Baseball Memories: Joe, Paul, the Giants and the Yankees
Written by David Lippman
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
(Eds Note) One of Gotham Baseball Magazine's finest contributors, David Lippman's enchanting tale of his family's legacy interwoven through sports history is a must read. If you haven't read any of the previous installements, I urge you you to do so - MH
To my grandmother’s eternal rage, my father was born at the Bronx Episcopalian Home for Wayward Girls.
Actually, by the time Joe and Rose Lippman arrived there for the delivery of their only child, the building had become the Jewish Memorial Hospital, but nobody had removed the stonework that gave the old name. So Joe Lippman spent the rest of his life making jokes about the hospital’s name, while Rose Lippman fumed and fulminated. Fuming and fulminating was what she did best, anyway.
Paul Lippman was born on June 24, 1928. According to the web page at http://www.retrosheet.org, that day the Yankees shut out the Boston Red Sox, 4-0, behind George Pipgras, at the Stadium, maintaining an 8½-game lead over the Philadelphia Athletics. The Brooklyn Dodgers shut out the New York Giants, 2-0, at Ebbets Field. The Giants fell to six games behind the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League, in third place. Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons started and lost.
In those days, the Giants and Yankees alternated home-and-home, with the Dodgers as odd team out. So all three New York teams could play in New York on a given day. That made life good for New York’s baseball fans, and it stayed that way until 1957, over the first 29 years of my father’s life.
It was also a good thing the Yankees won that day, as they had dropped a doubleheader the day before to the Boston Red Sox. The win on June 24 kept the Red Sox 20 games behind the Yankees, in sixth place. But in those days, there was no rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox. The Sox were a terrible ball club, known for ineptitude. The Yankees’ real rivals were Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, spearheaded by Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove.
Rose didn’t want a boy. She had hoped for a pretty little girl. She had grown up in a family with four girls and one boy, and she liked little girls better than little boys. I never quite understood why, because she worshipped her brother Frank Denker. He was a con man who started his career as a con man at age five, selling yesterday’s three-cent newspapers for two cents today.
Paul was my grandparents’ only child. There were many reasons. The delivery took 12 hours. Dad came out all bruised and Grandma didn’t want to look at him.
Just to make the situation more interesting, Rose apparently knew nothing about the “facts of life” at any time in her life. Rose’s only class in sex education came from her mother while she was getting dressed for her own wedding in 1925. Sarah Brill Denker said to Rose, “Don’t expect too much tonight, dear.” Rose wondered what her mother was talking about. That might explain why it took my grandparents three years to conceive my father in the first place.
Frank Denker moved up to bigger and better cons, like bootlegging liquor and selling fake boxing tickets, but never really succeeded at them. So instead he became a pharmacist, like his brother-in-law Joe Lippman, and was working the late shift at Joe’s drugstore at Dyckman Street and Payson Avenue the night Dad was born, while my grandparents were at the hospital.
So when Frank reported that two men had robbed the store that night, nobody in our family – except Rose – believed him. We were convinced Frank had pocketed the cash. But he insisted two men, one older, one younger, had robbed him, and 50 years later, he proved it to my father, showing him the yellowed clipping on the arrest of the two suspects from the Daily News. It was a father-and-son stick up team, and they had been working upper Manhattan and The Bronx, robbing drug stores, armed with shotguns. Frank was lucky to survive.
What all this proved to me, when I heard these stories first as a child, then as a teenager, was that contrary to popular belief, the “Good Old Days” were terrible. They had crime, con men, and killers back then, too. Crime was actually worse then, because of prohibition. Since it was now illegal to drink, arrests for drunk driving doubled in America. The number of illegal speakeasies was twice the number of shuttered taverns, and gangsters armed with Thompson sub-machine guns were shooting up the streets of Chicago. New York had its share of mobsters, too. Dutch Schultz came from Newark and got whacked in a restaurant there. Guess the calamari didn’t sit well. Lucky Luciano, Murder Inc., and Albert Anastasia were the biggest headlines in the Daily News and the Daily Mirror for the violence and gunplay they authored. Dad remarked later in life that all Prohibition did was turn America into “a nation of criminals.”
Even Grandpa was one…he could sell “medicinal alcohol” by prescription. Amazing how many doctors were prescribing liquor for everything from cramps to scarlet fever.
