Pinstripe Empire (18 page)

I knew Claire Ruth, Babe’s second wife. I knew his daughters Julia Ruth Stevens and Dorothy Ruth Pirrone, and I knew his teammates Hoyt, Dugan, Shawkey, Ruffing, Earle Combs, and Lefty Gomez. And of course clubhouse man Pete Sheehy.

But the best of all was Little Ray Kelly. Little Ray, who insisted on that nickname even as a fully grown accountant for Mobil Oil, was the Babe’s mascot.

Little Ray was only three when Babe spotted him having a catch with his dad on the park across from Riverside Drive, where they both lived. The cute three-year-old with good throwing and catching skills simply caught the Babe’s eye. Although he hadn’t even started kindergarten yet, Ray could read and knew baseball statistics. Babe asked Ray’s father to bring him to the Polo Grounds the next day. They sat in the dugout, and afterward, Ruth said, “I’d like to make Little Ray my personal mascot. “

And so, for the next eleven years, there was Little Ray, sitting next to Babe in the dugout, bringing him good luck, and bringing him in-game hot dogs from the clubhouse. Sometimes Babe even took him on road trips, a scary proposition for the child, as Babe simply roomed him with the adult, alcoholic batboy, the hunchbacked Eddie Bennett.

“I was scared to death rooming with him,” said Little Ray. “I guess the Babe’s judgment wasn’t the best on that. But he might have thought Eddie was also a kid. He didn’t pay close attention to everything.”

“How did the other players feel about Babe having his own mascot in the dugout?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding? He was Babe Ruth! He could do anything he wanted. He put a lot of money into his teammates’ pockets with all those World Series!”

“How about just the way guys talk in the dugout, Little Ray. Did they have to watch their language in front of you?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “How do you think I learned to talk like this?”

Yes, to a point, Babe could pretty much write his own rules. For instance, the team’s trainer kept an ice bucket in the dugout. In it would be placed a head of cabbage. That was for the Babe only. Every inning on a hot day, he would peel off a cabbage leaf and put it in his cap. Nobody else had access to that air-conditioned cabbage head.

THE IMPACT OF Ruth on attendance was immediate, and in preparation, ticket prices at the Polo Grounds (for both teams) were raised to $2.20 and $1.65 for box seats, $1.10 for grandstand (from 85 cents), 55 cents for the distant center-field bleachers, and 75 cents for left- and right-field bleachers. While some fans grumbled that “the game has just become a business now,” it really didn’t matter. The Babe’s Hall of Fame plaque would one day say GREATEST DRAWING CARD IN THE HISTORY OF BASEBALL, and in his first year with the Yankees, 1,289,422 paid to see him in the Polo Grounds, an American League record and the first time a team passed a million. It would be the Yanks’ largest season attendance until after World War II, more than even the new Yankee Stadium would draw in any of its first twenty-four seasons. (The Cubs exceeded 1.4 million in 1929 and 1930.) The Giants, long the dominant team in town, drew 929,609 and clearly felt threatened by their tenants.

In early May, Charles Stoneham (who had bought the Giants in 1919) and John McGraw announced that this would be the Yankees’ last year as tenants. A week later, they reversed course and said they would consider a new lease. Ruppert and Huston, of course, now had grand designs of their own and were looking around for architects and properties, an attractive one being available at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum at 135th and Amsterdam Avenue. But by the Winter Meetings of 1920, a new two-year lease was signed to remain at the Polo Grounds, slowing the urgency of the process.

The Colonels meanwhile engaged Osborn Engineering of Cleveland to draw up plans for a new ballpark, choosing to take this step before identifying the land on which it might sit. Osborn had designed the new Polo Grounds, as well as Fenway Park, Griffith Field in Washington, League Park in Cleveland, and Navin Field in Detroit.

HOME RUN BAKER thought of retiring in 1920, his three-year contract having run out, but he decided to come back for another year. “I feel I owe the
game of baseball a great deal,” he said. “It is because of my sense of duty and devotion to the game that I feel it almost obligatory to return.”

But those plans ended on February 17, when his wife, Ottilie, died from scarlet fever at thirty-one. Baker was left with two young daughters, and everyone understood his need to retire. His place in the lineup would be taken by Bob Meusel, twenty-three, a Pacific Coast League star who would join the Yankees the same year as Ruth. He had been recommended to the Yanks by PCL manager Bill Essick, who would go on to become a top Yankee scout.

