One Summer: America, 1927 Page 14

  Ruppert, by contrast, was a more complex character. The scion of a wealthy brewing family, he grew up in a rambling mansion in the German-American enclave of Yorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the same neighborhood that produced, in more modest circumstances, Lou Gehrig and the Marx brothers—close to the yeasty smell of the Ruppert Brewery, which was the biggest in the nation, occupying an enormous site between Ninetieth and Ninety-Third Streets. It produced Knickerbocker, Ruppert, and Ruppiner beers, which, not incidentally, sold very well at ballparks.

  Jacob Ruppert was a rather odd and solitary man. He lived alone in his big family house, attended by five servants. He served four terms as a congressman, from 1899 to 1907, for the Democratic Party, but then seems to have lost interest in politics. He spoke with a German accent—he called Ruth “Root,” for instance—which was a little puzzling because he had lived his whole life in America, as indeed had his parents. He collected jade, books, ceramics, dogs, horses, and art, and had what was called “America’s finest collection of small monkeys.” Though not adventurous himself, he was keen on exploration and in 1933 would sponsor an expedition by Richard Byrd to the Antarctic. Ruppert’s most arresting peccadillo was that he kept a second home in Garrison, New York, where he maintained a shrine to his mother in the form of a room containing everything she would need if she came back to life. This may go some way toward explaining why he never married.

  Wealth and a love of baseball were about all that Ruppert and Huston had in common. Despite these drawbacks, on the last day of 1914, Ruppert and Huston each paid $225,000 for a half share of the Yankees—a staggering sum bearing in mind that Devery and Farrell had bought the team for $18,000 only a decade before. McGraw was elated, as well he might be. To any dispassionate observer, Ruppert and Huston were idiots.

  As it turned out, they couldn’t have come into baseball ownership at a worse time. One bad thing after another befell major league baseball in the following years. First, competition from the Federal League clobbered revenues. Attendance in American and National League parks dropped by a quarter during the two years of the Federal League’s existence. Then America’s entry into the First World War depressed attendance further. That was followed by the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed millions across the world and left most people severely disinclined to gather in public places. At the same time, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the 1918 major league season would be reduced to 130 games as a gesture toward the war effort. Total attendance that year fell to just three million—a decline of 50 percent from ten years earlier. Finally, in 1919, Congress brought in the Volstead Act, which declared that Prohibition would begin in January 1920. That would remove beer sales from ballparks, eliminating a crucial source of revenue.

  Many teams barely clung on. No owner was in a more parlous state than the soon-to-be-notorious Harrison Herbert Frazee of the Boston Red Sox. Harry Frazee was really a theatrical impresario, but he loved baseball, too, and in 1916 with a partner named Hugh Ward, he bought the Red Sox—then the best team in the game. They paid $1 million, far more than they could afford. Very quickly Frazee and Ward found themselves struggling to meet loan payments.

  In the first week of January 1920, facing imminent default, Frazee did something that Red Sox fans spent the rest of the century obsessing over: he sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 in cash and a loan of $350,000. Although not so well noticed by history, but just as devastating to the team, Frazee offloaded sixteen other players to the Yankees between 1918 and 1923. The Yankees even acquired his general manager, Ed Barrow. In a sense, the Red Sox franchise transferred to New York. Frazee sold out altogether in 1923. Coincidentally, Huston would sell out to Ruppert in the same year.

  Even more unnoticed by history was the timing of the Ruth deal. It is not at all a coincidence that the New York Yankees purchased Babe Ruth in the same month that Prohibition came into effect. Jacob Ruppert at the time of the Ruth sale was three weeks away from losing his brewery business. He urgently needed an alternative source of income. Now he was going to find out if it was actually possible to get rich from owning a baseball team, and he was going to do it by staking nearly everything on the most brilliant, headstrong, undisciplined, lovable, thrillingly original, ornery son of a bitch that ever put on a baseball uniform.

  It would be quite a ride.

  * * *

  * Ruth in 1918 actually hit 12 home runs, but one was a walk-off homer, and in those days the person who hit a game-winning home run was awarded only the number of bases needed to score the winning run, so Ruth’s 12th homer was recorded as a triple.

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  Before Babe Ruth changed everything, a home run in baseball was a pretty rare event. John Franklin Baker of the Philadelphia Athletics became known to posterity as “Home Run” Baker not because he banged out lots of home runs, but because in the 1911 World Series he hit crucial homers in two successive games. The rest of the time Baker didn’t hit that many home runs—just two all season in 1910, for instance. Even so, he was one of the game’s preeminent sluggers, and the name “Home Run” didn’t seem silly to anyone.