Speaking of diseases, they had some terrifying ones back then. When a kid on my father’s block on Payson Avenue came down with polio, everybody kept their kids in the apartments and puttied up the windows, to keep the polio germs out of the house. Polio could kill you. So could whooping cough. Or the measles. Or pneumonia. There weren’t any antibiotics back then. No penicillin. If you got sick, you drank horrid-tasting calamine lotion and hoped you got better. Catholic mothers would jingle rosary beads, but they didn’t help much.
If a major league ballplayer hurt his arm or shoulder, the trainer didn’t run out onto the field with a huge first-aid kit, and they didn’t send him to hospital for an MRI and a cat scan. They didn’t have physical therapists to oversee the player’s injury rehabilitation. You had to recover from the “sore arm,” tough it out, or quit. So when Dizzy Dean injured his toe in an All-Star Game, it wasn’t properly treated. He had to pitch around it. He tried. He wrecked his pitching motion, which wrecked his arm, which wrecked his career. Grandpa sometimes mentioned that to me.
They may not have had antibiotics, but they did have a national drug abuse problem.Grandpa knew about that, as a pharmacist. Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and opium were all sold openly. It wasn’t illegal to sell them, possess them, or use them. Grandpa filled prescriptions from doctors for all of those drugs, and kept them in the basement of the store. He knew he could make more money selling them out the back than out the front, but he was an honest guy.
Dad and Grandpa would sometimes see drug addicts staggering around after taking whatever they took, in those suits everybody wore back then, in the same crazy daze they have today. Kids sometimes turned up at school on a high, and would give out whatever they had to their schoolmates. Politicians, educators, and clergy members fulminated on the issue, but nothing was done. There were no rehab centers. Junkies were tossed into insane asylums and jail. If you were a junkie, you were an object of derision or fear.
All the drugs were legal, but scary. Especially marijuana, which was well-known in New York because it was popular at all the speakeasies and illegal nightclubs. But that was the biggest terror of them all for Dad and the other kids his age.
In 1936, a film called “Tell Your Children” appeared in movie theaters, coming right between the B-movie and the newsreel, and Dad and the rest of his pals had to sit through this at the Academy Theater on Dyckman Street before they could see the latest newsreel of Joe DiMaggio making amazing catches in center field.
“Tell Your Children” was a short cautionary tale about the dangers of marijuana abuse. In the film, clean-cut teenagers got introduced to marijuana, and once they smoked the huge reefers, they started laughing like maniacs, playing the piano loudly and badly, going insane, and killing people. At the end of the picture, one victim was declared permanently insane and his girlfriend killed herself. The final image was the film’s narrator, a high school principal, warning the movie-going adults to keep their kids away from marijuana.
Dad ran back to Grandpa very frightened, and told him that marijuana made you go insane and kill people. Grandpa was stunned. As a pharmacist, he knew that was not the effect of weed. He told Dad it wasn’t that bad, but stay away from marijuana anyway. He did. So 40 years later, I did. I didn’t want to laugh like a maniac and kill people.
But if you didn’t want to get high from marijuana or cocaine, you could always be like Bess Houdini, widow of the famous magician, Harry Houdini.
He died in 1926, and she lived in her family home on Payson Avenue up the hill from Joe’s drugstore, and she regularly came into the store to buy non-prescription tranquilizer pills by the bucketload. She also drank bathtub gin by the bucketload, and spent Harry’s money on hiring “psychics” who promised to send her Harry’s big message from the “other side.” It never arrived. She should have tried Western Union. Back then, they also had a titanic economic collapse that bankrupted the nation. Dad was just a year old when the stock market “laid an egg,” and that didn’t mean anything to him, but it did to Joe and Rose. Suddenly all their customers stopped buying anything at the drug store.
In those days, drug stores didn’t just fill prescriptions and sell deodorant (which didn’t exist yet), they had soda and ice cream fountains, they sold magazines, baseball cards, chewing gum, and hairnets. They sold a lot of the stuff that today people buy from supermarkets, because the only supermarket around was that new King Kullen that had opened in 1925 way the heck out on Long Island. You couldn’t get there on the Broadway local, so you bought what you needed at the corner drugstore, and there seemed to be a drugstore on every corner.
