"One June evening in 1938, when I was writing sports for the New York World-Telegram and covering the Brooklyn Dodgers, the desk told me to get over to the Leewood Golf Club at Tuckahoe, N.Y., early the next morning. There might be a Page One exclusive involving Babe Ruth.
I was camping on the front porch of the golf club when, at 9:30 A.M., the Babe arrived. Ruth talked. He was about to emerge from three years of retirement to join the Dodgers as first base coach. Under the terms of his contract with Brooklyn's Larry MacPhail, Ruth would also indulge in batting practice.
'Don't know if the eyes or the reflexes are up to it but I kinda think I can still bend into the ball some,' boomed Ruth as he headed toward the first tee.
On our next Western trip, the Dodgers unveiled Ruth in St. Louis at a Sunday double-header with the Mercury pushing 90 degrees. A pre-game hitting-for-distance contest, featuring the Babe, had been arranged and publicized. Ruth would slug the ball against the likes of Joe (Ducky) Medwick, Johnny Mize and Don Padgett, of the Cardinals, as well as Dolph Camilli and Ernie Koy, of the Dodgers. Each batter was allowed five clouts from a 'thrower' of his choice.
To the roaring delight of some 15,000 fans- 6,000 more than on our last Sunday game in St. Louis- Ruth won all the marbles by belting a long drive over the right field wall. The ball traveled 430 feet, landing in the second car tracks on Grand Avenue, five feet farther than Medwick's best smash. It made good copy. Fat and wheezing, the perspiring 43-year-old Sultan of Swat couldn't have been happier if he'd knocked one out of the park to decide a World Series.
Although Brooklyn was only a seventh place outfit that summer, the Babe somehow gave it 'Derby' class. With Ruth aboard, you couldn't be confused with baggage freight. Sportsman's Park ... Wrigley Field ... Ebbets Field ... it didn't matter. The Babe remained the Big Apple- the big guy could still swell the gate!
During the games, the Babe was stationed along the first base coaching line, where, waving his arms like a circus seal, he'd bark encouragement. Brooklyn didn't own the most potent batting order in the league, but we featured the mightiest first base coach in captivity! Life was real- it was fun! We weren't winning many ball game but we had the number one road attraction.
With Ruth at first and the Dodgers' manager, Burleigh Grimes, coaching at third, Brooklyn's strategy was seldom overpowering. Nevertheless, the Dodgers would occasionally rise up and punch some flag contender on the nose.
There was the August night we were playing the Boston club (now Milwaukee) under the Ebbets Field lights. The game, a real pitching duel, was tied 0-0 going into the last half of the 11th inning. Buddy Hassett led off with a single and advanced on Camilli's walk, Ernie Koy popped up and out, and Cookie Lavagetto came to bat. After looking the situation over, he lashed a pitch to center field. Hassett, off and running with the pitcher's motion, reached home yards ahead of the peg. The Dodgers won, 1-0, and 25,000 Brooklynites went wild.
In my story, I wrote, 'Hassett singled but after Camilli walked, Ernie Koy popped out. Lavagetto came to bat, and getting the hit-and-run signal from Babe Ruth, smashed a line drive single to center, Hassett scoring from second for the ball game.'
The following afternoon, we were rained out. Looking for filler copy, I ultimately landed in the Dodgers' dressing room. Except for Grimes and his captain and shortstop, Leo Durocher, the room was empty- the others had showered and departed.
Grimes glared at me.
'We don't need you in here,' he growled. 'Give a rookie reporter an inch and he walks all over you. Better get your stories from the pressbox from now on.'
'I'm not looking for a story,' I replied, taken by surprise. 'I have a sore throat.' Continuing into Trainer Eddie Froelich's room, I sat down.
'What's Grimes burned up about?' I asked.
'Seems you wrote something about Ruth flashing the hit-and-run,' whispered Eddie. 'Burleigh's not happy about it. And Leo's been shoveling on the coal.'
I returned to the locker room as Grimes and Durocher were leaving.
'I understand you don't like today's story,' I said.
That's as far as I got. Grimes blew his top, with Leo keeping score and pinch-hitting whenever Burleigh paused for breath. The gist of the matter was that, until further notice, Grimes would continue to call all strategy from behind third base. As boss, he expected the credit as well as the abuse for whatever the Dodgers' success or failures.
In effect, Ruth's arm-waving and other extra-curricular rumblings from behind first base constituted dumb show and noise. That being so, it was high time that I, a cub reporter, realized and appreciated Babe Ruth for what he was. 'He's a white elephant ... out here to drag in customers ... nothing more.'
It was my turn. I told Grimes that I'd take my advice from my newspaper. Furthermore, if Ruth's presence in Brooklyn meant additional customers in the park, any time I could tip my hat to the Babe in print I would. And Grimes and the rest should get down on their bony knees and give thanks that Ruth was helping pay their salaries.
Before I'd finished by Barbara Frietchie oration, Grimes and Durocher had stomped out, slamming the door, leaving one spouting cub reporter, sputtering through indignant tears.
For a while there wasn't a sound. Then, draped in a giant pink Turkish towel, the Babe appeared in the doorway of the shower room. There, completely unnoticed, he'd been toweling himself- and had heard every word.
He looked at me a moment, then said, 'Well kid, I guess that's how it is.'
One week later in Brooklyn, we were rained out of a Sunday doubleheader. With another reporter, I made my way to the locker room. The place was full of uniforms and confusion as ball players scrambled to get away for a half-holiday. Next to his locker, the Babe, strangely quiet, was just finishing. He was about to put his baseball spikes into his locker when he spotted me.
'Kid,' he gruffed,' what size shoe do you wear?'
'Nine and a half C,' I replied.
