Wednesday, April 20, 1927: On The Train to Philadelphia
“What’s Babe Ruth Like?”
Yesterday was the last game of the series against the Red Sox, and after beating them three straight we beat ourselves 6–3. Errors by Koenig at short and Collins behind the plate did us in.
Gehrig’s still tearing the cover off the ball, but Ruth had another homerless day. Worse, he grounded weakly into two double plays and struck out once.
Now we’re on the train heading down to Philadelphia.
Everyone is picking the Athletics to win the pennant this year. Just before the season opened, The New York Telegram published a poll of 100 American League players that has us finishing second to the A’s — and hardly any ballplayers picked us to win. As for the sports writers, they also favor the Athletics to win the pennant, and four of them even picked us to finish fourth! The newspaper also polled the bookies along Seventh Avenue: Connie Mack’s A’s were 9 to 5 to win the AL, while the odds for us were only 3 to 1.
But they’re all wrong.
And I’m not saying that just because I wear a Yankee uniform. We’ve played the A’s four games, and we’re 3–0 and they’re 0–3, and everyone in pinstripes believes we would have swept all four if that one game hadn’t been called for darkness.
Most of the doubters think Ruth is too old.
After seven games the Babe’s not looking great, but none of us have any worries. No doubts at all. The Great War may have shaken man’s faith in God, but no Yankee will ever lose his faith in Ruth.
Fifty years from now, I don’t know how many people will remember how great Ty Cobb was. Hell, in a hundred years I don’t know how many people will remember who Ty Cobb was. But a hundred years from now, people will remember the Babe.
“What’s Babe Ruth like?”
Every single person I’ve met since I finally made the big leagues and came to New York last year asks me that.
Sometimes they’ll wait a couple of minutes to ask. The polite ones will first ask me about my own life as a ballplayer. Two questions about me is probably the average, three is the most — but they’re really just stalling. As soon as they politely can, they’ll stop asking about me. They’ll pause. And then they’ll lean forward and whisper quickly, in a very excited manner:
“What’s Babe Ruth like?”
And here’s what I tell them:
“You know all of those stories you’re always reading about the Babe in the newspapers, every day? You know all the things you hear about the Babe that make him seem as big as a Paul Bunyan?”
Now it’s my turn to lean forward, before letting them in on my secret.
“He’s bigger than that. I honestly think Babe Ruth might be a God.”
Sometimes they laugh. But always they get a little nervous once they realize I’m not kidding.
And I’m not.
Babe Ruth is a God, and everybody who has ever played with him will tell you so. And everyone who has ever played against him will tell you so, too. Well almost everyone. Not Cobb. Cobb hates Ruth. And that’s because while Ruth came down from the heavens and regularly sends messages back home through the clouds — 47 of them last year, 46 in ’24, 54 in ’20 and 59 in 1921 — Cobb comes from the opposite joint.
Cobb is Hades in cleats, and he does his best to create hell on earth, on the base paths, in the clubhouse, and in every bar and whorehouse he enters — and any gambler in a Seventh Avenue betting parlor will tell you the odds are absolutely certain that Cobb will be returning straight back to hell as soon as he leaves this earth. And everyone who’s ever met Cobb will tell you that can’t be soon enough.
And Babe Ruth is Thor. Thor plus Dionysus, the Greek god of the feast and wine (and of women with lots of wine in them). Actually, with Ruth it’s gin. The Greeks didn’t have gin, but that’s only because they didn’t have Prohibition.
Ruth is a walking bacchanalian feast — that’s the feast in honor of Dionysus. Yup, Babe Ruth is a feast in honor of himself. A moveable feast somehow held within one enormous body that travels all over America, hitting long unmeasurable home runs by day and seeking out all of life’s pleasures long into the night.
Ping Bodie was Babe’s first Yankee roommate back in ’20, and when he was asked what it was like to room with the Babe, ol’ Ping just shook his head and said, “I didn’t room with Ruth. I roomed with his luggage.”
At night the Babe goes from party to party, or he just goes, and eventually the party comes to him.