  In baseball’s deadball era, as the period before 1920 is commonly known, teams didn’t look for rocketlike hits and big rallies, but manufactured runs “scientifically,” by slapping out singles and moving runners along by any means possible—through bunts and walks and other patiently incremental strategies. Some teams actually practiced getting hit by pitches. Scores tended to be low but close.

  There was a good reason for this. Hitting a baseball is hard, and in many ways it was harder in Babe Ruth’s day than it is now. A baseball thrown at 90 miles per hour hits the catcher’s mitt four-tenths of a second after it leaves the pitcher’s hand, which clearly does not allow much time for reflection on the batter’s part. Moreover, in order to get his bat to the plate to meet the ball’s arrival, the batter must start his swing at two-tenths of a second, when the ball is still only halfway there. If the pitch is a curve, nearly all its deviation will still be to come. Half of it will occur just in the last fifteen feet. If the pitch is some other sort—a fast ball, change-up, or cutter, say—the ball will arrive at a fractionally different instant and at a different height. Because of friction, the ball will also lose about 5 miles per hour of speed during the course of its short journey from the pitcher’s hand. In Babe Ruth’s day, pitchers had an additional advantage in that the mound was fifteen inches high instead of the modern ten. That makes a difference, too.

  So the batter, in this preposterously fractional part of a fraction that is allotted to him for decision making, must weigh all these variables, calculate the place and moment that the ball will cross the plate, and make sure that his bat is there to meet it. The slightest miscalculation, which is what the pitcher is counting on, will result in a foul ball or pop-up or some other form of routine failure. To slap out a single is hard enough—that is why even the very best hitters fail nearly seven times out of ten—but to hit the ball with power requires confident and irreversible commitment.

  It was this that Babe Ruth did as no man ever had before. Ruth used a mighty club of a bat—it weighed fifty-four ounces—and gripped it at the very end, around the knob, which enhanced the whip-like motion of his swing. The result was a combination of power and timing so focused and potent that it generated eight thousand pounds of force (scientists actually measured it in a lab) and, in the space of one-thousandth of a second—the duration of contact—through the miracle of physics it converted the sizzling zip of an incoming 90-mile-an-hour baseball into an outgoing spheroid launched cloudward at 110 miles an hour.

  The result was like something fired from a gun. It was hypnotic and rare, and now here was a man who could do it pretty regularly. Babe Ruth’s home runs were not merely more frequent, they were more majestic. No one had ever seen balls travel so loftily and far.

  “During batting practice all the Cleveland players stopped what they were doing just to watch him hit,�
� Willis Hudlin, a pitcher for the Indians at the time, recalled more than seventy years later for Sports Illustrated. “He’s the only guy the players ever did that for.”

  No other player had ever brought this kind of excitement to the game. When Ruth came to the plate, the whole ballpark fell silent. “Even the peanut vendors paused in their shouting, and turned to watch,” noted one observer. With Ruth at bat, as Marshall Smelser put it in a 1993 biography, the game became a contest “between two men instead of eighteen.”

  In 1920, his first year with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs—more than any other team in the major leagues. He batted .376 and led the league in ten batting categories. It was almost impossible to imagine anyone ever having a better year—or, come to that, a more timely one. Baseball was about to be sent reeling by its greatest scandal, the throwing of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago “Black Sox,” an event that, when it was revealed in the fall of 1920, wholly undermined people’s faith in the game. Ruth’s colossal swatting was the greatest distraction in sporting history. He didn’t just transform the game, he very possibly saved it.

  In 1921, impossibly, Ruth had an even better year than in 1920. He hit 59 home runs—a number so high as to be beyond the reach of any meaningful adjective—and scored more runs, had more extra base hits, and racked up more total bases than any player ever had before. He led the league in runs batted in and bases on balls, and had the third-highest batting average, at .378, just behind Harry Heilmann and Ty Cobb—whose batting averages, it is worth noting, would almost certainly have been a couple of points lower had Ruth spent the season pitching against them, too.* Ruth also stole seventeen bases and led the Yankees to their first league championship. This was the best season that any player had ever had.

  Curiously, it wasn’t just Babe Ruth who was hitting home runs in volume as the 1920s began. Suddenly balls were flying out of parks all over the place. From 1918 to 1922, American League home runs traced an unexpectedly impressive trajectory, as a simple summary shows:

  1918— 96

  1919— 240

  1920— 369

  1921— 477

  1922— 525

  For the major leagues as a whole, the total number of home runs went from 235 in 1918 to over 1,000 in 1922—a quadrupling in just four years, a wholly unprecedented level of change. So what happened? Well, quite a lot actually.

  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 admir
ing 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.”