'Same as me,' commented Ruth, and handed me his spikes. 'Even if you don't use 'em, maybe someday you'll have a kid of your own. And maybe he'll like these.'
Adjusting his famed camel's-hair cap, the Babe patted a speechless reporter on the shoulder and walked out of baseball for the rest of his life."
-Dave Camerer, This Week (Baseball Digest, January 1954)
"INSIDE" OF RUTH'S SHIFT TO OUTFIELD
Players Talked Barrow Into Allowing Change
"Subscribers beyond the sub-voting age will recall Harry Hooper as a component of the Boston Red Sox outfield of Hooper, Duffy Lewis and Tris Speaker, considered by most historians as the best there ever was.
Harry Hooper, now a prosperous businessman of Capitola, Cal., takes pen in hand thus: 'My object in writing is to attempt to correct an impression that has prevailed many years and which has apparently been accepted as fact. It is that the late Ed Barrow, in his wisdom and farsightedness, took Babe Ruth out of the pitcher's box and made him an outfielder.
'It is true that as manager of the Boston Sox, Barrow made the decision. But he did it reluctantly and against his conviction. At that time Heinie Wagner (coach) and Everett Scott (shortstop) and myself formed a board of strategy, as it were. We believed the Babe in the outfield would be more valuable to the team, and we argued with Barrow that it would certainly help the gate to have Ruth as a daily attraction instead of every fourth or fifth game as a pitcher.
'The three of us on the 'board' and the Babe himself pleaded with Barrow all during the spring training trip. I think it was after the season started that Manager Barrow let down and decided to play Babe in the outfield.
'Barrow's argument was reasonable. He protested that he would be crazy to take what was probably the best young left-handed pitcher in the American League then, and make an outfielder of him. If he guessed wrong fans would laugh him into scorn.
'I recall Barrow's very words when he finally consented to make the change. He said: 'All right, I'll put Ruth out there, but mark my word, after the first slump he gets in he'll come to me on his knees begging to pitch again.'
'Don't get the idea that I have any grievance with Barrow. I was captain and field director under him in 1918 and 1919 and we got along fine. I don't think Ed ever played pro ball and there was a lot he didn't know about the finer points of the game, though he was a good executive. He ran the club with an iron hand and his discipline made us better men, but on the field we played our own game.
'As for telling Ruth when to hit- he always was permitted to use his own judgement, and if he bunted it was always on his initiative. The Babe was fast on his feet despite his size and could beat out a bunt.
'I was there when Ruth walked out to pitch his first major league game in Boston in 1914 and I played with him through 1919. I played against him for five years after that when he had joined the Yankees. In the five years he was with us he was the finest left-handed pitcher I ever laid eyes on, from Rube Waddell to Mose Grove.
'To me the Babe's greatest triumph in Boston was in 1918. The fans gave him a 'day.' He hooked up in a duel with Lefty Williams of the Chicago White Sox. Near the end Ruth broke up the game by hitting a perfectly pitched low outside fast ball over the left center field fence of Fenway Park. That was a feat I never saw duplicated even by right-handed batters. Fans carried him off the field on their shoulders.
'If smart pitchers had pitched to him in his heyday the Babe could have knocked 70 or 80 homers. His 60 can be written off as a minimum performance. They walked him more times than they allowed him to swing.
'Babe was always grateful to me, I like to think, for my part in urging Manager Barrow to station him in the outfield. Many years later Ruth named me on his all-time all-star outfield. He did it out of a sense of gratitude.'
The Babe, concludes Ex-Outfielder Hooper, was like that. He couldn't remember a first name to save his soul but he always remembered chums who befriended him in the critical years when he was a nobody from a Baltimore orphanage."
-Will Connolly, San Francisco Chronicle (Baseball Digest, May 1954)
LIGHT SEPTEMBER SCHEDULE AGAINST RUTH "SUCCESSORS"
"Back in 1940, Joe Kuhel, an excellent American League first baseman and a good but not exceptional hitter, banged away to a flying start.
Never known particularly as a home run hitter (he was a good bit like the man who succeeded him at first base in Washington, Mickey Vernon), Kuhel, who was with the White Sox at the time, started hitting home runs with regularity. He had seven or eight after just a couple weeks of the season.
Someone noted that he was 'two games and four days' or some such ahead of Babe Ruth's all-time home run record of 60 in 1927. An enterprising Chicago newspaper played the story big, assigned a writer to give Kuhel day-by-day coverage, what he ate, how he relaxed, what type of bat he used ... and it frightened poor Joe almost to death.
He eventually wound up that year with 27 homers ... the high water mark by far of his career but he never got over the shock. 'I thought they were kidding,' he said one time. 'The last thought I ever had was of breaking Ruth's record.'
Ever since, though, almost every season the comparison table has been used with one hitter or another- Ralph Kiner and Ed Matthews and this year Stan Musial. As Stan himself has said, he still hits the ball where it's pitched and lets the home runs take care of themselves. That's why he always has been such a great hitter because no one overshifts on him. It takes a radical change like Birdie Tebbets' four-outfielder gimmick to protect against him and that calls for a specific situation more than anything else.
To get back to Ruth, comparisons with his all-time record are unfortunate for one reason. Ruth finished with a tremendous kick. Seventeen of his homers were hit in September of 1927.
In those days, there was a full schedule in September. Now, to guard against the late postponements which would be washed off the schedule- and also to provide days to get in rained-out contests, the clubs have a light schedule that month. Most of the teams have only about 20 games in September ... so, if a player went into the month even with Ruth's record ... he'd have to average almost a homer a game to tie the mark of break it."
-Robert L. Burns, St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Baseball Digest, August 1954)
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