People went shopping every day, usually because huge refrigerators and freezers hadn’t been invented yet. Neither had microwave ovens or TV dinners.
But about seven months after the stock market crashed, the companies that lost all their money in the debacle finally took the really heavy cost-cutting measures they needed to stay afloat, which meant firings and closings. In the days before unemployment insurance, Social Security, welfare, and Workmen’s Compensation, that meant fired workers and their families were facing eviction, the poorhouse, and starvation. So nobody had any money to buy an ice cream cone or a copy of Collier’s magazine from Grandpa.
The next blow to fall was one that was scheduled. Until 1931, people going from New York to New Jersey would take a ferry at the foot of Dyckman Street to go to Fort Lee, following the route taken by British troops in the American War of Independence. While they waited in their cars on Dyckman Street for the next boat, they would go into Grandpa’s drug store to buy a magazine (Life had just got started), Cherry Coke (Joe tossed the cherries into the soda and voila, Cherry Coke) or a pack of cigarettes (everybody smoked: Joe DiMaggio did ads that told you Chesterfield didn’t have a “cough in a carload”).
In 1931, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opened the George Washington Bridge, sparking a memorable children’s book about a great gray bridge and a little red lighthouse – but also taking all the traffic off of Dyckman Street.
It was a pretty good double whammy for Joe and Rose. And just to make it three strikes, the building that held the drugstore began sinking into a swamp. The landlord told Joe he’d have to close or move. Some weeks Rose was on the phone to Con Edison, begging them not to shut off the power for a few hours. Every time Joe found $20 over his minimum stock in the cash register, he had Paul take it to Rose, who would then pay of a piece of some outstanding bill – the landlord, the grocer, or the Con Edison.
It was a lousy time to own a drugstore or be a kid. It wasn’t that good a time to be a New York baseball fan, either. Joe had grown up with the New York Giants. Now they had grown old.
In the 1920s, they had a future Hall of Fame infield with Bill Terry, Dave Bancroft, Travis Jackson, and Fred Lindstrom, but the St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Chicago Cubs dominated the National League. The Cards had Grover Cleveland Alexander and Frankie Frisch, the Pirates had Paul and Lloyd Waner, and the Cubs had Rogers Hornsby and Hack Wilson.
Things didn’t go so well for the Yankees, either. They swept the Pirates and the Cardinals in the 1927 and 1928 World Series, but then Manager Miller Huggins died in 1929, and the Yankee season collapsed, just like 50 years later, when Thurman Munson died.
The big difference was that Thurman died in a mid-summer tragic and ghastly plane crash. Huggins developed blood poisoning late in the season and died of that. Like Thurm, Huggins died young – Hug was only 49. Like Thurm, Huggins was held in universal respect by his players and was regarded around the league as a small but tough guy you didn’t mess with. Hug handed out a nine-day suspension to Babe Ruth in 1925, and the Babe never questioned the little guy ever again. And like Thurm, they put up a memorial to honor Huggins. The big differences were three: Hug died in 1929, and his plaque, paid for by the Baseball Writers Association of America New York Chapter, went up in 1932. Thurm died in 1979, and his plaque, paid for by the Yankees, went up almost right away. Hug’s memorial was the first one out there, too.
Unlike Thurm, Huggins held a law degree. Not so ridiculous on the face – Tony La Russa has a law degree – but still surprising. Not only did Huggins run his team on the field, he used his legal and business knowledge to make sure his players turned those World Series checks into bigger money over the winter. And Huggins was a tiny little fellow, not the hefty bulk Munson was.
But it had the same impact. The bottom was gone from the Yankees, and they finished the last few games of the 1929 season in a fog. Next year, under former pitcher and Great War Navy veteran Bob Shawkey, the Yankees fell to third place. He even traded two of the stars of the 1927 team, Waite Hoyt and Mark Koenig, to Detroit after Hoyt lipped off to his manager. Since Hoyt went on pitching in the majors for eight more years, that move didn’t make much sense. And Babe Ruth complained about Shawkey’s managing, too, so the Sailor sailed off, replaced by Joe McCarthy, who became a legend.
But Shawkey got a last laugh. He pitched and won the first game at Yankee Stadium in 1923, so when they re-opened the ballpark in 1976, he threw out the first pitch.