“Sailor Bob” Shawkey hunts and fishes with Ruth all the time, and he swears one time they went hunting in a cabin in the middle of the woods in Northern Michigan that took them two hours over dirt roads to drive to, and by the end of the weekend that cabin was full of broads and booze.
Our very talented but slightly unbalanced outfielder, Bob Meusel, says that when he and Ruth were barnstorming after the World Series in ’21, Ruth brought a girl back to their room in Oklahoma and while Meusel tried to get some sleep, Ruth screwed her loud and long, and when he was done he lit a cigar, which Meusel says Ruth does every time he finishes. Well, Meusel falls asleep and says that after the girl left around 7 o’clock that morning, he wakes up and asks the Babe how many times he’d done her, and the Babe just pointed to his bedside ashtray. The one with seven cigar butts in it.
Ilive two blocks from the Babe’s hotel, the Ansonia, and a few times last season he gave me a ride up to the stadium in his custom-made Nash sedan. Once we stopped to get gas and I got out to fill it up, and after about five minutes I realized something was dangerously wrong — the gas pump says I’ve already put 40 gallons in the car, but the gas is still flowing! So now I’m in a panic, and I’m looking all around and under the car for the leak, and the Babe just starts laughing at me. Then he tells me that because he goes out driving, drinking and catting all night long, he never likes to have to stop for gas, so he had a 55-gallon gas tank built into his car.
Yup. Ruth’s got himself a customized automobile with a gas tank big enough for a bus, just so he doesn’t have to stop when he’s out hunting for “dinner and a daughter,” as he likes to phrase it. Ever since then, it scares the hell out of me whenever someone lights a match near that car.
But here’s one more thing about Ruth. He’s also the god of children.
Last year, on two of our drives up to the Stadium, Ruth told me we were going to be half an hour late but not to worry, that he would talk to Miller Huggins, and pay my fine. And then instead of going straight to the stadium, we stopped at a hospital in Washington Heights and the Babe stayed an hour just talking to the kids. There wasn’t any press around. The folks at the hospital really knew him — everyone knows Babe Ruth — but these folks knew him as a regular visitor.
Ballplayers see the Babe around kids and, honest, we all feel kind of jealous. You feel happy for the kids, and the Babe, but there’s a part of you that’s jealous because no one kid is ever gonna love you the way every kid in America loves the Babe.
Ruth is a child. Childlike and childish, but since 1925, he’s been mostly childlike. He has no inhibitions, no sense that the world is not his for the taking, and except for Miller Huggins and Ed Barrow, no sense that there ever existed such a thing as a parent or anyone else with rules attached to them.
He’s like a lost boy, and every boy in America sees that. They all see a bit of themselves in Ruth. He’s big and ugly, so not a lot of boys really want to be Babe Ruth. But they all feel that they are Babe Ruth, in some real way. And the Babe knows that. He feels like a symbol to them. But he also feels like he’s their pal. Like every kid is his best friend.
The Babe regularly signs autographs for kids in the outfield during the games, between innings, or if the game gets halted because of a pitching change or an injury he’ll walk over to the stands and sign then, too. Sometimes fans run out of the stands just to shake his hand and ask him for an autograph. And he gives it, every time.
Most of all, Ruth’s like a kid who always had his nose pressed to the wrong side of the window and had to watch other kids open presents every Christmas, while he got none. He grew up poor and in a reform school, and then suddenly there he was: 19 years old with the ability to just walk into a showroom and buy a car with the money that was in his pocket, and he’s been buying presents for himself and everyone else ever since.
If I was in a gunfight, I’d want Sailor Bob Shawkey by my side. If I was in a bar fight, I’d want Silent Bob Meusel. If I was on a desert island and had to figure out how to survive, I’d want Waite Schoolboy Hoyt, our best pitcher and the savviest man on the team with me. But if I could always be by one guy’s side, for the whole roller coaster ride of his life on earth? I’d want that guy to be the Babe.
That’s what Babe Ruth’s like, to me.
