The Selling of the Babe (17 page)

In other words, he wanted more for less … yet the Red Sox had already made moves for the upcoming season under the assumption Ruth would be pitching—Barrow said publicly “he will probably pitch and pinch-hit. One thing I'm convinced of, Ruth will play only one position. He will not be switched from first to left field then back to the box. He will not be worked that way again.” Had that not been the case, the club might have found a way to keep either Shore or Leonard. In late January, Frazee and Barrow were still talking about acquiring another outfielder—someone cheaper than Lewis, presumably, to play left field. A rare analytical feature in the
Globe
by Mel Webb made no mention of using Ruth solely as an outfielder, referring to him as a “remarkable asset … as pitcher, first baseman and outfielder, as well as a fence buster.” Had Ruth not tailed off so badly the previous August, he might have been viewed as more of a hitter than pitcher, but that was not yet the case. In any event, in regard to Ruth, the Red Sox were keeping their options open.

Ruth, however, had other ideas, and he was never more unpredictable than when he thought for himself, or when someone had his ear. Ruth, although not unintelligent, was not particularly well educated or discriminating in his thinking. He often acted more on enthusiasm and emotion than on analysis.

First, there was the matter of money. After earning $7,500 in 1918, under the advice of Igoe, for 1919 Ruth wanted either a one-year deal for $15,000 in 1919—or a three-year deal for $10,000 a year. And that was just to play outfield. “I'll win more games playing in the outfield than I will pitching,” he told the press. That wasn't true under any analysis, either the kind made then or now, but it made good copy, and once Ruth got an idea in his head, it was hard to turn him around.

Purely in terms of money, it was a strange request. If Ruth really thought he was worth $15,000 a year, why offer a longer-term discount? Because if he did think he was worth $15,000 for a single season, or could get it, he'd likely be asking for even more in subsequent seasons. Ruth wasn't the kind of guy who much worried about his financial security.

Frazee saw it for what it was, and what he saw in the theater all the time, a negotiating ploy—by asking for $15,000, Ruth revealed that he really wanted $10,000. He probably wasn't really interested in a three-year deal, either. That was designed to scare Frazee into offering Ruth $10,000 or so for a single year. Multiyear deals were rare at the time, and given recent events, who in their right mind would make such an arrangement? What if the flu came back?

There was no rush for the Red Sox. Ruth had few alternatives and wasn't known for his patience. Boston let him wait.

Over the next two months Ruth made occasional forays into Boston to talk contract and have some fun, then zoomed all over New England. All it took was a few days cooped up in Sudbury to get him fired up for a road trip. He spent a great deal of time in Meredith, New Hampshire, a resort town on Lake Winnipesaukee, where he cavorted with local schoolgirls and even broke up a fight between rowdies at a dance he attended with his wife. But Ruth may have found more to his favor in Meredith than the music. He'd return to the town for a number of years, and there are persistent rumors that the reason was that Ruth had fathered a child, a boy, with a local girl, and kept it secret the rest of his life.

In 1921, he and Helen would adopt an infant, Dorothy, and his second wife, Claire, had a child of her own, Julia, whom Ruth also adopted. Helen allegedly had several miscarriages, but Ruth never admitted to fathering a child. Given his extracurricular activities, that means Ruth was somehow incapable of being a father, incredibly lucky, or discreet.

The notion that Ruth had a son is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Respectable young women of the era were often spirited away to have out-of-wedlock children anonymously in special homes designed to protect their identity and virtue. Infants were then either taken at birth for adoption or their parentage laundered, appearing in the care of relatives or cooperative friends, a foundling left on a doorstop or presented as an orphan of some distant relative never talked about before or since. For the rich and powerful, it was even easier to accomplish. There is some evidence, for instance, that Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey's adopted daughter was, in fact, his own by another woman. Some believe the same was true of Ruth's first child, Dorothy, that she was the result of one of Ruth's affairs, then later “adopted” by him.