Meusel split the season between third base and the outfield, where he had a rifle arm, eventually settling into the Yankee outfield as his brother Emil “Irish” Meusel had done for the Giants. Bob would hit an impressive .328 that year, setting eleven Yankee rookie records, most of which would last until Joe DiMaggio came along.

Bob was well liked by his teammates, but like many players before and after, had a less satisfying relationship with the press. He was said to have two personalities and could turn them off and on at will when a newspaperman approached.

“Bob Meusel is of a different type,” wrote
Baseball
magazine. “For one thing he has a rather unemotional face, and praise or criticism doesn’t affect him the same way as it does Ruth. He looks on apparently with languid indifference.”

“Meusel was very quiet … drank a lot,” said Mark Koenig in a 1979 interview. In an era when so many players were heavy drinkers, to be called out like that by Koenig he must have made quite an impression.

Later, with his career winding down, he arrived in spring training and seemed to have a big smile and a hardy handshake for all the newspapermen he had shunned for so long. It was Frank Graham who said, “Bob Meusel learned to say hello, just when it was time to say goodbye.”

Aaron Ward became the team’s regular at third in 1920. A native of Booneville, Arkansas, Ward graduated from Ouachita College with the intent of going to law school but couldn’t resist baseball. As a part-time job, he once read bills before the Arkansas State Senate.

Ward was a durable performer who played 567 consecutive games from 1920 to 1924 and held down third base through the 1925 season.

THE YANKEES’ GOOD-NATURED business manager Harry Sparrow died on May 7, leaving a gaping hole in the front office. Flags at the Polo Grounds
were lowered to half staff for a man who loved nothing more than sunshine on the morning of a game. Sparrow was only forty-five and had been in declining health, losing thirty pounds, since a case of food poisoning in spring training in 1917. His death was a tough one for the team in an important season. Charlie McManus became the acting business manager.

After an exciting spring training in Jacksonville, Ruth hit his first home run as a Yankee in the team’s twelfth game, off Herb Pennock of Boston. It was a “sockdolager,” according to the
Times
, launched high over the right-field grandstand and into Manhattan Field, where only Joe Jackson had previously hit a ball. Babe swung a forty-two-ounce bat, occasionally more, and was the only player in the game who wound the handle of his bat with tape for a better grip, a style later copied by many.

ON THE MORNING of Monday, August 16, Carl Mays awoke at his apartment in the Roger Morris Hotel on Edgecombe Avenue, atop Coogan’s Bluff. The Yanks had lost in Washington on Sunday to fall to third place, a half game behind Chicago and Cleveland, who were tied for first. They had then taken a train back to New York. That afternoon, Mays (18–8) would face Cleveland’s Stan Coveleski (18–9) in a game that could put them in first.

Mays had not raised his popularity in his first full season in New York, but with so much attention on Ruth, he, like his teammates, proceeded somewhat unnoticed. About twenty-one thousand were on hand for the big game. Neither the Yankees nor the Indians had ever won a pennant; the White Sox were defending champions, but there was still much talk about their shady performance in the 1919 Series defeat to Cincinnati. They were not the popular favorites.

Mays drove his car from his garage, down the bluff, and parked behind the Polo Grounds so he could arrive near the outfield clubhouse entrance.

Mays was the only submarine pitcher in the game, and was known to throw hard and inside. He’d hit five batters that season, and there was nothing extraordinary about that.

The Indians’ popular shortstop, Ray Chapman, liked to crowd the plate. And so he did when he came to bat in the fifth inning, with the Indians leading 3–0.

With the count 1 and 1, “my arm reached the farthest point of my back-swing [and] I saw Ray shift his back foot into the position he took for a
running bunt, a push bunt,” said Mays to author Bob McGarigle in the 1972 book
Baseball’s Great Tragedy
.

So at the last split second before hurling the ball, I changed to a high and tight strike pitch. Usually a batter would fall away from such a pitch. But Chapman didn’t, there was a sharp crack, and the ball bounded like a bunt between myself and the third-base line. I ran over, fielded the ball and winged it over to Wally Pipp at first base.

