The Big Fella Read online

  Endpapers

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  For Emma

  Here’s Looking at You, Kid

  Epigraph

  Give me the child for the first seven years and

  I’ll give you the man.

  —Jesuit maxim

  Babe Ruth is the king of kings, the ace of aces,

  the what of what-not.

  —Lima News (Ohio)

  Babe Ruth is as much a part of the daily life and

  thought of this nation as the milkman, pay day,

  Prohibition, the Bible and evolution.

  —New York Evening Post

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpapers

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue: June 13, 1902, Baltimore

  Chapter 1: October 10, Providence

  Chapter 2: October 10, Aboard the New York Central to Manhattan

  Chapter 3: October 11, Trenton

  Chapter 4: October 12, Cityline

  Chapter 5: October 13, Asbury Park

  Chapter 6: October 13–14, Aboard the Manhattan Limited to Lima

  Chapter 7: October 15, Kansas City, Missouri

  Chapter 8: October 16, Omaha

  Chapter 9: October 17, Aboard the Rock Island Line to Des Moines

  Chapter 10: October 18, Sioux City

  Chapter 11: October 19, Denver

  Chapter 12: October 21–22, Bay Area

  Chapter 13: October 23, Bay Area II

  Chapter 14: October 25, Marysville

  Chapter 15: October 26, San Jose

  Chapter 16: October 28, San Diego

  Chapter 17: October 29, Fresno

  Chapter 18: October 30, Los Angeles

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix 1: The Power of the Man

  Appendix 2: The Babe’s Portfolio

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Jane Leavy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Twenty-five years ago, when I took my son to visit the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, I was already trying to decide how to write about the Babe. Nick was seven years old, George Herman Ruth Jr.’s age when his parents sent him away to live at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, Delinquent, Incorrigible, and Wayward Boys on the western edge of the city.

  The minimalist, redbrick row house at 216 Emory Street where he was born on February 6, 1895, was the home of his maternal grandparents. Just twelve feet wide, sixty feet deep, and three squat stories high, it had four fireplaces but no running water or indoor plumbing, no gas or electricity.

  Four adjoining row houses, the only homes fronting on the two-block side street, shared a pump located in the alley that ran behind them. Runoff collected in the center of the banked cobblestone street. There were no sewers.

  The house, built in 1880, was situated in a working-class neighborhood with a grand name, Ridgely’s Delight, which dated back to the mid-seventeenth-century plantation built by Colonel Charles Ridgely. By the late 1800s, the plantation was gone, and the area on the southwest cusp of downtown Baltimore was heavily industrial. The lightning rod shop operated by George Ruth Sr.’s father was just around the corner.

  Museum curators had carefully appointed the dollhouse-size bedroom in which George Jr. came into the world in period antiques. Angels perched on the whitewashed mantel above an impossibly small wooden cradle. A marble washstand with a pink-and-white porcelain basin and pitcher, lace curtains, and brass wall sconces on either side of a double bed with an ornate mahogany headboard filled out the room, set off from the public by velvet ropes and stanchions—reminiscent of a presidential birthplace.

  Katie Ruth told her son that he was born on February 7, 1894, which was untrue. Odd that she should have gotten the year wrong, arriving as he did in the middle of the February Freeze of ’95, when it seemed hell might just freeze over, as had the Baltimore harbor.

  The bollixed birth date wasn’t the only incongruity I took away from our visit to the museum. There was something unsettling about the whole tableau, at odds with the well-worn tropes about Ruth’s impoverished beginnings and guttersnipe childhood on the Baltimore waterfront.

  It would take the better part of twenty-five years for me to put my finger on the precise nature of the disconnect: the myths and misconceptions about Babe Ruth begin at his birthplace. Only the dimensions of the familial still life and the outsized man Ruth became were incontrovertible. Everything else was conjecture.

  Something different was bothering my son. He lingered at the threshold far longer than boys that age linger anywhere, trying to reconcile the life-size image of the Babe that greeted us at the museum entrance with the petite set piece of family life on the border of Victorian Pigtown.

