Pinstripe Empire (30 page)

At shortstop for the Cubs was none other than Mark Koenig. After his time with the Tigers, Koenig had gone back to the minor leagues before being purchased by Chicago in late August, in time to play 33 games and to hit .353 in helping the Cubs secure the pennant.

A half share of World Series money, as voted by his teammates, was usually fine for that amount of service time, but the Yankees thought the Cubs had been cheapskates toward their old pal and were really letting them have it. (The Yanks generously rewarded their batboy Eddie Bennett, who had been in a bad auto accident early in the season.) The dialogue often turned bitter. The Cubs’ players were riding Ruth about being “Grandpa,” also suggesting he had negro blood, a familiar refrain in those days.

Ruffing and Gomez won the first two contests with complete-game efforts, and the action shifted to Wrigley Field, where attendance reached nearly fifty thousand thanks to temporary bleachers erected over Waveland and Sheffield avenues to expand bleacher capacity.

In the third game, with Pipgras opposing Charlie Root, Ruth came up in the fifth inning with one out, none on, and the score tied 4–4. Babe had homered in the first inning, and New York governor Franklin Roosevelt was among the fans who sat in the windy chill enjoying the action.

But the taunting continued. As Ruth strolled to bat, a lemon rolled his way, a symbol of derision. Lemons were the weapon of the day; he’d been seeing them all afternoon.

Root’s first pitch was a called strike, and the Babe held up a finger, saying
something like “It only takes one to hit it,” though only catcher Gabby Hartnett and umpire Roy Van Graflan could hear. After two balls, the next pitch was another called strike, and Ruth raised two fingers and pointed at either Root, the bleachers, or nothing in particular. Babe also pointed his bat toward the Cubs dugout. He apparently shouted something at Root. The crowd was booing.

The next pitch turned into baseball history and folklore. With a mighty swing, out it soared. The ball traveled a reported 490 feet, the third longest in World Series history to that point.

It was history because it was Babe’s 15th World Series homer, a record that would stand for thirty-two years.

It was folklore because it came to be known as the Called Shot, the time Babe pointed to the bleachers and homered. Gehrig followed with a homer (he had hit one in Wrigley years earlier playing in a high school tournament), and the Yanks went on to win the game 7–5, with Pennock saving it in the ninth to put the Yanks up three games to none.

Most journalists reported that Babe pointed to the bleachers and then homered. Players had mixed feelings. Sewell said he was pointing to the Cubs’ bench. Chapman said he was pointing at Root. Ruffing said he had no doubt he was pointing to center field. Crosetti thought Ruth’s finger “just happened to be pointing to center, when he indicated he had one strike left.” Gomez was sure he called the shot but remembered him pointing his bat. Trainer Doc Painter remembered Pennock saying, “Suppose you had missed, you would have looked like an awful bum,” when Ruth got to the bench, and Ruth laughing and saying, “I never thought of that!”

Charlie Grimm, the Cubs’ manager, said he was pointing at Root. Hartnett, awfully close to the scene, denied he’d pointed to the bleachers. Koenig said he pointed, but “You know darn well a guy with two strikes isn’t going to say he’s going to hit a home run on the next pitch.”

“I give him the benefit of the doubt but I don’t think he actually pointed to center field. I think he was acknowledging that he had two strikes,” Koenig added.

As for Charlie Root, he told people that if Ruth had done that, the next pitch would have gone straight into his ribcage. “I guess I should have wasted the next pitch, and I thought Ruth figured I would too,” he said. “I decided to try to cross him and came in with it. The ball was gone as soon as Ruth swung. It never occurred to me then that the people in the stands would think he had been pointing to the bleachers. But that’s the way it was.”

Little Ray Kelly, no longer Babe’s mascot but still a pal, flew to Chicago with his dad as guests of the Babe. They had choice box seats. “Damned right he pointed and hit it out,” maintained Little Ray. “I’ll swear it to the day I die.”

The
Reach Guide
reported that “Ruth hit a ball over the centerfield fence—a tremendous drive—after indicating by pantomime to his hostile admirers what he purposed to do—and did!”

Matt Kandle was an amateur photographer at the game that day, shooting home movies. They quietly remained in the family until his great-grandson Kirk released still photos, and then the actual film, in 1982.

