Bombers An Oral History of the New York Yankees

Big belly, big nose, big shoulders, big bat, big swing, big cigars, bigger cars: Everything about Babe Ruth was big. He was living large before anyone coined the phrase. Ruth was the ultimate consumer of food, booze, women, pitchers, and life. Ultimately, of himself. He was completely of his time--the Roaring Twenties, when many Americans frolicked till dawn in speakeasies, gambling parlors, vice dens, and other illicit venues. Ruth was one of their own, a satyr capable of reveling in an all-night debauch in some whorehouse before racing to the ballpark, without so much as a catnap, to hit two home runs against some Bible-belting, temperate, upright, devoted husband of a pitcher who had taken the mound with a full eight hours' sleep. Yet while he was playing, few beyond Ruth's circle knew of his excesses, that he knocked them back in gin mills as often as he knocked them out of ballparks. Babe cavorted during the so-called Golden Age of Sports, when fans expected their athletic icons to mimic the virtuous comportment of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Much of what journalists wrote about Ruth back then--the man, not the extraordinary player--was myth, a myth that never fully embraced the breadth of his vibrant, delightfully profane personality. Ruth's on-field exploits needed no embellishment. The Babe was, hands down, the most astonishing baseball talent ever to slip into a pair of spikes, and if you want to argue that point, consider this: Before becoming the game's most prodigious slugger, Ruth was considered the finest left-handed pitcher in the major leagues. So unless you find someone who can morph from Randy Johnson into Barry Bonds, who are you going to put up against him? Uberplayer that Babe was, no one had to exaggerate his accomplishments, an irony since the most enduring Ruth legend started on the diamond. It has the Yankee right fielder strutting to the plate against the Chicago Cubs during the third game of the 1932 World Series and calling his shot--actually predicting with the point of a finger that he would smack the next pitch from Charlie Root over Wrigley Field's center-field fence. Homer he did, to that very spot. But did the Bambino actually call it? Most of the reporters covering that series apparently didn't think so. At least, not at first. In his splendid biography of Ruth, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, author Robert Creamer writes that the day following Ruth's homer, only one journalist, Joe Williams of the Scripps-Howard syndicate, mentioned the called shot in his story. A few days after Williams's piece appeared, several writers--most notably Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News and Bill Corum of the Hearst syndicate--carried the angle further. Corum's account of the called shot was particularly curious since, as Creamer notes, he didn't refer to it at all when he wrote his game account in the Wrigley Field press box on the day it supposedly occurred: Robert Creamer: "It's just my conjecture, but when those two or three writers first wrote about the Babe's call, no one thought that much of it at the time. Then it became a good follow-up story. Especially for a guy looking for something to write about, something a little different, a little refreshing. Also, I think all of them had a vague memory of seeing Ruth point at something, but I think they saw him point in the first inning, which was very clearly written about. So maybe they had that in the back of their minds, sort of equating the pointing in the first inning with the gesture in the third." After the game--a 7-5 New York victory--the Cubs denied that Babe called anything. Charlie Root, the no-nonsense, gravel-tough pitcher who surrendered Ruth's homer, said, "Ruth didn't point at the fence, because if he had I would have knocked him on his ass with the very next pitch." Root's catcher, Gabby Hartnett, supported his teammate, claiming that Ruth wagged his fingers, notLally, Richard is the author of 'Bombers An Oral History of the New York Yankees' with ISBN 9781400046775 and ISBN 1400046777.