Then I watched as Wally prepared to start the ball around the infield. But he never did. Just as he was about to throw to Peckinpaugh he stopped with the ball up around his ear and looked in toward home plate.

It was only then that I realized Chapman had not run to first. I turned toward home plate and saw Ray on the ground. [Catcher Muddy] Ruel was trying to help him, as were several of the Cleveland players who had come off the bench, and Tris Speaker, who had been in the on-deck circle. Home-plate umpire Tom Connolly sought to summon a physician from the stands.

After a few moments that seemed like an hour Ray got to his feet with the help of his teammates and walked to the bench. A substitute was put in for him as a runner and the game continued just like any other in which a player had been struck by a pitched ball.

The fans in the ballpark did not realize that Chappie’s skull was fractured. He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital on West 163rd Street. A decision to operate was made by Speaker, the Indians’ secretary Walter McNichols, and McManus, the Yankees’ acting business manager. The morning papers had him in “grave condition” following a three-hour midnight operation to make an incision at the base of the skull. Small pieces of skull were removed. Bones had lacerated his brain.

He died shortly before 5:00 A.M.

The American League considered a cash donation to Chapman’s widow, but settled on a letter of sympathy.

It would be more than thirty-five years until players were required to wear helmets. (In 1999, Yankee coach Don Zimmer was “beaned” in the
dugout by a batted ball, and the next day, as he jokingly wore an army helmet with a Yankee logo, wire fencing was added across the top of the dugout steps to prevent a repeat.) Getting beaned was considered the risk of being a player. Almost all experienced it.

There had been two known minor league deaths from beanings—one in 1906 in the New England League and one in 1916 in the Southern League. Mike “Doc” Powers, the 1905 Highlander who had formed half of a doctor-doctor battery, died of peritonitis in 1909, two weeks after running into a wall while playing for the Athletics. Chapman’s death, however, is generally cited as the only on-field death in major league history.

The Yankees’ Russ Ford had hit Chicago’s Roy Corhan in 1911, leaving him unconscious for three days and forcing Ford to take a two-week leave of absence. Kindly Walter Johnson, the hardest thrower in the game, beaned the Yankees’ Jack Martin in 1912 and was so distraught that he suffered more than Martin did. (Martin not only survived but was the oldest living Yankee when he died in 1980 at ninety-three.)

The Yankees had witnessed something like this for one of their own during spring training of 1920, an event that still haunted the team. Yankee outfielder Chick Fewster had been beaned on the left temple by Jeff Pfeffer of the Dodgers. He lay unconscious for ten minutes before Doc Woods could bring him around. Hospitalized and without the power of speech, he lay, barely alive, for three days with a fractured skull. He was moved from Florida to his hometown Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where a piece of his skull was removed and a silver plate placed inside. It was assumed he would never play again.

But on July 5, Fewster returned to action. The Yankees had a batting helmet designed for him, but he didn’t wear it. He played in just 21 games that year and was on the bench when Chapman went down. The Yankee players surely had him in mind as they watched Chapman walk off the field. Chick survived—surely Chappie would too.

But he didn’t, and oh, what a loss it was. Chapman was an enormously well-liked player, a total contrast to Mays. How odd that all of this would happen in 1920, the very year in which the spitball was banned, safety being one of the reasons.

Reaction, predictably, was very anti-Mays.

Mark Roth, the Yankees’ traveling secretary, went to Mays’s apartment early on Tuesday morning.

“Carl, I’ve got some bad news for you,” he said. “Ray Chapman died at five o’clock this morning.”

A police car arrived soon after and Mays, met at the precinct house by a Yankee lawyer, spoke to an assistant district attorney from the homicide division.

“It was,” he told them, “the most regrettable incident of my career, and I would give anything if I could undo what has happened.”

The assistant DA was satisfied that it was just a horrible accident in the normal course of a baseball game, and no charges were filed. No other witnesses were called. Mays was sent home, where his wife informed him of two telephone death threats that had already been received.

Cap Huston met with Speaker on Tuesday to express his condolences on behalf of the Yankees. It was a tense meeting. Mays did not go to the funeral home on Amsterdam Avenue—“I couldn’t bring myself to look at his lifeless body,” he said—but he did meet with reporters at his apartment on Tuesday afternoon.