  Finally, he said, “Babe Ruth fit in here?”

  His confusion was understandable. The Babe is a priori: too big ever to have been that small. No one thinks of him as Little George, his nickname in the family that banished him in June 1902. In part, that’s a function of the sheer size of the man he grew to be, six foot two and 215 pounds when he was in trim and made everyone else in uniform look like the boys who now play in youth leagues named for him. In part, it is because so little is known about the boyhood of the man Casey Stengel called “the big feller.” And in part, it is an expression of the huge place he still occupies in the American imagination.

  Jim Murray, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, defined that place in an introduction to a 1991 children’s book, Babe Ruth:

  “A star is not something that flashes through the sky. That’s a comet. Or a meteor. A star is something you can steer ships by. It stays in place and gives off a steady glow; it is fixed, permanent.”

  More than a century after his major-league debut, and seventy years after his death, Babe Ruth remains the lodestar of American fame. And that star has not diminished.

  Curator Greg Schwalenberg rewarded my son’s patience with a visit to the storage closet that then housed the museum’s archives. The metal shelves were stocked with Cal Ripken bobbleheads, expired packs of baseball cards, and a cascade of bats thrown together on wire and steel shelving. “Here, try this,” Schwalenberg said, extricating a hunk of swarthy, tapered ash from the heap of bats that fell against each other with the echo of falling timber in the small, enclosed space.

  Dinged and gouged, rubbed and boned, with black, oblong splotches where baseballs had left their mark, the 35-inch-long and 38-ounce bat spoke to effort, ambition, history, and idiosyncrasy. Just as Nick got the thing balanced over his shoulder and assumed his stance, Schwalenberg said, “That’s one of the bats the Babe used in 1927.”

  Nick struggled manfully to maintain his composure and his equilibrium, staggering under the weight of the moment. As soon as he got himself right, Schwalenberg exchanged Babe’s bat for a more manageable Cal Ripken model, a practical maneuver intended to protect the museum’s most precious asset and ensure a teachable moment.

  “You should see the major leaguers who come here,” longtime museum director Mike Gibbons told me later. “They have the same reaction.”

  Chris Davis, the Baltimore Orioles first baseman, for one. He arrived in a sports coat and tie with a solemn expression for his meeting with Babe’s bat. Like Nick, he noticed the slim taper of the wood—more like a fungo bat than today’s balloon-headed lumber—and that it was weighted so differently than bats used today. And the seven razor-thin slashes Babe had made in the sha
ft, spaced at irregular intervals—the first is 23/4 inches from the knob, then 3, 23/4, 31/2, 31/8, 63/4, 41/2 inches apart—cutting across the grain, the way Ruth cut across convention.

  “Women, hot dogs, or home runs,” Gibbons speculated.

  “I would go with the latter,” said Davis, a God-fearing man.

  Davis also noticed an odd bow in the ash, a gentle curve of the sort a tree might acquire after too many hard winters in the wind. “It’s hard to believe a bat would bend over time just from swinging it,” Davis said, “but with him you never know.”

  On Friday, June 13, 2014, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Babe Ruth’s major-league debut by unveiling its first new Babe Ruth exhibit in three decades. It was designed by senior curator Tom Shieber as a scrapbook journey through Ruth’s life and as an historical corrective, baseball’s first institutional attempt to bring human dimension to the Big Fella, a decision symbolized by the life-size mannequin stationed at the entrance. Only its calves are larger than life: a necessity mandated by stabilizing brass rods within its pinstriped uniform.

  Attendance at the ribbon cutting was sparse: two Hall of Famers; one Babe Ruth impersonator, who grumped that “Babe Ruth had to pay to get into his hall today”; one very pregnant great-granddaughter representing the Ruth family; and one flustered docent, who told a group of fifth graders from Albany, New York, how lucky they were to be there visiting the Babe on opening day.

  “Can anybody tell me what Babe Ruth was known for?”

