The Selling of the Babe (3 page)

Although he had the Sudbury farm, during the regular season Ruth rarely hung his hat there. When he first arrived in Boston, he stayed in a hotel, but he soon moved to an apartment and by 1918 was living at 680 Commonwealth Avenue, the current location of Boston University's Warren Towers, a short walk from Fenway Park. Years later, his Yankees teammate Ping Bodie remarked, “I don't room with him. I room with his suitcase.” Well, that was already true in Boston and the speaker could have been Ruth's young wife, Helen, the teenaged South Boston waitress Ruth met and married soon after making his first appearance in a Red Sox uniform in 1914 (a woman his teammates later speculated might have been Ruth's first sexual experience—at least the first he didn't pay for). Yet it wasn't long before Ruth discovered the privileges of being a professional athlete: not only were the drinks and meals free, so were the women. And even Puritan Boston offered more than its share of that. After all, Boston was a port of call and the “girls of Boston” were mentioned in more than one sea shanty.

The nearby South End already had a reputation as one of the most liquid neighborhoods in the country, with a bar on virtually every corner. The neighborhood popping up around the ballpark, the Fenway, already had a well-deserved reputation as a red-light district, one that lasted into the 1980s—Batavia Street became so notorious the city later renamed it the more sedate Symphony Road. Although many of Boston's larger cultural institutions, such as the Opera House and the Museum of Fine Arts, were only a few blocks away on Huntington Avenue, it was always tempting to take a turn off Massachusetts Avenue and stray into the darker thoroughfares, where in many local establishments the line between bar and brothel was notoriously thin. Ruth not only crossed that line but also tripped over it and virtually passed out on it on a regular basis. Bill Carrigan, Ruth's first manager in Boston, even found it necessary to pay Ruth on a per diem basis, or else he'd run out of money only a few days after cashing his check. Finding Ruth after a bender—usually sleeping it off somewhere, often in the back alley behind a brothel, his pockets turned inside out—became something of a pastime for his teammates. Stories of Ruth's nighttime escapades were well known among Boston working men … and some of their wives.

Every woman he saw was as tempting a challenge as a fastball over the heart of the plate, and Ruth's advances were often as crude and direct as his approach at the plate. Married or single, beautiful or plain, it mattered little to him. Plenty accepted his advances, finding his unpolished approach almost irresistible. Besides, after the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, an awful lot of young husbands had boarded troopships for France, leaving an awful lot of young wives in need of companionship and eager for a night of fun. With the average yearly household income of less than $1,000, Ruth's wallet, combined with his celebrity, made him immensely popular. While Johnny was fighting the Hun, Ruth kept the home fires a blushing, randy red.

Regardless, with Ruth, almost everyone looked the other way. The basics of his biography were well known and it was hard to feel anything but sympathy toward him. Born in Baltimore to George Ruth, an American saloonkeeper of German Catholic heritage, and his sickly wife, Kate, George Jr. was born on February 6, 1895, one of eight children. But in those poverty-stricken times, all but two of the eight children, George and his sister, Katherine, died as infants.

Almost abandoned from the start by his father, who worked long hours, and mother, who was in near constant mourning and ill health, Ruth ran the streets around the Baltimore waterfront as a boy and rarely went to school. Eventually he was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a church-sponsored institution for orphans, incorrigibles, boys abandoned, and those whose parents were just too poor or too overwhelmed to care for them. After first entering St. Mary's in 1902, Ruth spent much of the next twelve years under the watchful eyes and forceful hand of the Xaverian Brothers who ran the institution, learning to be a shirtmaker and playing sports in whatever free time he had. He was particularly impressed by Brother Matthias and Brother Hermann, both of whom took a particular interest in him and both of whom enthralled the boy with their prowess at hitting a baseball. Matthias, in particular, made a lasting impression by hitting one-handed fungoes far over their heads.

