Pinstripe Empire (20 page)

On June 10, 1921, Ruth hit the 120th homer of his career, a 420-foot liner into the right-field upper deck at the Polo Grounds off Cleveland’s Jim Bagby Sr. It put him one past Gavvy Cravath as the all-time home run champion, a position he would hold until Hank Aaron homered off Al Downing in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, a total of 53 years—19,252 days as the game’s home run king. (Coincidentally, it was Jim Bagby Jr., also of Cleveland, who would be one of two pitchers to stop Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941.)

On September 15, facing Bill Bayne in St. Louis, Babe hit his 55th home run of the season to set a new single-season mark, breaking his 54 of the previous year. And on October 2, off Curt Fullerton in Fenway Park, he hit his 59th and final home run of the season, which would set the new standard for the record books—at least for the next six years.

For the season, which may have been his best, he had an .846 slugging percentage, a .378 average, and 129 extra base hits. His slugging percentage was 240 points better than that of the runner-up, Harry Heilmann. He scored 177 times (45 more than the runner-up) and knocked in 171 runs (32 more than the runner-up). In park after park he hit the longest home run ever seen, 16 of them over 450 feet and nine of them over 500 feet, according
to research by Bill Jenkinson, a scholar of Ruth’s homers. He hit one about 575 feet to center field in Detroit on July 17 off a Bert Cole fastball, a 1-and-1 pitch, which may have been the longest home run in all of baseball history. No one measured it, but Jenkinson concludes, “There are no other home runs in Major League history that have been confirmed to have flown so far.”

His on-base percentage of .512 was 60 points higher than runner-up Ty Cobb. He walked 145 times (42 more than the runner-up). His 59 home runs were 35 better than runners-up Bob Meusel and Ken Williams. He even missed the triples title by just two, belting 16, and he was second in doubles to Speaker with 44. Only seven players stole more bases than his 17.

And no one can be certain that this was yet a lively ball, although it was, of course, thought to be. “The manufacturers [Spalding and Reach] have consistently denied that the ball is any different from what it used to be, except that they admit that the quality of yarn used in winding it may be somewhat better than it was during the war,” reported the
Reach Official Guide.

A decade later, the
Spalding Guide
looked back at the power revolution and noted, “Beginning in 1921, the managers of major league clubs began to allow more latitude to their batters than they had in the past. They took off some of the shackles of forearm and place-hitting and permitted the batters to take a toehold and a free swing. The result was an immediate increase in the number of home runs and an alarming decrease in the number of sacrifice hits.”

All of this, it should be mentioned, came in a season in which Ruth was involved in a bad auto wreck. Players were allowed to skip the team train and drive on their own to eastern cities. Babe, accompanied by his first wife, Helen, with teammate Fred Hofmann and coach Charlie O’Leary in the backseat, crashed, the car rolling over twice. O’Leary was tossed from it, and Babe thought he was dead. Miraculously, though, there were no injuries, just another day in the life of Ruth. They resumed their trip to Philadelphia by taxi and saw the headline in the morning paper: BABE RUTH KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT.

The ’21 Yanks won 98 games, a club record to that point, but didn’t coast to the pennant. On the morning of Sunday, September 25, they were tied for first with the defending champion Indians, with Mays facing their old teammate Ray Caldwell and first place on the line. This was arguably the biggest game the Yankees had played since Chesbro’s famous wild-pitch game of 1904, and an overflow crowd of forty thousand packed the Polo
Grounds despite periodic afternoon rain, equaling the record crowd to see a Yankee–Red Sox doubleheader fourteen days before, at which a reported sixty thousand were turned away.

The team played without Home Run Baker, whose mother had died. Mike McNally, one of the players who came in the Hoyt-Schang trade, played third, and would continue to do so on into postseason games, with Baker’s star clearly in decline.

The game was a 21–7 Yankee romp, with the Yanks on top 15–4 after four innings and the outcome clear. Mays went the distance for his 26th win, while Caldwell failed to get out of the second inning. Meusel and Fewster homered, Chick hitting his first of the season as he took over for Ruth in left in midgame, allowing Babe to coach third, something Ruth often had fun doing when he wasn’t due to bat.

The Yanks led by one game.

