One Summer: America, 1927 (19 page)

First, in the wake of the Ray Chapman killing, umpires were instructed to keep a decent ball in play at all times. No more would pitchers be allowed to turn the ball brown with dirt and tobacco juice, making it all but invisible in late innings. The major leagues also banned what was loosely known as the spitball. The application of spit (or grease, tobacco juice, Vaseline, or any of at least two dozen other globulous additives) to the side of the ball induced an imbalance that caused the ball to wobble and dip in abrupt and unpredictable ways, rather as a modern knuckle-ball does, but with the difference that spitballs could be thrown hard. Every spitball pitcher had his own favorite substance. Eddie Cicotte of the Chicago White Sox used paraffin wax to great effect, though how he did so without poisoning himself over the course of nine innings was something of a wonder. Home teams on the receiving end of doctored balls sometimes tried to discourage opposing pitchers by painting that day’s game balls with mustard oil, tincture of capsicum, or some other fiery surprise, which at least provided the home players with the possibility of amusement, if not more hittable pitches.

After the 1919 season it was decided to ban the spitball for everyone except seventeen pitchers whose careers were dependent on it. They
would be allowed to retain the pitch until their own retirements. The last legal spitballer was Burleigh Grimes, who retired in 1934. Babe Ruth, for one, believed that without the banning of doctored balls no batter could risk the big swings necessary to hit home runs.

The most important change of all, however, was that the ball itself became livelier—though when exactly, why exactly, and by how much are questions that are surprisingly difficult to answer.

The quest to produce a sturdier, more resilient baseball was a long-standing one. Ben Shibe, co-owner of the Philadelphia Athletics and a manufacturer of sporting goods, who had begun his colorful career in the leather goods industry and so knew his way around stitched products, devoted much of his spare time for years to trying to make better baseballs. In 1909 he invented the cork-centered ball. Cork centers were lighter than rubber centers, which meant that the balls required more twine, wound tighter, to obtain their regulation weight and circumference. Shibe’s new ball, nearly everyone agreed, was notably livelier. Hits seemed sharper, particularly in the later innings of games, when balls normally grew spongy. Then sometime after the war—when precisely is another curiously vague matter—Shibe’s company, A. J. Reach, began to import a superior grade of wool from Australia, which was even springier and could be wound tighter still around its feather-light cork. This is commonly held to account for the sudden appearance of the celebrated “rabbit ball.”

Interestingly, Reach strenuously denied that the new ball was livelier. He produced results from the U.S. Bureau of Standards showing that the ball was neither more nor less bouncy than those that preceded it. Most players didn’t agree, however. “There was a great difference between the ball that was in use when I broke in and the rabbit ball that was handed us a few seasons ago,” Walter Johnson told a reporter in the summer of 1927. “This ball travels with much more speed than the old one when hit.”

Although home run numbers grew generally, no one came close to matching Ruth’s totals. In 1920, when Ruth hit 54 homers, no other player hit even 20. In 1921, his 59 homers were 11 more than the next two best hitters combined. By July 1921, in only his second year as a full-time
batter, Ruth had already hit 139 home runs, more than any other person had hit in a career before. “So compelling is his presence at the plate, so picturesque and showy and deliciously melodramatic his every move and appearance that he is, from the point of the onlooker, a success even when he is a failure,” wrote one observer. Even his pop-ups were sensational; they were often hoisted so high that he had comfortably rounded second base before the ball dropped into an infielder’s glove.

In Babe Ruth’s first year in New York, Yankees attendance more than doubled, to 1,289,000, even though the team finished third. The Giants had never attracted a million fans in a year. The Yankees never attracted fewer. John McGraw was so offended by Ruth’s assault on the principles of “scientific” baseball, and so envious of the Yankees success, that he ordered them to leave the Polo Grounds and find a new home. In 1922, Jacob Ruppert began building Yankee Stadium—the greatest ballpark ever seen to that time. He placed it on a plot of land carefully chosen to be within sight of McGraw’s Polo Grounds. When finished, the stadium cost $2.5 million and was 50 percent bigger than any previous ballpark. From the day of its opening it was known as the House That Ruth Built.