The game saved Ruth. Bigger than the other boys, and better coordinated, he excelled as a pitcher, making his mark first pitching against other area schools and institutions. He eventually caught the eye of Jack Dunn, owner and manager of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, who more or less purchased his emancipation in 1914 at age nineteen (Ruth and everyone else thought he was only eighteen at the time) and took him from St. Mary's directly into professional baseball, where he split time between Baltimore and Providence in the International League and won 22 games in his first professional season, even making a few appearances in the majors for Boston.

Ruth's crude talent was undeniable, as was his naïveté of the ways of the adult world. He still acted like the hard-to-handle boy and spent his first-ever paycheck on every boy's dream, a bicycle. A year later, in 1915, despite lacking the education, social graces, and the manners of his fellow ballplayers, Ruth's talent brought him to the major leagues for good. By the end of his rookie year he was well on his way to becoming a star, and someone who had already learned the greatest lesson of his life—talent on the field forgave many sins and allowed him to indulge in behaviors that got regular fellows in trouble.

It was almost impossible not to like him. In turn, he could be funny, crude, rude, and tempestuous, but he was so unware, so guileless, so clueless that he was doing anything wrong that it was hard to assign him any blame. He just did what he wanted, impulsively, whether it was take a bite from another fellow's sandwich, use his roommate's toothbrush, or let out an enormous belch. And, let's face it, most of those who kept his company not only admired his talent but, if not his personal hygiene, his freewheeling, carefree attitude. Ruth lived for today—well, at least for the next ten minutes, and rarely gave the rest of it a thought. He did the things everyone else wanted to do but were stopped by either their conscience or their breeding.

An anonymous sportswriter in the
Boston Post
likely had all that in mind when he wrote before the start of spring training that “Ruth's power as a turnstile clicker is well-known.… The Baltimore boy is a trifle temperamental. He does things in a ‘different' manner from most ballplayers, He has a walk all his own. He has a way of talking all his own. When he comes to bat the outfielders drop back to the far barriers … he is the type over which the small boy and the tired businessman go wild.”

Yet by the start of the 1918 season, Ruth was still something of a local phenomenon, easily Boston's most popular player, but not yet a baseball figure on par with guys like the Tiger's Ty Cobb, the Indians' Tris Speaker, or the White Sox' Joe Jackson. Unless your name was Walter Johnson, the Washington Senators pitcher whose fastball made him stand out, or Christy Mathewson, the New York Giants star nearing the tail end of his career, pitchers, playing only every four or five days, generally didn't fill the seats. That was about to change—sort of.

Ruth was the only active player to embark from Boston that morning, joined by a few club officials and a contingent of Boston sportswriters and newspaper cartoonists nearly as eager to flee their families as he was. The train had barely left South Station before Ruth was already in his element. He discovered that he shared the train with a group of soldiers from Camp Devens, free on a weekend pass, and the party got under way.

At nearly every stop, it increased. Red Sox principal owner Harry Frazee and his new manager, Ed Barrow, chugged up the Hudson from New York and joined the train in Albany, and as the entourage wound its way westward through Buffalo and Akron for St. Louis, where it turned south, at every stop they were joined by more recruits and more soldiers, most ready to have a good time.

Ruth loved it. To him, even after several big league seasons, a train ride was still a grand adventure. The card games and cigar smoking went on almost nonstop, punctuated by repeated trips to the dining car and a steady stream of new passengers in awe of traveling in the company of Ruth and a growing group of ballplayers, guys whose names they'd seen in the papers. By the time the train reached Hot Springs just after noon on March 11, Ruth, in a sense, was already in midseason form, having entertained the press, shared more than a flask or two with his fans, and dropped a bundle at the card table with his teammates. Already, Barrow found it wise to impose a 10-cent limit on card games between players, just to keep the conflict down.

That was a real worry. Ruth loved to gamble but didn't really seem to get the concept that he was supposed to win. According to Harry Hooper, during an earlier spring visit to Hot Springs, Ruth had gambled away the bulk of his season's pay in only a few weeks.