  “He made thousands of pitches,” one little boy said.

  “I don’t know if he pitched,” she corrected in her best schoolmarm voice. “Anybody know how many home runs he hit?”

  “Seven hundred and fourteen!” chimed a chorus of certainty.

  “Yes!” she said, clearly relieved at the unanimity of response. “He held the record until, until—it’s not coming to me right now—until someone else broke it.”

  When I was their age, Ruth’s shiny red metal locker, donated to the Hall of Fame in 1949—where he had dressed and undressed for fourteen major-league seasons, exchanging silk shirts for Yankee pinstripes—stood alone, as he did, its doors flung open wide in welcome. The silver crown fashioned for him after he hit fifty-nine home runs in 1921, and studded with fifty-nine silver baseballs, perched atop the locker, almost grazing the ceiling.

  He was the tops.

  In the Babe’s new digs upstairs on the second floor, his locker functions as a display case, its doors with his name and number stenciled in white, subsumed in museum cabinetry. Inside: his 1932 jersey; a 1923 bat he gave to New York governor Al Smith; a loving cup from students in Philadelphia; and Nat Fein’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph taken on June 13, 1948, after he posed before that locker for the last time.

  The archival clutter leaves no room to imagine him lighting up a stogie, putting on white duck pants for a night on the town, ignoring a stack of mail with checks that would go uncashed. No room to imagine what it was like to be Babe Ruth—to be with Babe Ruth—when he was young and full and powerful and so incandescent he lit up the world.

  The 180-square-foot gallery, with its black ceilings and dim museum lighting, feels just too claustrophobic for the Babe, containing him behind glass in a way he could never be contained in life. He needs fresh air, and running room, great green expanses of outfield grass where he could track down hard-hit balls and inhale deeply the helium-like giddiness of being him.

  By the fall of 1927, Babe Ruth had completely reshaped the game of baseball, bending it to his will. Little ball and the shortsighted micromanagement of his outsized talent and personality were things of the past.

  Subtlety was banished. Clout was all.

  Ruth had taught America to think big—expect big.

  “Watch my dust,” the Babe said.

  He kicked up a whole lot of it in 1927, rounding the bases sixty times, while breaking his 1921 home-run record.

  This was a year of outsized events. In January, the Harlem Globetrotters debuted. In April, the Great Mississippi Flood caused over $400 million in damage, precipitating the great migration of southern blacks to northern cities.

  In May, Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. An earthquake killed two hundred thousand people in China and the last of 15 million Tin Lizzies rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line.

  In June, the Cyclone roller coaster made its maiden run in Coney Island, a 110-second primal scream of ups, downs, and hairpin turns around tilted curves—which is one way to describe the decade—and Shipwreck Kelly spent twelve days on top of a flagpole in New Jersey.

  In August, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists exonerated fifty-seven years later for a murder they always claimed they didn’t commit, briefly deflected attention from the Bustin’ Twins, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, whose home-run binge was the talk not just of baseball but of headline writers across the nation. On September 14, Isadora Duncan’s scarf made news when it became entangled in the rear axle of a car, breaking her neck.

  Then, in the breathless space of thirty days, Ruth hit his sixtieth home run, led the Yankees to a four-game sweep in the World Series, and completed a twenty-one-day victory lap of the country with Gehrig in tow, kicking up more dust in bandboxes across the American heartland.

  It was the best month of his life.

  This, I realized, twenty-five years after the fact, was the way to write about the Babe. I would re-create that month: round the bases with him in his jaunty Bustin’ Babes jersey; follow him to Western League Park in Omaha; fill in the empty scorecard from Firemen’s Park in Fresno, on display in a glass cabinet beside his jersey.

  I wanted to be on the field when the stands emptied and marauding mobs waylaid him on the base paths, tackling, besieging, and occasionally holding him hostage to a new kind of love. I figured if I could do that, readers might forgive me for not documenting every pitch he threw, or home run he hit, or season he played in twenty-one years in the major leagues, which has been done admirably and thoroughly by previous biographers.

