The Selling of the Babe (7 page)

The game was boring. No one would say it aloud, but that was the truth. The men who ran the game had been brought up with baseball in the 1880s and 1890s and still thought it should be played that way it had been then. “Scientific,” inside baseball ruled and managers such as Connie Mack and the Giants' John McGraw were considered stars as much as any player, brilliant tacticians who controlled their men as if chess pieces, squeezing out runs through a combination of bunts, scratch base hits, stolen bases, and sacrifices.

Unfortunately, that mixture was becoming ever more predictable, and more rare. At its highest level, such as in the World Series, the style of play made every pitch, like the move of every pawn, replete with meaning and significance. But for the rest of the year, players and managers alike too often simply went through the motions as if they couldn't wait to get off the field. In one spring training game in 1918, the Red Sox and Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers) played seven full innings in only thirty minutes. It was only an exhibition, but still … More often the only people who really enjoyed the contests were die-hard insiders and the men who whiled away their afternoons making “do they or don't they” bets in stands, arcane wagers based on the intricacies of the game, like whether the next hit would be in the air or on the ground, regardless of the score.

Since 1901 the total number of runs scored per game had dropped by nearly four and was showing no signs of increasing as improvements in gloves (they were bigger), field conditions (they caused fewer errors), and pitching approach combined to make it ever more difficult to score runs. Now almost every pitcher either threw a spitball or scuffed the ball in some way to make it move and dart erratically, all of which made runs more precious.

What had
not
changed much was the ball itself. It was made much the same way as it had been made forty years before when it was still allowable to “soak” a runner, or put him out by hitting him with a thrown ball.

The first baseballs had been handmade, generally four pieces of leather stitched together over a tightly wound ball of yarn, known as a “lemon-peel” due to the configuration of the stitching, but by the 1850s organized teams tried to agree on a uniform size and method of manufacture. Still, it wasn't until the 1870s that a true standard was set by the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, calling for a ball “formed by yarn wound around a small core … covered with two strips of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than 5.25 ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than 9.25 inches in circumference.” Manufacturers adopted the popular figure-8 style of stitching and the modern ball, constructed from a simple round rubber center wrapped in wool yarn and covered with stitched horsehide more or less, was born. It was tough, resilient, and almost impossible to hit more than a couple hundred feet, becoming softer and more lopsided with each use, and the game and its strategy evolved in line with the ball. Baseball was played primarily within only a couple hundred feet of home plate.

In 1911 a rubber-covered cork center was introduced that caused a brief uptick in runs, but that was quickly offset as pitchers adapted—using the spitball and scuffing the cover to make it move—and penurious club owners kept the same ball in play throughout the game, turning softer—and deader—by the inning. The game wasn't marked so much by the crack of the bat on the ball as a dull thud. Batters tried to place hits between fielders as if shooting pool with a moving target, taking a choppy, short, level swing designed as much to avoid the embarrassment of a miss as it was for the glory of a base hit.

Although the modern game was only about twenty years old, it was already living in the past. Ever since Ban Johnson created the American League and major league baseball took on its now familiar two-league structure in 1903, the same few names had dominated the sport—batting stars like Detroit's Ty Cobb, Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie of Cleveland, the White Sox' Joe Jackson, Eddie Collins of the A's, and the Yankees' and A's Home Run Baker, and the pitchers such as Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson. But by 1918, Cobb was entering his 14th season in the major leagues. Lajoie, Wagner, and Mathewson had recently retired, and the few remaining stars, like Jackson and Collins and Tris Speaker, lacked the charisma and appeal of their predecessors.

The game needed a star. The last thing it needed was a war. In the end, it got both. In the long run, the carnage that overspread Europe was the best thing that ever happened to the game.

For Babe Ruth, Opening Day on April 15, 1918, began just as it usually did for him. He arrived early and, as was his custom, probably helped the young vendors bag peanuts while scooping up great handfuls and leaving a hefty tip before taking the mound. Ruth spent nearly as much time with the people who worked at the park as he did the players—he didn't see much of a difference, and in fact, that was how he met Johnny Igoe, a man who was becoming his best friend and advisor. Igoe, who now ran a drugstore, had started out at Fenway Park as a peanut vendor.

