Authors: George Vecsey
Ruth was not only the greatest player in the history of the game but he was also a rollicking, likable, outsized character who arrived at precisely the right moment. He dominated the nation during a decade devoted to change (women gained the vote in 1920) and avoidance (Prohibition was enacted that very same year, and promptly bypassed by a huge swath of the country). Who better to personify this coming-of-age decade, the Roaring Twenties, than a barrel-chested, pigeon-toed hedonist known as the Babe?
America was full of individualists, the descendants of wanderers who had escaped the castes and laws of Europe to seek one freedom or another in the New World. The result was a continent full of people who did not necessarily accept what officials and teachers and pastors told them. George Herman Ruth certainly lived up to that tradition of independence from societal niceties. In a land of open space and mighty rivers and looming mountain ranges, Ruth, too, was a force of nature, a latter-day Paul Bunyan. Coming from Baltimore, where Wee Willie Keeler had “hit 'em where they ain't,” Ruth developed his own version of that philosophy—in this case, over fences. He refined the home run as America's definitive sporting act—emphatic, sudden, powerful. Fans plunked down their quarters and their dollars to watch this extrovert perform the extroverted act of slugging a home run.
Nine decades after Ruth's transition into slugger, America is still fascinated by the home run. On television, young and noisy male broadcasters—you could generically label them the Silly Boys—whoop
with amazement at video clips of thick-necked sluggers propelling the ball far into the night.
To this day, I still love talking about, reading about, writing about the Babe. He transcends the decades, the styles, the changes, the races, the money. He is America's beloved prodigal bad-boy son. He
is
baseball.
Before dispatching all these home runs, Ruth was a left-handed pitcher, one of the best in the game. To fully appreciate Babe Ruth, one has to start with his pitching record: 94 victories, 46 losses, and a 2.28 earned run average. If you did not know better, you would glance at his truncated pitching career in some baseball almanac and you would ask: Who
was
that guy? Why did he stop pitching? Did he leave the game? Did he hurt his arm? Did he get in trouble? Imagine what he could have become if he had stayed on the mound.
Ruth came along in 1914, a big lefty just turned nineteen, with virtually no discipline, which was understandable given his Dickensian childhood. He was born in the brawling dock and railroad area of downtown Baltimore to parents too busy serving beer to gandy dancers and stevedores to pay attention to their unruly son. When he was eight, Ruth was placed in the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where he was visited irregularly by his mother, Kate, and sister, Mamie, but never by his father. At the home, the young man was befriended by Brother Matthias Boutier, who recognized his athletic skill and his desire, and channeled him past the tailoring lessons and classroom lectures the kid hated.
When the baseball scouts began finding their way behind the walls of the home, Brother Matthias arranged for Jack Dunn, the owner of the Orioles, to become Ruth's legal guardian. When Dunn signed Ruth for $600 and sent him off to his first spring training in 1914, one of the Orioles' coaches said, “There's one of Jack Dunn's babes.” The name stuck. Baseball had better nicknames, back then.
The minor league Orioles quickly sold Ruth to the Red Sox, who used him in four games in 1914. The next three years, still raw, Ruth won 65 games and lost 33, not letting a hasty marriage in Boston slow down his major league carousing. At first he was a novelty as a slugging pitcher, striking nine homers in his first three seasons, but
by 1918 he was too valuable to be left on the bench three days out of four. The Sox played him in the outfield or at first base, producing 11 homers and a .300 batting average. In the 1918 World Series he won both his starts with a 1.06 earned run average. By then it was clear: there had never been a player like Babe Ruth. In 1919 he pitched only 17 times in his 130 games, hitting 29 home runs to break the major league home run record.
Given his obvious power, Ruth could very well have saved baseball as a member of the Sox for the next decade or two, but he was destined to save a different franchise in another city. His absence would haunt Boston's fans for eighty-six years, many of them miserable.
Ruth's departure began with the owner of the Red Sox, Harry Frazee, a theatrical impresario and real estate owner from New York, who had no ties to Boston. Caught in a feud with Ban Johnson and most of the American League power structure, Frazee began dealing with the only team that would work with him. The Yankees had never won anything since escaping Baltimore in 1903 but had been bought in 1915 by two rich and ambitious New Yorkers, Jacob Ruppert, a brewing magnate, and Tillinghast l'Hommedieu Huston, an engineer.