The prospect that Ruth might have had a son is tantalizing. The Ruth line ended with Babe and his sister, and the notion that Babe Ruth's DNA might be floating around leaves one wondering if there might be some ballplayer one day bearing Ruth's ancestral abilities. If so, it's probably best for the boy's parentage to stay a secret. Imagine the burden of being Babe Ruth's son?

In between trips, Igoe tried to float ideas that Ruth had other financial options—after all, as part of a cost-cutting measure, every player in the majors was given his release in 1918. Theoretically, Ruth could sign to do anything for anyone, although the baseball magnates all agreed not to poach players from one another. Ruth's only leverage came from offers outside baseball, but in this, he and Igoe were hardly sophisticated. They tried to trump up the notion that Ruth might give up the game for boxing, something made about as much sense as John L. Sullivan taking a turn on the pitcher's mound, and there was even a story that Ruth was thinking of putting his money and his talents into “roller polo,” an early version of roller hockey, or play baseball in some industrial league.

None was realistic, and didn't worry the Red Sox in the least. In truth, Ruth had no other options, no ballplayer did, really, at least not any that were very realistic or would pay him anything close to what he could make playing in the major leagues. If Ruth wanted to play baseball, he would either play for the Red Sox or not play at all. The size of his contract would depend only on how much Boston could spend under the unofficial cap without drawing the ire of the other clubs, and how much either man would respond to public pressure to get a contract worked out.

Well into March, the local papers were still referring to Ruth as a pitcher, but as the off-season continued, the idea that he was only an outfielder began ossifying in Ruth's brain. Just months after leading the Red Sox to victory in the World Series and winning two ballgames and setting a World Series record for consecutive scoreless innings, based on 11 productive swings of the bat and the resulting roars of the crowd, Ruth decided to change the course of his career entirely. It wasn't inspired by a sore arm or a bad knee or anything else. Ruth just fell in love with the idea of hitting home runs, with the feeling that coursed through his body when he got ahold of one.

There is something to be said for that. Hitting a baseball square and then watching it go over a fence is almost transcendent. Once experienced, it is never forgotten. Pitching, for all the power and authority one can feel while blowing a fastball past a hitter, doesn't offer the same return. Its joys are primarily cumulative. Of all sports, the feeling that comes from hitting a home run is singular, and in baseball, particularly hitting, which includes so much inherent failure, so much that is dependent on the ball finding space between fielders, only the smacking of a long home run, which renders everyone else on the field irrelevant, seems to justify all the previous disappointments.

One can imagine how Ruth must have felt when he hit his first over-the-fence home run at St. Mary's, a place where he was confined and almost every moment of his day regulated and controlled. But when he hit a home run … well, it left the yard, and it never came back. That's the feeling he wanted, that's what he was chasing, and every subsequent home run was Ruth's pursuit for that sense of freedom, of that ephemeral possibility, once again. Even better, when you hit a home run, everybody loves you for it. What can possibly feel better to an unloved young boy than that?

Ruth's preference was all fine and well, but the Red Sox weren't about personal experience; they were about making money, and that meant winning ballgames. Ever since the end of the World Series, the Red Sox had assumed that Ruth was going to pitch in 1919. Barrow had penciled in a rotation of Ruth, Mays, Sam Jones, and then either Joe Bush, Ray Caldwell, or young phenom Herb Pennock—two bona fide stars and one front-liner, leaving him to choose his fourth starter from between a couple of veterans and one of the best pitching prospects in the game, Pennock—an eventual Hall of Famer. That's why they'd been able to shed Shore and Leonard and stay under the artificial payroll cap. But if Ruth didn't pitch, that changed the equation and felt a lot less secure.

Many of the Red Sox set sail from Boston on March 18 for Jacksonville, where they would then disembark and travel by train across the state to Tampa, where they planned to hold spring training. Local government there, eager for a tourist attraction, subsidized their travel to entice them to the area, and even planned to subsidize a visit by the New York Giants so the Red Sox and Giants could play some exhibitions. Tampa was already gaining a reputation as a winter home to snowbirds, those who could afford to flee the cold of the Northeast, and they were eager to pay to see some baseball. You couldn't spend every day at the beach.