This was seismic news, a Zapruder film for baseball. But although the film contained absolute proof of Babe pointing, it didn’t end the debate. Even viewing the film makes it impossible to know for certain where he was pointing or what the gesture meant.

Ruth was publicity-skilled enough to maintain that it surely did happen. “The good Lord was with me that day,” he told newsreel photographers. And so the Called Shot took its place among the greatest of all baseball stories.

My father was born in Brooklyn but wasn’t much of a baseball fan and didn’t attend a game until he took me to Ebbets Field in 1955. It was the first game for both of us. Once, when we were discussing Hank Aaron breaking Ruth’s home run record, he said to me, “Oh, but Ruth used to call his home runs.” So for the average American, the story made it into popular culture; the translation wasn’t always perfect, but no one can really be sure what happened that afternoon.

The fourth game saw the Cubs score four in the first inning and knock Johnny Allen out of the box, but Moore and Pennock allowed just two runs the rest of the way while the Yanks scored 13, with Lazzeri homering twice. The Yankees won 13–6 for their fourth world championship, running their World Series win streak to twelve games.

If they had named World Series MVPs back then, it would have been Gehrig, whose superlative play was again upstaged by Ruth’s theatrics. Gehrig hit .529 with three homers, nine runs scored, and eight RBI in the four games.

THERE WAS A remarkable similarity to the 1933, 1934, and 1935 seasons, each finding the Yankees finishing second, seven games out of first in ’33 and ’34, three games out in ’35, averaging 91 wins a year.

They ran their streak of games without being shut out to 308—almost two full years—before Lefty Grove stopped them on August 3, 1933.

A year after the Dickey-Reynolds fight of ’32, the Yanks and Senators squared off again in April. This time it was Chapman sliding hard into the Senators’ second baseman Buddy Myer that got things going. With Vice President John Nance Garner looking on, Myer responded to the slide with a kick to the thigh. Chapman got off a series of punches as both benches emptied. There were suggestions that Chapman unloaded some anti-Semitic remarks at Myer, who was Jewish.

Myer and Chapman were both ejected but had to exit together through the Washington dugout. Not surprisingly, things were said to Chapman as he walked down the dugout steps, and in a flash he was exchanging punches with Washington’s Earl Whitehill, knocking him out. With this, Senators fans battled their way onto the field, grabbing bats from the dugout in the process. The Yanks’ Dixie Walker (later a star with the Dodgers) went into the stands after taunting fans, who pinned him down; Dickey, Lazzeri, and Gomez went to rescue him. It all felt like something that belonged in nineteenth-century baseball. There has never been as big a brawl involving the Yankees as this one, with fans storming the field.

The Jewish community was troubled by the incident. People seemed to know that Chapman had no love for Jews. The players knew it too. Birdie Tebbetts, the longtime catcher and manager who finished up his career as a Yankee scout, wrote of another play in his autobiography a few years later,

He [Chapman] had the same kind of reputation as Ty Cobb, and I know because I’d heard it myself that he was one of the most brutal Jew-baiting tormentors of Hank Greenberg. So about the middle of the ballgame, on a close play at the plate, when Chapman roared in from third and slammed into me, spikes high, I just blew my stack. I threw off my mask and started throwing punches … Both of us were tossed out of the game, fined and suspended.

After that episode, the next stop … was Yankee Stadium. There was a place under the stands near the Yankee dugout where players could gather and grab a smoke before going out on the field, and as we were standing there, a bunch of Yankees wandered by. One of them was Lou Gehrig [who had recently broken Everett Scott’s consecutive-game streak]. He stopped, looked us over, and said, “Which one of you is Tebbetts?”

I said, “I am.”

He looked at me and said, “Did you land a good punch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you fight him again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, if you ever do and you land two good punches, I’ll buy you the best suit you will ever own.”

And with that, Lou Gehrig turned and climbed the staircase, grabbed a bat and stepped into the batting cage.

The Yankees won the Myer-Chapman game 16–0. That was more like 1930s Yankee baseball.

Chapman, Myer, and Whitehall were all suspended for five days. Five fans were arrested. The era of both teams leaving through the same dugout was drawing to a close. Three years later, Chapman was traded to Washington, of all teams, in exchange for Jake Powell, who would bring his own problems to New York. Chapman and Myer were now teammates.

