shot to its feet, all 15,238 souls roaring and cheering, slapping each other’s backs and holding their heads in wonder. He had done it AGAIN. The outfielder rose, threw the ball softly back in to the shortstop, then, grimacing, did not bask in the applause or tip his cap, but twisted his head back and forth and rolled his shoulders as he slowly walked back to his position.

  The delay only increased their ardor. For a full three minutes, the crowd cheered as the outfielder tried to shake off the effects of his tumble, bending to clutch his knees and trying to stretch out his neck and upper back. He continued to flex and bend in between pitches as Boston hurler Carl Mays set down the next hitter, but he could not continue and would not risk remaining in the game and maybe costing his team a win, and perhaps even the World Series. He was not that kind of player.

  He waved toward the bench and when the umpire held up his hand and called time, started trotting in. The crowd noticed and with each step more of them stood and applauded again, this time with the respect and admiration accorded to a hero. He had been the unabashed star of the Series, his timely hitting—moving runners along, then taking an extra base—sparking several Boston rallies and his glove squelching several Cub comebacks. His selfless removal of himself from the game underscored his contribution; this was a team victory, and here was a man who thought only of his team, and not of himself.

  As he approached the Boston bench and manager Ed Barrow rose to greet him, he gave a brief nod to his replacement. Then George Whiteman entered the dugout to the cautious but warm embrace of his fellow Red Sox.

  As Whiteman sat heavily on the bench and Boston’s trainer attended to him, a teammate, almost unnoticed, grabbed his glove and bounded up the dugout steps to take his place, running heavily out to left field.

  George Herman Ruth had already pitched, and won, two games in the Series, but apart from a few innings as a defensive replacement, had not appeared in the lineup of the other three Series contests, something that had surprised observers at first but also something that Whiteman’s spectacular play throughout the Series rendered moot. For much of the year, with rosters reduced due to the American entry into the Great War, Ruth, out of necessity, had sometimes played outfield, usually Fenway Park’s short left field, where the earthen embankment known as Duffy’s Cliff and the wall behind it kept spectators from peering in from atop the garage across the street and left the emergency, part-time outfielder little room to cover. As manager Ed Barrow went with the hot hand, Ruth had more or less split time in left with Whiteman, a thirty-five-year-old career minor leaguer playing his first full year in the major leagues. For much of the season, Ruth had hit far better than anyone expected—in stretches, he seemed like one of the best hitters in the league, and led all baseball with 11 home runs. But he had only hit well in spurts, and over the final weeks of the season he had struggled, particularly against left-handed pitching, leading Barrow to decide to stick with the right-handed bat of Whiteman in the Series against Chicago’s predominantly left-handed pitching staff.

  It was an act of genius. No one realized it yet, but the 1918 World Series was the last quiet gasp of the Dead Ball Era, the lowest-scoring World Series in history, as both teams tried to scratch out runs through a combination of seeing-eye ground balls, short flares, bunts, stolen bases, and hit-and-run plays, punctuated by the rare long hit that rolled between outfielders to the distant fence. The baseball itself, the dead ball, made even deader by the use of inferior wool wrapping and horsehide due to the war, made scoring a premium. Only 19 runners would cross the plate in the six-game Series, neither team scoring more than three runs in any one game, and every man on either team who took the mound during the Series pitched well. It would prove to be the last World Series in history in which no one on either team struck a home run.

  The lack of scoring, combined with the distraction of the war and some political misplays by the men who ran baseball, left fans less than enthusiastic. Attendance in the Series had been poor, and on this day, Fenway Park was barely half full for what would prove to be the finale, and the last world championship the Red Sox would win in eighty-six long and frustrating years.

  Only George Whiteman had made it seem worthwhile. As veteran baseball writer Paul Shannon wrote in the Boston Post, “In nearly every run the Red Sox scored in the six games, Whiteman, the little Texan veteran, has figured mightily.” Fans identified with the stocky minor leaguer finally getting his chance to play, the ultimate Everyman underdog, only receiving the opportunity because the real heroes were buried in the mud of a trench somewhere in France. After the Series, Whiteman’s face would grace the cover of Baseball Magazine, which asked the question “Hero of the Series?????” In his ghostwritten account of the Series, Ty Cobb, the game’s greatest star, would answer that he was.

