RUTH'S LAST STRAW
"Pinky Whitney, who infielded for the Boston Braves and Philadelphia Phillies in the Thirties, was talking: 'I'll never forget a day in Boston in 1935,' he said. 'That was the day a big guy on our club belted three home runs in one day. But a couple of days later this same guy saw a fly ball sail over his head for extra bases. He should have caught the ball easily. When he came into the bench at the end of the inning, he sat down, wiped off his face with a towel and said, 'I'll never play another game of baseball.' Then turning to me he said, 'Here, you can have my bats.' I still have them, too. The guy was Babe Ruth.' "
-Dick Peebles in the San Antonio Express (Baseball Digest, March 1952)
MOVIE BONER
"It's a funny thing but I went to see the Babe Ruth movie and all during it I was bothered by something,' says Tim McAuliffe, the big cap king. 'I couldn't explain why Bill Bendix didn't resemble Babe Ruth to me. Then, finally, I discovered it. The one thing everyone forgot in getting the movie ready was that the Babe's cap was always different from all players except Lou Gehrig. Their visors stuck out straight from their forehead, in fact, almost tilted up. They wore a brace inside the front lining. I couldn't enjoy the movie after that.' "
-Gerry Hern in the Boston Post (Baseball Digest, March 1952)
BEST BET AGAINST RUTH
"Earl Whitehill, who won 217 games in the years after he came out of Cedar Rapids, Ia., mostly for second division ball clubs, was asked if he and his fellow American League pitchers ever evolved what might be termed a master plan for trying to get Babe Ruth out.
Perhaps it is not generally known, but pitchers are something of a clan apart. If one of their members discovers a certain batter's weakness, or anything resembling a weakness, the news gets around the league faster than a brush fire. Pitchers do not like batters, and the feeling is reciprocated with interest.
'Most of the boys thought the best idea was to pitch high and outside,' Whitehill recalled. 'That way he wasn't so likely to pull one into the right field seats on you. But there was never any general agreement on that fellow.
'The trouble with the Babe is that you'd give him a certain pitch and he would miss it by a foot. I mean by a foot, and you would think to yourself that you had something. A couple pitches later you would come in with it again and he would knock it out of the lot. Myself, I liked to curve him low and had better luck than some of the others.' "
-Gayle Talbot, Associated Press (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
RUTH- EVER THE BIG LEAGUER
"Eddie Stumpf is business director of the Cleveland Indians' farm system and runs the biggest training camp in baseball. At a guess, he's at least a $20,000 a year man. But in the old days when he was a shoestring sports promoter in Milwaukee- well, Eddie told the story when he said: 'One time a fellow said I offered a player twenty-five dollars and the man didn't get it. I told him that couldn't be true because I never offered a player more than seven-fifty.'
Once Christy Walsh bought Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to Milwaukee. Stumpf recruited two teams. Ruth played with one and Gehrig with the other. The deal was $1,500 plus 50 per cent, but canny Eddie had a clause in the contract which let him off for $100 if it rained.
'At about 1:30 it began to drizzle,' Stumpf reminisced. 'I've got $1,300 in the till and the best I think I can do is $1,500. So I called Walsh and said I would pay him the $100 and refund to the customers.
'Walsh says, 'Don't you like us?' '
'I said, 'I don't like you $800 worth.'
'Then Ruth took over. He said, 'Play the game, Eddie, and pay off all the kids (the players). If there's anything left, okay?'
'We played and I paid off $900. There was $1,100 left. Walsh said, 'How long did you work on this?' I told him two weeks. He said, 'Take a couple of hundred.'
'Then they came back for me the next year and the weather was good and we drew $11,000.' "
-R.G. Lynch in the Milwaukee Journal (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
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