Babe Ruth became celebrated as no sports figure ever had before. Everything about him, said the writer Paul Gallico, seemed larger than life—“his frame, his enormous head surmounted by blue-black curly hair, his great blob of a nose spattered generously over his face.” He wasn’t good-looking, but he was irresistibly charismatic. As his friend and teammate Waite Hoyt put it: “He was one of a kind. If he had never played ball, if you had never heard of him and passed him on Broadway, you’d turn around and look.”

Ruth’s rise to fame could not have been more impeccably timed. It coincided precisely with the birth of tabloid newspapers, newsreel films, fan magazines, and radio—all vital cogs in the new celebrity culture—and his arrival in New York brought him into the throbbing heart of the media world. Newspapers began running a daily column titled “What Babe Ruth Did Today.” When Babe Ruth had a bunion trimmed, it received national coverage. Interest in him went way beyond
the sports pages, however. He featured on the covers of dozens of magazines that had nothing to do with baseball, from
Hardware Age
to
Popular Science
. The
Literary Digest
ran an admiring profile, as did
The New Yorker
soon after it began publication. No ballplayer had ever attracted this kind of attention in the wider world before.

He became regarded as a kind of god. In 1921, a team of professors at Columbia University hooked him up to wires and something called a Hipp chronoscope, subjected him to a battery of physical and mental tests, and pronounced him “one man in a million” for his reflexes, eyesight, hearing, and “nervous stability.” He even scored 10 percent above normal for intelligence—a fact that he boasted of with particular pride to anyone who would listen.

People loved him—that’s genuinely not too strong a word—and not without reason. He was kind and generous, especially to children, and endearingly unpretentious. Introduced to President Coolidge on a sweltering day at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Ruth wiped his face with a handkerchief and said, “Hot as hell, ain’t it, Prez?” At a party he referred to the hosts as “the hostess and hoster.” But at the same time, he commanded a certain wit. Once when a traffic cop shouted at him, “Hey, this is a one-way street,” Ruth responded, “I’m only driving one way!” The sportswriter Red Smith became convinced that Ruth possessed a first-rate brain, one that combined shrewdness with simplicity and innocence with penetrating perception. “It was, in its special way, a great mind,” he insisted.

Those who knew him well weren’t so sure, for Ruth’s brain had wondrous gaps. He could never remember names, for instance. When Waite Hoyt, his closest friend, left the team for the Tigers after eleven years as Ruth’s teammate, Ruth’s parting words to him were: “Take care of yourself, Walter.” He was equally hopeless at learning lines. Once for a national radio broadcast he was coached again and again to say: “As the Duke of Wellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” When it came time to recite the line, Ruth proudly blurted: “As Duke Ellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.”

His extravagance was legendary. On one road trip, he wore
twenty-two silk shirts in three days, then gave them all to the chambermaid upon departing. In Cuba, he lost $26,000 on a single horse race, and $65,000 in a few days. “It has been necessary for his employers to have him followed by detectives to protect him from himself as well as from confidence men, blackmailers, racetrack touts and bookmakers, gamblers and scheming young ladies,” noted
The New Yorker
in 1926. Despite his wealth, often he didn’t have the cash to pay his income tax bills, including in 1927 when Ruppert made him the highest-paid baseball player in history. Over the course of his career, by his own estimation, he lost or wasted well over a quarter of a million dollars.

His teammates did what they could to help him, taking it in turns to go through his mail to alert him to anything important. “Ruth had 24 secretaries,” Hoyt once observed. Doc Woods, the team trainer, once found $6,000 worth of checks in mail that Ruth had discarded. Woods also commonly faked Ruth’s signature on baseballs and photographs, and reportedly faked some ten thousand signatures in one year.

His appetites for sex and food, both seemingly boundless, were a source of perennial wonder. Marshall Hunt, sports editor of the
New York Daily News
, told how on road trips they would drive out into the country looking for restaurants that did chicken dinners. “What Babe really wanted,” Hunt said, “was a good chicken-dinner-and-daughter combination, and it worked out that way more often than you would think.”

His indiscretions often led to complications. Fred Lieb (the
New York Evening Telegram
sportswriter who first called Yankee Stadium the House That Ruth Built) once watched as Ruth was chased through a train in Shreveport, Louisiana, by a woman (reputedly the wife of a state legislator) armed with a knife. Ruth only escaped by jumping off the train and then back on again just as it was departing. On another occasion he was chased “near naked” out of a hotel by an aggrieved husband with a gun. When someone asked his Yankee teammate Ping Bodie what it was like to room with Ruth, Bodie replied, “I don’t know. I room with his suitcase.”