With or without Hoyt, the Yankees and Giants didn’t do much in 1930. Bill Terry hit .401 to lead the National League and all of creation in hitting. The Giants finished second under a grouchy and sick John J. McGraw anyway. Meanwhile, McCarthy re-organized the Yankees in 1931…no card-playing or shaving in the clubhouse, everybody had to wear suits on road trips, and most importantly, the Yankees had to have clean, crisp uniforms for every game. He also ordered larger ballcaps, so the players looked bigger. Check out the photos of the Huggins Yankees and after: the old caps were beanies with the interlocking “NY.” The later caps are like the modern ones. The old uniforms look dirty and banged-up. The later ones are shiny. That was probably very intimidating to opposing teams, then and now.
But Dad didn’t notice most of this stuff, being an infant. As he hit childhood, he was aware of other things. His neighborhood in Inwood was different from his relatives’ neighborhoods in The Bronx and Brooklyn. Sure, it had rows of brownstones, street peddlers, elevated trains running over cobblestoned streets with trolley tracks like the rest of New York, but Rose could walk over a few blocks to a real farm at 214th Street and 10th Avenue, where a family was still planting vegetables – right under the elevated subway tracks – and selling pumpkins and corn on the spot. It was the last farm on Manhattan Island.
And Payson Avenue itself was on a hill, so in winter, he and his pals could go sledding down the street.
But the best part was Inwood Hill Park, directly across Payson Avenue, which began in “Billy Meyers’ Yard” – whatever that was, but that’s what the open area was called – and led up into the extreme northwest corner of Manhattan, where the Dutch had purchased the island in 1626, and the last remaining piece of Manhattan’s original forest still stood. Dad played ball in the yard with his pals and all the other kid games in the forest.
More importantly, the various tribes of Indians that had been rooked out of Manhattan by Capt. Peter Minuit – which translated, made him “Captain Midnight,” New York’s first superhero or supervillain – held annual summer reunions up in Inwood Hill Park, wearing their feathers, beating drums, doing chants, just like those Tom Mix Westerns, and the big attraction was this legendary Indian princess, who was supposed to show up and dance naked around the campfire in front of everybody or something like that. Yeah, just like the movies, only she really takes off all her clothes! Check it out, Paul! Of course, when Dad finally saw the Princess step out of her Model A Ford to attend the big bash, she was 80 years old and a mass of wrinkles, and while she was wearing the feathers, she didn’t dance or take off her clothes or do anything else. It was kind of a rip-off.
I didn’t believe this story when Dad told it to me, until I found a book about New York that had a photograph of the old girl with her grandchildren, and I showed it to Dad. He pointed right at the old Mohawk bag and said, “Yep, that’s her.”
But if the Indian Princess was a fake, what was Joe supposed to think in 1932, when Babe Ruth took Charlie Root downtown in the third game of the World Series.
It was a typical year for the Yankees…they stomped everybody bloody and won 107 games. The only trouble they had came when Bill Dickey broke a Washington Senator’s jaw with one punch in a home plate dispute, and drew a 30-day suspension. That was probably the biggest hit the Senators had all season.
The Chicago Cubs did something they don’t do any more…they won the National League pennant, with sluggers like Riggs Stephenson and Kiki Cuyler. They also had some extremely tough pitchers in Lon Warneke, Pat Malone, Guy Bush, Burleigh Grimes, and Charlie Root.
Charlie Root was typical of the pitching staff, a prototype for the tobacco-squirting ornery right-hander, who’s not afraid to knock you down on the plate if you dig in against him. In 1969 the Chicago fans named him their best right-handed pitcher ever, but I think Ferguson Jenkins has good reason to disagree.
All the Cub toughness didn’t help them much. The Yankees blasted them in the opener at Yankee Stadium, 12-6, overcoming a two-run Ruth error in the first with a two-run homer by Lou Gehrig. In Game Two, Lefty Gomez went the distance and Ben Chapman’s two-run single in the third lifted the Yankees to a 5-2 victory.
So if they took Game Three in Chicago, the Yankees would have the insurmountable three-game lead.
What people don’t know is that Root, who was 15-10, with a 3.58 ERA on the season, was having a tough year. His strikeout total had fallen below 100 for the first time in six years, and it never rose over 100 again.