While his teammates sailed south, Ruth lagged behind and met with Frazee in New York, where the owner held court with a number of Boston players still seeking contracts for 1919. He'd been offering Ruth $7,500—half of what he asked for. Ruth balked, but he wanted to go to Florida, too. That, coupled with his impatience, caused Ruth to accept when Frazee agreed to Ruth's request for a three-year deal at $10,000 a year. Although some reports indicated it was only $9,000 annually, that may have been just to make Frazee look good. With that business taken care of Ruth hopped on the train to Florida and joined teammates a few days later.

In agreeing to Ruth's proposal for a long-term deal, Frazee may already have been looking ahead. The big snafu in every trade of the era was always the ballplayer's contract. Most were single-year deals and teams hated making trades only to have their new player, making the logical assumption that his new team must think highly of his abilities, immediately ask for more money. With Ruth under contract for three years, if he were traded, the other team would know exactly what he would cost them.

Ruth may have been under contract, but he was not under control. He'd enjoyed the off-season and was heavy, twenty or thirty pounds over his usual weight, and neither his arm nor his legs were in shape to pitch. That may have been intentional on his part. By showing up coated in a nice layer of fat, that pretty much guaranteed that Barrow, by way of punishment more than plan, would use Ruth in the field in an effort to get him to lose a few pounds, at least early on. Sure enough, on March 24, when the team held its first workout at Plant Field, a ballfield laid out in the infield of a racetrack that also served as the home of the Florida State Fair, Ruth took part in Barrow's double sessions, working out both on the mound and in the outfield.

Although the Florida weather made it in many ways preferable to Hot Springs, Plant Field was an odd place to play, not even a real ballpark. The diamond was laid out in front of the track grandstand, facing the backstretch. Although the “fence” in center field was the track rail on the opposite side of the course, elsewhere there was a ramshackle barrier, leaving some room between the fence and the rest of the track rail. Ruth wowed spectators with several long drives that first day, but all fell well short of the ballpark fence, not to mention the more distant rail.

That should have been no surprise. In the spring of 1919, major league teams were likely still using baseballs manufactured the previous season featuring subpar wool and horsehide, the deadest of dead balls. Better quality baseball wouldn't be available until later in the season, and during spring training the Red Sox might have even been using worn balls left over from 1918. Hitting those would have been like trying to hit a lead-filled beanbag.

The fans of course, knew nothing about this and didn't care. Having heard and read about Ruth's exploits from the previous year, they were already speculating as to whether or Ruth or anyone else could hit a baseball over either the fence or the rail—and this was a racetrack, where wagering was customary. The infield at the standard half-mile racing track was only 400 feet across. Given that home plate was sited at the edge of the racetrack, a drive to dead center needed to travel just a bit less than 400 feet to clear the rail. It was much farther down the lines, but had the field been centered on the track infield, the rail would have been more than 500 feet away.

But that's not how the diamond was laid out. The grandstand overlooked the finish line near the end of the home stretch, which made the rail in right field much closer than that in left. Although it is impossible to determine precisely from period photographs, in right field the distance to the rail may have been as short as only 475 feet or so—still a long drive, but not quite as long as one might initially think. The configuration of the field and the fences would figure prominently into Ruth's story that spring.

Ruth got off to a quick start in intra-squad games that began almost immediately. Tellingly, when Ruth played the field it was for the squad referred to as “Babe's Busters,” the scrubs, and not the regulars. He entertained crowds with his long hitting, but didn't hit anything close to the rail. But he also pitched against Boston's regular lineup, a sign that Barrow still viewed him as a pitcher first. Stuffy McInnis was still the first baseman. There was, however, a hole in left field. When everyone returned from the war, George Whiteman, the hero of the '18 Series, was deemed expendable. Although he went on to set a record for the most games ever played in the minor leagues and would remain active for another decade, he never appeared in the big leagues again. Veteran Del Gainer, back from the war, seemed to be Barrow's early choice to stand before Duffy's Cliff.