Once he took the mound, the Philadelphia A's found hitting Ruth about as productive as taking swings at peanut shells. After the usual pregame honorifics, which included the Red Sox marching out onto the field, raising the flag, and making appeals to the public to purchase Liberty Bonds to support the war, Ruth took the mound. He threw a scoreless first inning before giving up a run in the second when he botched a pick-off throw, and the Red Sox took a 2–1 lead in the bottom of the inning, Ruth knocking in run number two with a hard single past A's first baseman George Burns.

Ruth pitched the rest of the game as if he didn't have a care in the world and Boston cruised to an easy 7–1 victory, one that barely stirred the crowd, which the
Globe
described as behaving “with a sort of conservation of appreciation apparent.” In other words, they sat on their hands bored out of their minds.

If Ruth hadn't a care in the world, Harry Frazee had nothing but worry to contend with. Although he had acted boldly during the off-season, as had, to a lesser degree, owner Charles Comiskey of the White Sox, the rest of his brethren, in particular AL president Ban Johnson, were cowering before an uncertain future. In short, they were mucking everything up.

The previous December, when Frazee was acting boldly, baseball had announced it would proceed regardless of the war and play a full 154-game schedule. But they had since backtracked, cutting the season back to a scheduled 140 games. To someone like Frazee, who had acted with confidence, the loss of fourteen playing dates—seven at home—hurt. Players were paid by the season, not by the game, and he had budgeted accordingly. Had he known that was going to take place, he may not have been quite so audacious. Now he was stuck.

And he was also stuck with the repressive presence of both Boston's Puritan past and its more Catholic present. At the time, weekday games started at 3:00 p.m. to accommodate professional men who could scoot out of the office early. Factory workers didn't have that luxury. They could generally only attend games on holidays and weekends, and in Boston, that meant Saturday: so-called blue laws were in place, and Sunday baseball was banned. That cost the Red Sox ten or twelve lucrative home dates a year. Only a few years before, that hadn't been a problem. Sunday baseball had once been banned almost everywhere, but that was changing—it was legal now in several American League cities and would be legal in New York in 1919, helping the Yankees to turn their first profit under co-owner Jacob Ruppert and his financial partner, Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston, more often known as Cap Huston. Already, Frazee's Broadway shows had to shutter on Sundays (one of the reasons he was so eager to take his shows on the road to smaller cities with looser restrictions), but on Broadway at least, everyone had to play by the same rules.

He must have found it galling that the competition was allowed to profit when he was not. Indeed the inability to play baseball on Sunday would hamstring Boston's major league franchises for more than another decade. Whereas the A's, for instance, might pull in a crowd of 40,000 or 50,000 over a weekend, usually ten times what they would draw on weekdays, Frazee, at best, could count on only one large crowd, on Saturday. Increasingly, this left the Red Sox at a severe disadvantage, one that soon would become even more pronounced. They courted the Church and politicians with free tickets and season passes, but didn't get much for their generosity

To no one's surprise, the Red Sox got off to a quick start in 1918, opening the season with six straight wins at home including three against the Yankees before finally falling in the last game of their four-game series. Ruth picked up win number two on April 19, defeating Hank Thormahlen 9–5, and chipping in a single and an RBI, but the crowds remained disappointing—and the team was forced to play a doubleheader after a rainout the previous day. In his next start, Ruth picked up another hit, but fell 3–0 to the A's. For the first time all year, he had a complaint; he said his arm was sore.

Still, everything seemed to be going more or less according to plan as the Red Sox finished the month 11–2, with a three-game lead in the pennant race. About the only player not performing to expectations was first baseman Dick Hoblitzell. Batting cleanup, the ten-year veteran and team captain opened the season 1-for-25. Even worse, he'd been declared eligible for the draft, which may well have weighed on his performance. A notice to report could come at any time.