In the fall of 1919, as the gambling scandal in Chicago was going public, Ruth was assailed in the Boston press for making exorbitant salary demands on the club. He had signed for $10,000 a year for three seasons, starting in 1919, but after hitting 29 homers that year he demanded $20,000 the next year. Frazee's solution was to sell him to the Yankees, officially announced in January of 1920, for $125,000 plus the promise of a $350,000 loan for Frazee.
Some Boston fans were mortified and others said good riddance, but certainly no one could have predicted this big lummox would become the great transforming figure of the sport. Nobody knew he would become, as it were, Babe Ruth. At twenty-five, Ruth pitched only once for the Yankees in 1920, hitting 54 home runs, nearly doubling his own record.
Legend has it that Judge Landis, in reaction to the Black Sox, ordered up livelier balls so the Babe could drill them over the fences.
As with many other legends, the truth may be more complicated. There is evidence that sporting goods companies had begun, as early as 1910, to use better technology and uniform production techniques to wrap baseballs more tightly around more uniform cork centers and a higher grade of wool, thereby making the balls bounce harder and farther. Years later, the A. J. Reach Company confirmed that in 1919 it had been using new machines and a better grade of Australian wool yarn, which could have caused more tightly wrapped balls to fly farther off the bat, but some of this may have been normal evolution in manufacturing. For whatever reason, the number of home runs jumped from 448 to 630 from 1919 to 1920, but the concept of baseball's new and intentional weapons of mass destruction may have been exaggerated.
Ruth's record-breaking 59 home runs helped the Yankees win their first pennant in 1921 but they would lose the World Series to their landlords, the Giants. The rivalry and larger crowds in the Polo Grounds might have satisfied some baseball people but John J. McGraw was not fond of either the home run or Ruth, and began trying to evict the tenants. The city of New York had approved Sunday ball in 1920, and the Giants wanted as many of those lucrative dates as possible.
Squatters with an attitude, the Yankees won another pennant in 1922, with Ruth hitting only 35 homers in 110 games because of suspensions for off-season barnstorming and then for brawling. The Yankees lost the Series to the Giants again, but in the meantime, the Yankee owners were financing a new stadium in the Bronx, across the Harlem River, in plain sight of the Polo Grounds. Yankee Stadium opened in 1923 with the Yankees playing the Red Sox. Harry Frazee was an honored guest—and why not, given the great gift the Red Sox owner had bestowed on the Yankees? He didn't have that far to come, anyway, since his offices were in midtown Manhattan. Ruth hit a home run and Fred Lieb, a prominent New York sportswriter, called the place “The House That Ruth Built,” a nickname that has stuck.
In 1925, Lou Gehrig, a strapping young first baseman out of Columbia University, became the perfect complement to Ruth. By the
time they humbled Pittsburgh in the 1927 World Series, the Yankees were the dominant team in baseball.
Ruth and Gehrig were polar opposites. Gehrig was loyal, went home every evening to his wife, was not highly demanding to the owners (and thereby underpaid), while Ruth was still insubordinate and occasionally unhealthy. He missed part of the 1925 season after being taken off a train due to an illness still alluded to as a stomachache from too many hot dogs and soda but more likely the result of other excesses.
Ruth and Gehrig barnstormed together in the off-season, with the Babe willing to wear any hat handed to him—a classic clown, an instinctive showman, always generous to children. The country loved him. He also barnstormed as far away as Japan, now a baseball-mad nation, which cheered the visiting idol, Babu Rutu.
Together for 10 full seasons, from 1925 through 1934, they formed the most powerful one-two punch in baseball history, but their time was short. Ruth was phased out by the Yankees after 1934 and tried playing with the Boston Braves, hitting three home runs in Pittsburgh and almost immediately retiring on that last loud note. He then waited for the managing job with the Yankees, which, he eventually realized, was never going to come.