Babe Ruth continued to be exasperated watching a manager who had never played a major league game running the show. In Ruth’s time, so many of his contemporary stars had had their shot at being player-managers: Cobb, Speaker, Walter Johnson, Joe Tinker, Chance, Bill Terry, Hornsby—the list went on, and Ruth fumed. He had “saved” baseball, they said. He had been the greatest drawing card in history. He thought he deserved his shot. Ruppert offered him the managing job at Newark for 1934; he turned it down. “To ask me … to manage a club in the minors,” he said, “would be the same … as to ask Colonel Ruppert … to run a soda fountain.”

On July 6, 1933, Babe hit the first home run in All-Star Game history. Always one to rise to the occasion, he blasted one out in Comiskey Park after sportswriter Arch Ward’s idea for an All-Star Game became reality. But ’33 would be his last .300 season, and his 34 homers were his fewest as a Yankee except for the bellyache season of ’25.

There was a sense that 1934 would be his swan song. He hit his 700th home run on July 13, but only 11 after that. (Gehrig, suffering from lumbago, almost saw his playing streak end that very day, leaving in the second inning, but he was able to return the next day.) And when Ruth went 0-for-3 with a walk in the final game of the year, a 5–3 loss at Washington, many sensed that it was over for the Babe at age thirty-nine. Before the game, the band from his old school, St. Mary’s in Baltimore, performed,
while a scroll signed by President Roosevelt and many others was presented. He had batted just .288/22/84.

After the season he went to Japan, China, and the Philippines with a touring All-Star team that also included Gehrig and Gomez. He hit .408 with 13 homers in the 22 games, but his game in Manila on December 10 was to be his last representing the Yankees (although he wore a special uniform, not a Yankee one).

Before embarking, he told sportswriter Joe Williams that he wouldn’t be back with the Yankees in 1935 “unless I’m manager. Don’t you think I’m entitled to the chance?”

According to Barrow, the story caught him by surprise. McCarthy, according to Barrow, offered to resign. The Yankees wouldn’t hear of it.

“Surprising as it was, it was also a great relief,” he wrote. “The Babe had made things easier for the Colonel and myself.” Ruppert, in conversation with Boston Braves owner Emil Fuchs, agreed to allow Babe to sign with the Braves. Ruth, Ruppert, Fuchs, and Barrow gathered at the brewery office on February 26, 1935, to announce Ruth’s release and his return to Boston, this time with the Braves.

And so it ended. He would be going to St. Petersburg to train with Boston, awkwardly sharing facilities with the Yankees, and then he would play just 28 games and hit his final three home runs (all in one game), rounding it out at 714.

Ruth held thirty-four major league or American League records and twenty-six World Series records. Over fifteen Yankee seasons, he’d hit .349 with 659 homers. Gehrig, the 1934 homer champ with 49, was next on the all-time AL list with 348 to Ruth’s 708 (including his Red Sox clouts). As a Yankee, Ruth led the league in homers ten times, in slugging percentage eleven times, in on-base percentage eleven times, and in walks eleven times. He played for seven pennant winners and four world championship teams. He’d made a lot of money for himself and for his teammates, and he achieved fame far beyond the baseball field. He had his times of high drama, but what he did for baseball, and for the Yankees, was unquestioned.

How big was this release? By most measurements, everyone could see that Babe Ruth’s career was winding down. His age, his stats, and his expanding waistline all screamed out with the reality. But when it finally happened, it just had an empty feel to it.

Babe’s name would be part of any experience at Yankee Stadium. You
couldn’t watch a game without thinking of him. When he made occasional visits to the ballpark, he always seemed to call attention to himself by dressing in light-colored clothing while everyone else was in dark attire. He would always stand out.

Some forty years later, when I was in the front office, the effect was still lingering. I’d make a mistake, perhaps an incorrect stat in the press notes, or someone else would make one, and we’d try to assess the damage. “How serious might this be?”

“Hey, they released Babe Ruth!” would be the response.

New York would remain Babe Ruth’s home for the remaining thirteen years of his life. After marrying Claire in 1929, they had lived at 345 West Eighty-eighth Street, in an eleven-room apartment on the seventh floor, down the hall from Claire’s mother. In 1942 they moved to 110 Riverside Drive, at Eighty-third Street, where Claire lived until her death in 1976.