But the big news came from Frazee. On April 30 the papers announced that Frazee had been offered upward of $100,000 for Ruth, whom the
Boston Herald
described as a “colossal southpaw pitcher and hitter most extraordinaire.” Frazee was clearly titillated by the offer, which a few days later he claimed was actually $150,000, saying, “I might as well sell the franchise and the whole club as Ruth.” But there is no solid evidence that the offer, which the press speculated came from either the White Sox or the Yankees, was genuine or just idle talk, even though it later became fashionable among the baseball magnates for nearly all of them to claim to have seen the future and been the first to put in a bid for Ruth.

Frazee knew the power of publicity and may well have been trying to seed a cloud and see if he could make it rain—it was becoming clear the war wasn't about to end anytime soon, and he might have been pondering cutting and running. Besides, the Red Sox would soon play in New York. Pumping up a crowd there, where the Polo Grounds seated 38,000, was simply good business. Even the visitor's share of a full house—or close to it—would make Frazee more than a crowd a quarter of that size in Fenway Park.

If there was an offer, the White Sox and Yankees were the two teams most likely to afford to make such a generous bid, and in 1918, Frazee's most likely trading partners. Charley Comiskey, the longtime owner of the White Sox, was flush with cash and generally known to be interested anytime a valuable player was made available. Although he paid his players like serfs, he didn't mind paying big money for them. That's how the game was played.

The New York Yankees were the most intriguing destination. Although Ban Johnson, eager to cut the legs out from the Giants' stranglehold on the lucrative New York market, had long promised to help make the Yankees contenders, he had never followed through. Their original owners, William Devery and Frank Farrell, two grotesquely corrupt members of New York's Tammany Hall political machine, cared about little more than fleecing their own ball club. Although beer baron Ruppert and Huston purchased the team after the 1914 season and stabilized the franchise, the team's on-field performance had barely improved. They remained a stepchild of the Giants, and even paid their National League counterparts $60,000 rent each year to use the Polo Grounds. The club had abandoned their original field, Hilltop Park, in 1913 after the Giants rebuilt the Polo Grounds after a fire. The move was intended as a stopgap measure until the Yankees could build their own concrete and steel park—fire was making the original wooden parks impossible to insure—but Ruppert and Huston hadn't been able to afford to do that yet. And although Johnson wasn't fond of the Giants, Ruppert, like Frazee, had proven difficult to control, so Johnson was again balking at giving the Yankees significant help.

But Jacob Ruppert was impatient and, unlike his predecessors, a real businessman and savvy politician. The dominant man in the Yankees partnership, Ruppert, whose family had been brewing beer in America for almost a hundred years, was a New Yorker and firmly ensconced in the upper crust of New York's manufacturing society. He had served in the National Guard, reaching the rank of colonel, and dabbled effectively enough in the politics of Tammany Hall to serve several terms in Congress. The longtime baseball fan had tried to buy both the Giants and Cubs before partnering with Huston, a former United States Army engineer and captain, and buying the Yankees for $480,000 in 1915. At the time, Johnson pledged to help his ball club, a promise Ruppert expected him to make good.

Yet when Johnson had steered Frazee to Connie Mack in the off-season and Frazee came away with the guts of Mack's ball club, Ruppert complained: he would have loved to make a bid. Two years before, Ruppert had felt put out when Tris Speaker was sold to Cleveland before he knew about it. Now Johnson tried to pacify him and helped engineer a deal that delivered once valuable second baseman Del Pratt to New York, now temporarily considered damaged goods after being charged with throwing games. He then helped arrange a trade that delivered outfielder Francesco Stephano Pezzolo—better known as Ping Bodie—from the A's to the Yankees. It didn't match Frazee's haul, but it helped keep the Yankees competitive and keep Ruppert quiet.

That was becoming more important by the day. Ruppert, who essentially took over the club when Huston went overseas in the service, understood New York. Despite his affected German accent, he was New York to the core—he knew the Italian American Bodie would be an instant draw among New York's growing class of Italian immigrants. And he also understood that with Prohibition in the air, this was no time for a beer baron to be buying only barley. Looking ahead, he realized that in another year or two baseball might be his only business. Thus far he'd already lost nearly a quarter of the club's purchase price, as a poor record and the onerous rent he paid the Giants made it hard to make money.