The other background to this scene is that the Cubs had acquired Mark Koenig, the former Yankee shortstop, as infield insurance when Billy Jurges got hurt, and he batted .353 in 33 games, a fine clip by any standard. But when the Cubs sat down to decide on series shares, they voted only half a share to Koenig.
The Yankees remembered Koenig from the 1927 and 1928 World Champion teams. The Yankees regarded the Cubs as being a bunch of cheapskates, and said so to the press. The Cubs retaliated by saying the original plan was to give Koenig a quarter share, but they upped it to half a share to recognize his hitting. The Cubs were even cheaper to rookie center fielder Frank Demaree. He played only 23 games in the season, but he platooned with Johnny Moore in center in the series, hit a home run…and got a quarter share. Yeah, I’d call them cheapskates. When Ruth found out about that vote a week after the series, he did, even more loudly.
It may seem strange in the days of huge multi-million contracts and massive endorsement deals, when the major league minimum is $300,000, for players to berate each other over half- and quarter-shares in the World Series. But back then, those post-season shares were huge money for woefully paid ballplayers. If you got a Series share, you didn’t have to work in the Chrysler plant or digging ditches that winter. And in 1932, there weren’t too many jobs digging ditches. Not many endorsement offers, either.
The Yankee outbursts didn’t change the Cubs’ share payouts, but it did succeed in enraging all of Chicago. And the flames were superheated by the equally fiery rhetoric of the Chicago Tribune, owned by the right-wing isolationist and general nutball Col. Bertie McCormick, who was the Rupert Murdoch of his day. Bertie had a penthouse atop the “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” and before anyone could see him, they had to fill out a questionnaire about their life, hobbies, clubs, and background.
Then a secretary shot a photograph of the visitor on the spot, and the mug shot would be rushed through development and handed to the colonel. He’d study the photo and read the questionnaire and no matter what the issue was, if the guy didn’t look or read right, that secretary would tell the poor sucker, “The colonel cannot see you today.” Get out.
No explanation.
The colonel had many dislikes and hatreds, particularly Democrats, liberals, and the British. New York had heaps of the first two, and probably a lot of sympathy for the latter. He didn’t think much of Jews or blacks, either, and New York had a lot of those. So he didn’t like New York, and his newspaper said so, as frequently as possible. And he made money off of that line of drivel. In a lot of ways, he was like Peter Parker’s tyrannical newspaper boss, J. Jonah Jameson.
That was also a time when bench-jockeying was a serious business and art. Players would spew out colorful, graphic, and unrepeatable insults at opponents and umpires all game long. The popular insult was to say the batter was a six-letter word that is a description for an African-American, a phrase that was popular at that time.
Nowadays, ballplayers aren’t big on bench-jockeying, and not because today’s players are more culturally sensitive. They change teams a lot more, so the guy they berate today is tomorrow’s teammate. Players make more money, so they are not as dependent on winning and living off the post-season checks. The union has made players more of a front united against owners. Most of the taunting is now done internally to keep the teammates loose.
Not back then. The Yankees insulted the Cubs as cheapskates, and the Cubs berated Babe Ruth over old rumors that he had black ancestry.
So when the Yankees came to town with a two-game lead in the World Series, Chicago fans treated the Yankees to the same kind of jeering and contempt they get today when they go to…well, Chicago. Angry Cub fans were at La Salle Street Station to “greet” the Yankees and the team needed to squeeze into a freight elevator and endure a police motorcycle escort to get to the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where there were more and angrier fans – one woman spit on Babe Ruth’s wife Claire.
When the Yankees showed up at Wrigley Field for batting practice next day, the place was packed with 49,985 angry Cub fans and New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in town to get himself nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention. He was rooting for the Yankees from a front-row seat, like Rudy Giuliani today.
The fans hurled insults and lemons at Babe Ruth, to say that he was one. The Babe threw them back. The fans were not amused, but that’s as far as it went.
Nowadays angry fans hurl toilet paper (in general) or money (at Reggie Jackson) or AA batteries (at John Rocker). I think they should just stick to colorful invective.
In batting practice, Ruth annoyed the fans even more, by smacking home runs to right field, aided by the wind. He yelled at the Cubs, “I’d play for half my salary if I could hit in this dump all the time.” The Cubs were unimpressed. Cub trainer Andy Lotshaw shouted, “If I had you, I’d hitch you to a wagon, potbelly.”