Gehrig's life took a far more disastrous turn. In the spring of 1939, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative neuromuscular disease: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), now called Lou Gehrig's disease. Upon his return from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the Yankees held a ceremony for him between games of the July 4 doubleheader, with Ruth and many of his old teammates present. Gehrig wrote his own speech and delivered it to the huge crowd:
“For the past two weeks, you've been reading about a bad break,” he said, pausing for a moment, the echoes resounding around the stadium. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The stoic captain then recited all his blessings, including just about everybody from his parents to the concessionaires. It was perhaps the most emotional moment ever experienced in a ballpark; Gary Cooper, in the subsequent film
Pride of the Yankees
, could
barely do justice to Gehrig's uncharacteristic baring of his emotions. The illness would kill Gehrig in twenty-three months.
Ruth, horrified by the death of his very dissimilar teammate, was close to a reformed man, with a second marriage and an adopted daughter. He had upgraded his table manners and learned to write letters, make speeches, and go out in public, and he still reveled in the glory of being the Babe whenever he visited a ballpark. His time, too, was short, as he was diagnosed with cancer. Other dying men, like the modest Gehrig, might make one public farewell performance. The Babe made three, the last one a few weeks before his death in August of 1948.
The early demise of both No. 3 and No. 4 set a melancholy mood that still hunkers under the eaves in Yankee Stadium, with its retired numbers and monuments to its own immortals—Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Billy Martin, Thurman Munson, Elston Howard, all of whom died way too young.
Years later, other players would surpass Ruth's home run totals, but he is still revered for his grandiose skills and flair, best described by the highly American adjective for prodigious: Ruthian.
—
The Babe was also kept alive by a second legend, baseball's own tale of two cities, with its overtones of prejudice and deceit. The villain in the Ruth saga is reputed to be Harry Frazee, the New York impresario who had sold Ruth to the Yankees. People have long since forgotten the ugly feud between Frazee and Ban Johnson, the league president, who controlled a majority of clubs known as the “Loyal Five,” and opposed the owners of the Yankees, Red Sox, and White Sox, known as the “Insurrectos.”
After Frazee bought the Sox from Joseph Lannin in 1916, Johnson referred to him as “the champion wrecker of baseball,” because Frazee had sold key players to the Yankees. Frazee insisted that other league owners would not deal with him, so he had no choice but to deal with the two Yankee owners, whom he knew from New York. The two Yankee owners also helped Frazee take out a loan of $350,000 to secure his mortgage on Fenway Park, thereby putting them in line to own the Red Sox park.
The feud went deeper than that. Johnson was a Midwesterner who had primitive blue-state, red-state issues with New York and Boston. At the very least, Johnson found Frazee brash, perhaps because of his involvement in show business, which in some circles was regarded as a milieu in which no gentleman would ever participate. Johnson and his faithful owners often suggested Frazee was too “New York,” which then and now could be taken as a code phrase for being Jewish.
The suggestion of anti-Semitism came from a familiar source of bigotry. Henry Ford of the automobile empire had founded a weekly newspaper, the
Dearborn Independent
, and used it to print allegations of sinister Jewish activity in America. In 1921, Ford's lead writer, J. Cameron, wrote an essay called “Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American Baseball,” which focused on Arnold Rothstein of New York rather than on the players and other gamblers involved in the Black Sox plot. At the time, the
Independent
printed over 250,000 copies, all over the country and overseas.
Ford soon published another essay called “Jewish Degradation of American Baseball,” zeroing in on Frazee: “Baseball was about as much of a sport to Frazee as selling tickets to a merry-go-round would be. He wanted to put his team across as if they were May Watson's girly-girly burlesquers.” Cameron then called Jews “scavengers” who meant to turn baseball into “garbage.” Cameron continued: “But there is no doubt anywhere, among either friends or critics of baseball, that the root cause of the present condition is due to Jewish influence.…If baseball is to be saved, it must be taken out of their hands.”
Frazee was also denigrated by Fred Lieb, the prolific New York sportswriter who was a close friend of Ban Johnson. According to Glenn Stout, a New England–based writer, Lieb suggested Frazee's acts could be explained by his birth, while never exactly claiming Frazee was Jewish.
“We have been maligned,” Frazee's great-grandson, Max Frazee, a New York–based construction official and artist, would say in 2004. The great-grandson was aghast at the bigotry of Henry Ford and others but he wanted to set the record straight: Harry Frazee
was an Episcopalian of Scottish ancestry. Apparently being a New Yorker was enough to qualify Frazee as Jewish, back in those days.