One Summer: America, 1927 (17 page)

This was the happy and exciting world in which Babe Ruth found himself now. Considering all that he wrought with his bat, it is an extraordinary fact that Ruth spent nearly the first quarter of his career as a pitcher—and not just
a
pitcher, but one of the very best in baseball. In 1915, his first full season with the Red Sox, he won 18 games against 8 losses, the fourth-best winning percentage in the league. He struck out 112 batters, gave up fewer hits per game than any other player in the league but one, and finished the year with an exceedingly respectable earned-run average (ERA) of 2.44. The next year, he had a record of 23 and 12, and led the league in ERA, shutouts, hits per game, and opponents’ batting average. He was third in number of wins, second in winning percentage and strikeouts, and fourth in complete games. His total of 9 shutouts remains a record for a left-hander. In 1917, he again dominated or featured in nearly every pitching category and had a record of 24–13. Almost incidentally, in the same period he began a run of 29⅔ consecutive scoreless innings pitched in World Series play—a record that stood for forty-three years.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how extraordinary this was. Boys straight out of school didn’t just stroll into major league ballparks and start confounding experienced hitters like Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson. Even the best young pitchers needed time to gain confidence and perspective. Walter Johnson in his first three years in the majors had a
record of 32 wins and 48 losses. Christy Mathewson was 34 and 37. Ruth in the same period was 43 and 21. Altogether in his time as a pitcher Ruth had a win–loss record of 94–46 and an ERA of 2.28. His winning percentage of .671 remains the seventh best of all time. He could easily be in the National Baseball Hall of Fame now as a pitcher.

The problem was—and never before for any human had this been a problem—he was also a peerless hitter. In 1915, his first full season, Ruth hit 4 home runs in 92 at-bats. That was just 3 fewer than Braggo Roth, the American League home run leader, who had more than four times as many plate appearances. In 1918, to take advantage of his bat, the Red Sox began playing Ruth at first base or in the outfield when he wasn’t pitching. The year 1918 proved to be the worst ever for home runs in major league baseball. The Senators as a team hit just 4 home runs that year. The Browns hit 5, the White Sox 8, and the Indians 9. Babe Ruth alone hit 11.
^*
The next year, despite pitching 133⅓ innings (including 12 complete games), Ruth hit 29 home runs, almost doubling the American League record set by Socks Seybold of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1902. Ruth also led the league in runs scored, runs batted in, runs produced, total bases, on-base percentage, and slugging average. In 111 games in the outfield he had 26 assists and just 2 errors. His fielding average of .996 was by a considerable margin the best in the league. That is a most astounding achievement—and it was, of course, only the beginning.

Modern baseball has a certain air of timelessness that is much cherished by its fans. A visitor from our age transported to a major league ballpark of the 1920s would find himself, in most respects, in entirely familiar territory. The play on the field, the sounds of the crowd, the cries of the vendors would all be reassuringly familiar in ways that many other aspects of life in 1920s America would not. (The same visitor would struggle to
start a car, make a phone call, tune a radio, even cross a busy street.) But even at the ballpark differences would soon become apparent.

For a start, games were generally a whole lot brisker. Traditionally, they started at three in the afternoon and rarely went much beyond five. (The ability to provide that day’s baseball scores had a great deal to do with the popularity of evening newspapers.) Ninety-minute games were not uncommon, but sometimes they were even faster than that. On one notable occasion, on September 26, 1926, in St. Louis, the Browns beat the Yankees 6–1 in just one hour and twelve minutes in the first game of a doubleheader, then came back and won the second game 6–2 in fifty-five minutes. These were both full nine-inning games. Quite how they managed it is a wonder. The two teams banged out 25 hits between them in the first game and 20 in the second, so these were hardly classic pitchers’ duels. There was just a lot less messing around.