As the 1920s progressed, Ruth increasingly stayed at better hotels than the rest of the team, at his own expense. There he would hold court
to anyone who cared to drop by. Waite Hoyt once counted 250 visitors to his suite over the course of an evening. Ruth seldom knew who any of the visitors were. At a party in his rooms at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, Ruth famously stood on a chair and shouted, “Any woman who doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.”

If sex was unavailable, he just ate. Marshall Hunt swore he once watched Ruth down eighteen hot dogs at a sitting. Several witnesses reported seeing him order a dinner that consisted of double helpings of everything—two porterhouse steaks, two mountains of fried potatoes, two salads, two slabs of apple pie with ice cream—then come back six hours later and consume the same meal again; in between he ate eight hot dogs and drank six bottles of pop. “Lord, he ate too much,” Harry Hooper, a teammate, told Lawrence Ritter, author of
The Glory of Their Times
. Over the course of his career, it was calculated that Ruth had gained and lost two and a half tons.

On the whole, he got away with his wayward lifestyle, but when he faltered, he faltered spectacularly. In 1922, he had a dreadful year. He was suspended on five separate occasions for various behavioral breaches and altogether missed about a third of the season. He squabbled endlessly with his manager, the long-suffering Miller Huggins. Once when Huggins criticized Ruth and his teammate Bob Meusel for their lack of discipline and output, Ruth carried the diminutive Huggins to the rear platform of the observation car and dangled him upside down over the rails until he withdrew his complaint. After Huggins’s death, one of his sisters claimed that Ruth had taken five years off his life.

In the winter of 1922, at what was supposed to be a testimonial dinner, Jimmy Walker, soon to be mayor of New York—and a man who knew a thing or two about high living—publicly castigated Ruth, calling him “a great athlete, but also a great fool.” Ruth, he said, had let everybody down by his loutish behavior during the season. “Worst of all, worst of all,” Walker went on, “you have let down the kids of America. Everywhere in America, on every vacant lot where kids play baseball, and in the hospitals too, where crippled children dream of movement forever denied their thin and warped little bodies, they think of you, their hero. They
look up to you, worship you. And then what happens? You carouse and abuse your great body.… The kids have seen their idol shattered and their dreams broken.”

Ruth by this point was sobbing piteously—but worse was still to come. As he left the dinner that evening he was served a summons on behalf of one Dolores Dixon of Brooklyn charging him with being the father of her unborn child. Ruth was in the embarrassing position of not being able to recall whether he had slept with the woman or not. In the end, it appeared that he had not. “Dolores Dixon” turned out to be a fictitious name, and the woman in question was unable to supply dates or places that tallied with Ruth’s known movements. The suit was dropped, but not until Ruth had been made to look exceedingly foolish.

In 1925 everything went wrong again. He arrived at spring training forty pounds overweight, and struggled to regain his form. In early April, as the Yankees were playing a series of exhibition games on the way home from spring training, Ruth began to feel unwell. By the time the team reached Asheville, he was feverish and barely coherent. Outside the train, he collapsed. As he was obviously in no state to play in an exhibition match, Miller Huggins, the manager, told him to continue on to New York. At Grand Central Station he collapsed again and went into convulsions. He was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Rumors circulated that Ruth had eaten too many hot dogs. The episode became known as “the bellyache heard round the world.” The hospital was curiously vague about Ruth’s condition and treatment, which led others to suppose that he was being treated for syphilis or some other venereal embarrassment. It now seems evident that whatever ailed Ruth, it was seriously acute and almost certainly gastric. Ruth was in bed for a month and weak enough to need a wheelchair for several days beyond that. Altogether he spent almost seven weeks in the hospital. When he did return to the Yankees, he was sporting a fresh abdominal scar and was a ghost of his former self: he had lost 76 pounds during his illness, and was now a trim but feeble 180 pounds, compared with the 256-pound tub of joviality he had been less than two months earlier. His legs were especially thin. He looked, said one observer, like “a bag of oats on two toothpicks.”