On Monday afternoon, the Yanks won again, this time 8–7, with Ruth hitting his 57th homer and Hoyt, in relief of Quinn, beating Coveleski. (It being after September 15, the unofficial end of straw-hat season, the crowd could no longer throw their hats into the air after a Ruth homer.) Mays, with no rest, pitched the last 1
⅓
innings for his seventh save of the season. Jake Ruppert couldn’t bear to watch the last batter; he went to the bullpen and let Hofmann update him.

Mays struck him out. The Yanks led by two.

On Tuesday, Urban Shocker of the Browns shut them out 2–0, and with the Indians idle, the lead was back to one and a half games with four games left in the season. Hearts were racing; could a pennant be at hand? At last?

The Yanks won every one of the four remaining games, and the pennant clincher came in the first game of a doubleheader on Saturday, October 1, with Mays winning his 27th, tying Shocker for the league lead and topping the Athletics 5–3 before twenty-six thousand delirious patrons at the Polo Grounds, on hand to witness history. Thousands more stood before scoreboards outside newspaper offices in Manhattan, where Western Union reports kept them informed pitch by pitch. The Yanks broke a 3–3 tie in the seventh, with McNally scoring from first on a hit-and-run single by Schang.

Elmer Miller caught Chick Galloway’s fly ball for the final out, and the Yankees, now in their nineteenth season, became the sixth of the eight American League teams to win a pennant: Only Washington and St. Louis remained winless. Yes, the Yankees had won the pennant!

Wrote Damon Runyon: “Miller Huggins, the little manager of the New York club, tamped across the yard in the wake of his men, his head bowed in a characteristic attitude. In happiness or sorrow, Huggins is ever something of a picture of dejection. The crowd cheered him as his familiar Charley [
sic
] Chaplain feet lugged his small body along, and Huggins had to keep doffing his cap.”

What a moment for Ruppert and Huston in their seventh year as owners. And for Barrow, in his first year as business manager! What a moment for the fans who had been there since ’03, or for Phil Schenck the groundskeeper (who now shared Polo Grounds duties with the Giants’ Henry Fabian), and Pop Logan in the clubhouse, the senior employees, or portly Jack Lenz, the PA announcer with his large megaphone, or Quinn, the only Highlander now on the field. For Ban Johnson, at long last. For Harry M. Stevens, who had been there as concessionaire from the start. The old guys—Farrell, Chesbro, Griffith, Chase—scattered like the wind, what must they have been thinking? And poor Willie Keeler in Brooklyn, suffering from a heart condition, in need of medicine and other necessities of life—so much so that a bunch of Brooklyn baseball guys headed by Charles Ebbets began a fund to raise money to help him.

And of course the Bambino, who pitched in relief in the second game that day and won it. The big lug had been under the pressure of living up to expectations since the day he arrived, and seemed not to have felt any pressure at all. He hit number 59 the next day in the meaningless season finale for his latest new standard. What were Red Sox fans, the Royal Rooters, thinking of all of this!

The first is always special, but with so many pennants to follow, 1921 sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. It shouldn’t. It was a great pennant race in the season that followed the Ray Chapman death and the banishment of the Black Sox players.

FOR THE BEST-OF-NINE World Series, with all games to be played in the Polo Grounds, gambling resumed as though nothing had happened in 1919 and ticket scalpers were out in force, getting what they could for $6.60 box seats. This would be the first World Series ever broadcast, with Tommy Cowan in a studio at WJZ in Newark, getting reports by phone and delivering a play-by-play for the few listeners who had wireless sets. Most fans who
couldn’t get to the games would again pack the streets outside newspaper offices to follow along on Play-O-Graphs, pitch-by-pitch scoreboards that kept fans posted of the game’s progress, including men on base.

This was the taciturn Huggins against the outspoken McGraw, the Giants returning for their sixth World Series and first in four years. The legendary McGraw had so far won only one World Series.

“The Star Spangled Banner” was played before the game, and the crowd included Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan. Frank Farrell was in attendance, as was Arnold Rothstein, who despite his dirty hands in the Black Sox scandal was unpunished and even engaging in business with Stoneham.

The Yankees won the first two games, getting steals of home (McNally and Meusel) in each one. The Giants took the third, and then Carl Mays had an eighth-inning meltdown in game four, blowing a 1–0 lead, and the Yanks lost 4–2, missing a chance to go up 3–1 in the Series.