  “C’mere,” a voice said.

  Cal Ripken Jr. dragged me by the elbow across the room to a display case housing Ruth’s blue-and-black paisley Ebonite N29918 bowling ball. The Babe did a lot of bowling after he retired and baseball couldn’t find any use for him.

  Bald, verging on stout, Cal Ripken bears little resemblance to the lithe Rookie of the Year I covered for the Washington Post in 1983. But his boyish enthusiasm and baby blues haven’t changed. Nose pressed against the glass, Cal expressed his ardent desire to put his fingers in Babe’s ball, which wasn’t as odd as it sounds.

  This was a great athlete, the man who surpassed Lou Gehrig’s record for tenacity, wanting to get a grip on the greatness that was Babe Ruth. “I’d like to put my fingers in the holes. See how wide his hand is, how big the spread is.”

  Growing up in Aberdeen, Maryland, the son of a baseball lifer, he had hefted a couple of Babe-size bats his dad, Cal Sr., had brought home for him to try. As the star and anchor of the Baltimore Orioles for twenty-one years, he, too, had had a chance to swing the bat Ruth’s family donated to the Birthplace and Museum. “How big was it? Only thirty-eight?” he said, shaking his head.

  Cal was in Cooperstown to celebrate the Hall of Fame’s seventy-fifth anniversary and to celebrate the Babe. The foundation he created in his father’s name had contracted with Saint Agnes Hospital, across the road from St. Mary’s, to rehabilitate the baseball field where Ruth learned the game. Now he was fixated on the Babe’s sixteen-pound bowling ball with its custom-drilled holes and the tantalizing but elusive opportunity it offered to take the full measure of the man, to gauge the size and strength of his hands and the power they had unleashed.

  In the interest of history, and with Tom Shieber’s aid, I arranged for Mark Rathbun of the Perfect Game Pro Shop in nearby Oneonta to measure Babe’s balls for Cal—the
Ebonite ball on display and the homely black one in storage in the basement of the Hall of Fame.

  How big was the spread of Babe’s hand?

  The distance from the edge of his thumb hole to the middle-finger hole on his Ebonite ball is just shy of four inches; and the distance from the thumb to the pointer finger is just a quarter inch less than that. Plenty big for a big man, Rathbun said, but not unheard of.

  It’s the diameter of those finger holes that made the bowling man quake and remeasure: Babe Ruth’s thumb was 13/32 inches wide at the knuckle. That’s the approximate width of an unshelled walnut.

  Diagram that.

  His fingers were huge, which explains, in part, his ability both to control a major-league baseball thrown from a distance of sixty feet, six inches, and to wallop one with a 54-ounce bat. In 1918 and 1919, his last two seasons with the Boston Red Sox, when he was making the transition from starting pitcher to everyday outfielder, he batted .312 with 40 home runs and 174 RBI and had a 2.55 ERA in just under 300 innings pitched.

  “He was the original natural,” observed Mike Rizzo, general manager of the Washington Nationals. “He picked up a ball at St. Mary’s and became one of the best left-handed pitchers ever. Then he said, ‘Screw it, I’d rather hit,’ and became the best hitter ever.”

  By any standard or metric, ancient or modern, Ruth remains the best, most remarkable player in baseball history. He is still ranked first in slugging percentage (.690), and is also first in the newer, chic modern metrics of on-base + slugging (OPS, 1.164) and wins above replacement (WAR, 182.5).

  He exploded notions of the doable. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. He had altered the dimensions of the game, its architecture and equipment. And every ball hit over every fence altered baseball’s relationship with those seated behind it, a revolutionary change noted by Waldo Frank, writing under the nom de plume Searchlight, in the May 16, 1925, edition of the New Yorker: “The Babe’s home run is an effort on the part of the machine to connect with the crowd. When the ball reaches the bleachers, contact is established. The game and the watchers of the game for that instant have the ball in common.”