Games were often a good deal wilder, too. Fights were common and sometimes involved fans as well as players. In 1924, a punch-up between Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in Detroit not only cleared both benches but caused a riot in the stands. Seats were ripped out and thrown on the field, and at least a thousand spectators invaded the playing area. The game had to be abandoned. Players also didn’t hesitate to go into the stands after fans who heckled them beyond forbearance. Ruth in 1920 vaulted into the stands to confront a man who had called him “a big piece of cheese”—then retreated smartly when the man pulled a knife on him. Cobb once went for a spectator who had been riding him all afternoon, and beat the man severely. When fans shouted at Cobb that the man was a war veteran who had no hands, Cobb cried, “I don’t care if he has no feet,” and kept pummeling until police arrived and pulled him off. Cobb was suspended for ten days for that. Ruth once punched an umpire in the jaw in an argument. He was fined $100 and suspended for ten days, too, and was very lucky to get away with that.

For players, life wasn’t terribly glamorous. When a visiting team arrived in a city on a road trip, the players usually walked from the railroad station to the hotel carrying their own bags. They often played in dirty uniforms, particularly in Chicago, where White Sox owner Charles Comiskey charged his players for doing their laundry.

The major leagues were more cozily compact, with just sixteen teams in ten cities. (Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia each had two major league teams; New York had three.) St. Louis was as far west as the major leagues went, Washington as far south.

Parks often had distinctive idiosyncrasies, which gave them a kind of interesting unpredictability. At the Polo Grounds in New York City, the outfield sloped so severely toward the fence that from the dugouts only the outfielders’ heads and shoulders were visible, like ships sailing over a horizon. At Griffith Stadium in Washington, the outfield wall zigzagged crazily around an overhanging tree and five houses whose owners had refused to sell when the park was built, providing arresting angles for caroms and amusing confusion among visiting outfielders. In at least three ballparks, including Yankee Stadium, flagpoles stood in fair territory in center field, waiting to snag any center fielder who forgot they were there. At Fenway Park in Boston, left fielders had to scramble up a steep bank to catch balls hit to the wall.

Perhaps the biggest shock to the visitor from today to a ballpark of the 1920s would be how sloppily maintained they were. Outfields were generally little better than cow pastures, and areas of heavy traffic such as base paths and around home plate were often ragged and bare, and grew more so as the season wore on. After rain, groundskeepers sometimes spread gasoline around the infield and set it alight to dry out the earth—hardly conducive to a fine, delicate tilth.

Safety features were almost entirely absent. Batting helmets did not exist. Outfield walls were unpadded. Gloves were so inflexible and primitive that a one-handed catch “was apt to cause a sensation,” as the historian Marshall Smelser has noted. Bat racks had not yet become standard, so at most parks the players lined up their bats on the ground in front of the dugout, to the considerable peril of catchers or infielders going after foul pop-ups. Outfielders commonly left their gloves on the field, too, when their team went in to bat. There was, in short, a lot to fall over or crash into. People frequently did.

For fans, it was considerably harder to work out what was going on in the game. Throughout the 1920s no American ballpark had a public address system. Usually there was just a man with a megaphone who
called out the names of batters and very little else. Unfamiliar players weren’t easy to identify because uniforms had no numbers. Putting numbers on uniforms didn’t start until 1929, when the Yankees and Indians introduced it. The Yankees then gave numbers to the starting players in the order they batted (more or less), which is why Ruth was number 3 and Lou Gehrig 4. Scoreboards didn’t list hits and errors, so spectators had to know themselves when a no-hitter or perfect game was in progress. Anyone keeping careful score at his seat would become a font of information for those around him.

On the field, players were often a lot more casual about inflicting injuries on others. Ty Cobb, who was only a degree or two removed from clinical psychopathy, always slid into base with cleats raised in the sincere hope of drawing blood, but many other players were only fractionally more considerate of their fellows. Throwing at batters was a common strategy accepted by all. Burleigh Grimes of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was famously bad tempered, set a record of sorts by once throwing at a batter in the on-deck circle. Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, the hardest-throwing pitcher of the day, never intentionally threw at a batter, but he hit more than a few by accident. He ended the career of a Lee Tannehill of the White Sox when he broke his arm so badly just above the wrist that Tannehill could never again grip a bat. Two weeks later Johnson shattered the jaw of a rookie shortstop named Jack Martin. (Johnson, an intensely decent man, always fell to pieces after hurting a player and usually had to be lifted from the game.) Ruth in his autobiography notes that he once tried to brush back a player named Max Flack but accidentally hit him bang in the middle of the forehead. Flack fell like a collapsing tower but survived. Ruth recounted the story merely as an example of the amusing things that happened on the field of play.