Mays then became the victim of a whispered assault on his performance, which had included five no-hit innings and a two-hitter through seven. Fred Lieb, perhaps influenced by asides from Huggins (who cared not a bit for Mays), began to tell people that Mays’s wife, Majorie, may have received a bribe at the start of the eighth, then waved a handkerchief to signal to her husband that the money had been received. Mays then gave up a leadoff triple, a single, fell down fielding a bunt for a single, and then after a sacrifice came a double, wiping out the lead. The story first appeared in print in a 1947 biography of Commissioner Landis, and then in Lieb’s 1977 memoir. Lieb said the game kept Mays out of the Hall of Fame (he was a voting member).

True? Impossible to say. If a fix was in, why wait for the eighth inning? After the Black Sox, everyone was suspicious of everyone.

Another controversy emerged in the game. Ruth showed up with an abscess near his left elbow, and whether he could play was in question. He did play—in fact he hit a home run. The abscess was drained for game five, but he was playing in an obviously weakened state. Joe Vila accused him of being overly dramatic, while others rushed to his defense. In the top of the fourth, after taking mighty practice swings in the on-deck circle, the Babe dropped a bunt down the third-base line and legged it out to first. It was a shocking sight. Meusel then doubled and Babe made it all the way home: He “staggered into the dugout, collapsed, and passed out.” The team doctor, Dr. George Stewart, revived him with ammonia. The press box (behind home plate) was informed that Babe had fainted.

Wrote Sid Mercer, “Surely no greater exhibition of gameness has ever been featured in baseball.”

One can only imagine the cheers of the crowd when the Yankees took the field and, after a delay with no one in left, Babe emerged and ran out to his position.

Game five would be the Babe’s last hurrah in the Series. The abscess remained an issue; it kept him out of games six and seven (lost by Mays 2–1) and limited him to one pinch-hit appearance in the decisive game eight, a ninth-inning, leadoff groundout.

(Keeler attended the sixth game, rooting for his pal McGraw but reminding others, “Don’t forget, I’m a charter member of the Yankees.” It was the last game he would ever see.)

Without Ruth, these weren’t the pennant-winning Yankees. The Giants won all three of those Ruth-less games and the world championship. The Series ended abruptly after Ruth’s groundout. Ward walked, then Baker hit a shot to Johnny Rawlings at second, who made a terrific play, nailing Baker at first. But Ward decided to make a dash for third and was nailed on a tag play, George Kelly to Frankie Frisch. The Yanks lost 1–0.

The best player in the Series was Waite Hoyt, who won two, lost one, and pitched 27 innings without allowing an earned run, striking out 18.

A full share for each losing player was a record $3,510, thanks to having all the games played in the biggest ballpark in the country.

And so the Yankees lost their first World Series, but the fans could talk about what “could have been” if not for the Babe’s abscess.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE ’21 World Series, the fully recovered Babe jumped on a train and headed to Buffalo to begin a series of exhibition games. His compensation for touring with the Babe Ruth All-Stars would be $30,000, well above his full season’s salary. He gathered up teammates Schang, Mays, Meusel, Bill Piercy, and Tom Sheehan to play with him, and off they went.

Ruth was told that this violated a major league rule prohibiting postseason exhibitions by World Series players. The rule was sound: It was intended to prevent the watering down of the Series by having players stage rematches around the country. Of course, this could hardly be considered a rematch since no Giants went, and only four of the Babe Ruth All-Stars were star players.

Still, Judge Landis was insistent that these games not take place. Fearing retribution, Mays and Schang dropped out. But Babe kept playing, giving fans well beyond major league territory a chance to see the biggest big leaguer of them all in person.

Ruppert and Huston feared they would all be suspended for the entire 1922 season. They were actually relieved when Landis delivered just a six-week suspension to Ruth, Meusel, and Piercy. Seemingly unconcerned, Babe then signed a three-year, $52,000-a-year contract to take him through 1924. But the season would begin without him.

Some felt the punishment would hurt the Yankee team more than Babe himself, and in that sense saw it as unfair.

ON FEBRUARY 14, a few weeks before spring training began, Ruth took the subway to the future stadium site, removed his winter topcoat, stood at “home plate” with a bat, and took some pitches from a reporter. He didn’t reach the imaginary seats, but he did “christen” the stadium that day by hitting a few into the snow-covered outfield.