  Ruth? Oh, he played well, too, when he played. Pitching a shutout in Game 1 and then collecting a second victory in Game 4, albeit with relief help after he took the mound with his finger swollen to nearly twice its size due to some mysterious altercation on the train from Chicago to Boston, one that put his fist into contact with either a solid steel wall, a window, or the jaw of another passenger. Although he still set a new record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched in the World Series at 29, one that would grow in stature over the years, it went almost unnoticed at the time.

  As George Whiteman left the field that gray afternoon, the spotlight shone only on him, the unabashed star of the Series. Hell, hardly anyone even noticed that Ruth had entered the game. He was upstaged, a bit player in Red Sox owner Harry Frazee’s latest baseball production, standing in for the star as the curtain fell.

  It would be the last time.

  Whiteman’s catch left the Cubs with the knowledge this was not their year and they went out quickly. Boston followed, and in the bottom of the ninth, Mays, the submariner and Boston’s best pitcher in 1918, retired Max Flack on a foul. Then Charlie Hollocher lofted an easy fly to Ruth for the second out. For many fans, it was the first time they noticed he was even in the game.

  The crowd stood to witness the final out as Ruth stood before Duffy’s Cliff and watched the Cub’s Leslie Mann bounce a lazy grounder to second base. Forty-year-old Dave Shean, another wartime fill-in, fielded the ball cleanly and flipped to first. Stuffy McInnis, foot on the bag, caught the ball with both hands and the Series was over, Boston winning four games to the Cubs’ two.

  Another quick cheer rose from the stands, and a few strands of confetti and torn newspapers floated through the air. As the Sox ran in, the other Boston players trotted from the dugout to congratulate each other, but as celebrations went, particularly in Boston, it was muted, more handshakes and hurrahs than screams of joy and dancing in the street.

  Although the Red Sox won the World Series, the endless war in Europe, an emerging outbreak of Spanish influenza, an abortive player strike that delayed Game 5 and caused fans to heckle the players with calls of “Bolsheveki!” combined with chesslike play had kept the crowd down and interest in the Series low. Even the Royal Rooters, Boston’s famous group of rabid fans that had followed professional baseball in Boston for nearly three decades, failed to make their usual appearance. After the final out, there was not so much a celebration as a collective sigh of relief that the most trying season in memory was finally over.

  About the only player already looking forward to the 1919 season was Ruth. He raced in from left, clutching his mitt in his gigantic hands, ready for a party whether his teammates wanted one or not. While the 1918 season had been something of a disaster for most of baseball (and, despite their victory, even for the Red Sox), Ruth had a great time anyway. Hell, he almost always did.

  He might have been a forgotten man at the end of the 1918 season, upstaged by a minor leaguer who would never play another inning of major league baseball. But never again. Over the next two years, the twenty-three-year-old pitcher many ne
wspapers still referred to as George would thoroughly transform himself, the fortunes of two teams, and, most importantly, the game of baseball itself, ushering the sport into the modern era. Ruth, whom the papers had started calling by his nickname, “Babe,” often still placing it in quotation marks, would become THE BABE, the greatest name in the game and the most dominant figure in American sports.

  He sprinted to the infield as if he already knew it, as if it was already Opening Day, as if he already could see what lay head.

  He couldn’t wait.

  1

  George Herman Ruth

  “I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god.”

  —Red Sox outfielder Harry Hooper

  When George Ruth arrived at Boston’s South Station to catch a train to spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on March 9, 1918, he carried two large bags, a set of left-handed golf clubs, and a smile that covered most of his cartoonish face from ear to ear. After spending much of the winter with his wife, Helen, at their farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts (called “Home Plate”), the notion of a month in Hot Springs almost made the long wait worthwhile. Oh, he looked forward to playing ball again, and a little golf and soaking in the steaming natural mineral baths, but it was everything else in Hot Springs that he really relished: the whores and the card games, the booze and the dance halls and the food. “Spring training” itself would consist of a little more than some long hikes and a few hours of fooling around on a ballfield each day—hell, the players didn’t even get paid to do that. That left plenty of time for everything else, which was one of the reasons ball clubs tended to go to places like Hot Springs or Tampa or other resort and vacation towns for spring training. They needed the nice weather, sure, but they also needed to entice the players to show up on time and stay reasonably happy while they were there. You couldn’t play baseball all the time.