Yet Barrow had other reasons to be concerned. Not only did the new manager need to get to know the players on his new team, they needed to get to know each other and he needed a refresher course himself in running a ball club, something he had not done at the major league level in more than a decade. After winning a world championship in 1916 and finishing in second place in 1917, by the spring of 1918 the Red Sox were an entirely different team.

That wasn't entirely of their own making. The United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917, woefully unprepared militarily. Government officials naively believed that upon a declaration of war patriotic young Americans would storm military recruiting offices to sign up, and set a target of a million recruits. Six weeks later, after only 73,000 volunteers had signed up, President Woodrow Wilson accepted the recommendation from Secretary of War Newton Baker to put forward a bill authorizing a draft for men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one.

It didn't become law until May 18, and even then, those affected had another three weeks to register. When they did, it still took the nation's military months to get up to speed—early recruits drilled using sticks as often as guns and the American military was still primarily a horse-driven operation. Initially, the draft affected only those young men who were unmarried and with no dependents. As such, the war barely affected major league baseball in 1917. As a married man, Ruth was exempt, and a scant few players were stirred by patriotism to enlist. Only a handful lost any significant time to the service—a great many more found it convenient to take a bride. The White Sox boat-raced Boston by nine games in 1917 to take the American League pennant, and then swamped the Giants in six games to become world champs. But not all was smooth sailing in the baseball world.

The war made most of the men who owned major league teams nervous. In 1914 and 1915 baseball had a faced a challenge from a new league, the Federal League, which raided it of players and in some cities went head-to-head with existing franchises. Although the league failed, for two seasons fans had three leagues to choose from, and in many cities, multiple teams, which had simultaneously hurt attendance and caused salaries to escalate as teams outbid one another for the best talent, leaving teams hurting. And while many observers expected the war to end within a few months of America's entry—Boston owner Harry Frazee claimed to have placed a four-figure bet on just that—the Axis powers dug in and by the 1917 World Series it was clear the United States was in for a protracted period of involvement. Although attendance was nominally up for the year, and salaries were down, most clubs were still recovering from the financial hit of the clash with the Federal League, had little cash to spare, and the war left them edgy. According to
New York Sun
sportswriter Joe Vila, writing in
The Sporting News
, only six of seventeen teams made money in 1917. Fortunately, the Red Sox were among them.

Still, no one was quite sure how the war would affect the game in 1918. At the time, under the National Agreement between the two leagues that determined how baseball was governed, the game was ruled by a three-member National Commission that included the president of each league, and a chairman. In 1918, the commission consisted of John Tener, former professional ballplayer, banker, and governor of Pennsylvania, August Herrmann, the chairman and president of the Cincinnati Reds, and Ban Johnson, the founder and president of the American League.

In theory, the three-man commission ruled by consensus, or lacking that, a majority, but in most matters only one vote and one opinion counted: Ban Johnson's. After studying law and working for a newspaper, the young Johnson was a savvy businessman, acute organizer, and ambitious. In 1893 he had been president of a minor league, the Midwest-based Western League. In 1899, when the National League, the only existing major league at the time, decided to drop a few franchises, Johnson made his move, transferring several teams into what had previously been National League towns, renaming his circuit the American League, and undercutting ticket prices.

The new league was a financial success, and one year later Johnson declared that it, too, was a major league and began raiding National League franchises. The AL proved to be so successful that the NL was eventually forced to make Johnson a partner, operating under the National Agreement, which installed the three-man National Commission as the sport's ruling body. A strong personality, Johnson slowly took command, becoming the most powerful person in the game. And although he had started out as something of a reformer, setting up his American League as a cleaner and more wholesome version of baseball than that played in the National League, as his wealth and power increased, so did his increasingly pompous, hard-drinking management style.

By 1918, Johnson considered the game his, and as a member of the National Commission he had the means to act on his impulses. Increasingly, he acted with impunity, playing favorites among the owners, bullying those who tried to resist him, telling everyone what to do and how to do it as power corrupted his rule. Those who referred to him as a czar and a despot were close to the mark.