Fatalities would seem a reasonable expectation in such circumstances, but in fact only one player was ever killed during the course of play. It was in August 1920 and Babe Ruth was present when it happened. Late in the afternoon in poor light, Yankees pitcher Carl Mays, who was known for being aggressive and was disliked by nearly everyone, including his own teammates, threw an inside pitch to Indians shortstop
Ray Chapman that Chapman never saw at all. Since balls were seldom replaced during a game they tended to grow dull and scuffed as the day wore on, a fact that pitchers often exploited to their advantage in fading light. Mays moreover had a submarine style delivery, which made his pitches even harder to pick up. In any case, Chapman never saw it. The ball struck him on the side of the head at the temple with a sickening thud and with such force that it bounced straight back to Mays, who fielded it and threw it to first, thinking it had come off Chapman’s bat. Then everyone realized the full horror of what had just happened. Chapman, obviously gravely injured, dropped his bat, and began walking in a dazed manner toward second base, evidently making for the clubhouse in center field. After a few steps, his legs gave way and he collapsed. He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.

Ruth said nothing of the incident in his autobiography other than that it provoked so much bad feeling among the Indians that Mays wasn’t played against them again that year. Chapman remains the only major league ballplayer to be mortally injured during a game.

The most dangerous part of the ballpark was actually the stands. In the worst incident in baseball history, in 1903 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, a wall at the back of the grandstand on which fans were perched gave way without warning and hundreds of people were pitched backward onto the street thirty feet below. Twelve died and two hundred were injured, many seriously. Remarkably, an even worse catastrophe nearly happened at the same stadium in the spring of 1927, in the week of Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris. In the seventh inning of a game between the Phillies and Cardinals on May 14, a sudden cloudburst—part of the same intractable storm system that was keeping the Atlantic fliers pinned down on Long Island—prompted hundreds of fans in the bleachers to rush for shelter under the covered upper terrace of a double-deck grandstand along the first-base line. In the previous inning, the Phillies had staged an eight-run rally, an event so rare in Philadelphia that the fans had reacted with joy, and it is thought that their exuberant stomping may have stressed the aging structure beyond its frail limits. Now
under the extra weight of several hundred people, the grandstand issued a plaintive moan and collapsed. Miraculously, no one was killed outright, though a fifty-year-old lithographer named Robert Haas was trampled to death in the panic that followed. Fifty people were injured seriously enough to require hospital treatment, though all but two were released within twenty-four hours. Never in American history had a sporting disaster been more spectacular and merciful at the same time.

A simple if not very noble reason lay behind years of slack maintenance at Baker Bowl and many other aging ballparks: economics. Baseball was a treasured institution but a poor investment. Its most elemental problem was that its games were played during the day when most people were at work. In many cities—Boston until 1929, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia until 1933—Sunday baseball was not permitted either, so many teams had just one day a week, Saturday, when they could hope to draw a good crowd. Even the most successful teams often played before more empty seats than full ones. Yankee Stadium broke all attendance records with a crowd of over 70,000 (including a lot of standees) when it opened for the first time on April 18, 1923, but the next day just 12,500 people turned up. Altogether in the 1910s, average major league attendance was about 4,000. Ballparks were often pretty quiet places in Ruth’s day.

Apart from a percentage on concessions and profits from exhibition games, teams had almost no source of income beyond ticket sales, and from these they had to fund a formidable range of costs—salaries, spring training, road trips, uniforms and equipment, clubhouse staff, a network of scouts, and a home stadium. This last could be staggeringly expensive. In 1913, Charles Hercules Ebbets, owner of the Dodgers, spent $750,000—as much as the cost of a big office building in Manhattan—to construct Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, then spent the rest of his life vainly trying to fill it. On the day that Lindbergh flew to Paris, for example, the Dodgers played before an audience of fewer than 4,000, which was fairly typical for them even in good years. Other teams like the St. Louis Browns, which never
had
good years, sometimes had average attendances of about 1,500.