The game began with Earle Combs’ hitting Root’s first pitch to Billy Jurges at short. Jurges was there because Koenig had hurt his wrist in New York and was sidelined. Jurges promptly manhandled ground ball and hurling it into the stands behind first base for a two-base error, followed by a walk to Joe Sewell. With two on and nobody out, Babe Ruth smacked a three-run dinger to put the Yankees up 3-0, silencing the audience. I wonder what Root thought. Great way to start a World Series game in front of your home fans, huh?
The Cubs got a run back on a walk and a double in the first, but Lou Gehrig led off the third inning with a home run to make it 4-2. The Cubs answered that with a Kiki Cuyler home run in the bottom of the inning, and a walk and a double made it a 4-3 game. Then the Cubs tied it up in the fourth when Tony Lazzeri made an error.
Now Charlie Root is trying to get the Cubs back in the series, and it’s the top of the fifth. Root starts off the inning by inducing Joe Sewell to ground out. One out and Babe Ruth coming to bat.
So here’s the Babe, coming to bat with one out in the top of the fifth, game tied. The Cubs are razzing him from the bench, the fans are razzing him and still hurling lemons from the stands, the newspapers are razzing him in print, and some moron spat on his wife. If I were Ruth, I would have wanted to shove my bat into some guy’s mouth.
Instead he smiled at Root and took called strike one. The Cub players, on the top of their dugout steps, and their fans fired more abuse at Babe. As everyone knows, Ruth held up one finger to say, “That’s one.” Obviously not the middle finger.
Root threw two balls, and then got his heater by Ruth again for called strike two, and Babe stuck up two fingers and said to catcher Hartnett, “It only takes one to hit it.” Ruth pointed roughly at Root or the Cub bench, snarling, “I’m going to knock that next pitch down your blankety-blank throat.” (No sense enraging grandmothers here.)
Then came the legend. Root fired a 2-2 pitch and Ruth smashed his 15th and last World Series home run into Wrigley’s center field bleachers, to put the Yankees up 5-4. Ruth trotted round the bases, and said something to each Cub infielder en route. I’ve often wondered what Root did at that moment…obviously he spun around to watch the ball fly into the seats, but after that…what? Did he call for a new ball? Did he insult Ruth? Did he wat for Hartnett to come out and pat him on the rump and say, “Relax, big guy?” I don’t know. I’ve never read any description of it. I asked Grandpa if he remembered much about the radio broadcast of the game, and he said he was just caught up in the home run.
One thing I did know was that Root indignantly denied that Babe had pointed to the center field seats. Root said he’d knock the Babe down with a brushback pitch. Hartnett said the same. From what I’ve read of Charlie Root, I can believe it. Looking at the numbers and the life, he comes over as a proud, scrappy professional, typical of the 1930s ballplayer, who played hard and ferocious, knowing that only fierce excellence stood between his reasonably well-paying job and the breadlines.
As the Babe rounded third, laughing, he yelled at the Cub bench, “Squeeze the eagle club!” I have no idea what that means. Roosevelt, sitting in his front-row box, burst into laughter, and watched the Babe trot back to his dugout, where the Yankees greeted him with backslaps and hugs. No high-fives. No curtain calls. No instant replay from seven different angles. Too bad. On the bright side, Howard Cosell didn’t talk over it. When the Babe returned to the bench, Frankie Crosetti recalled, someone asked if he’d really called the shot, and Ruth retorted, “If the writers want to think I pointed, let them. I don’t care.”
Meanwhile, the on-deck hitter, Lou Gehrig, stepped into the box to face Root. The game was far from over, and now came the part that Grandpa remembered all his life. Root must have been really shaken up by Babe’s second homer of the day, his audacity, and from losing the lead. Apparently Root’s next heater had very little velocity or movement, because without any fuss, pointing, or histrionics, Gehrig whipped round on Root’s fastball and smashed it into the same place Ruth walloped his. Then Gehrig trotted round the bases, head down, in his usual total silence.
Most people who talk about that game don’t remember that shot, but Grandpa did. That was Gehrig’s second shot of the game, too. To Joe, it was like the exclamation point on a sentence. Later, Grandpa realized the two home runs were microcosms of the two players’ careers: Ruth doing everything with larger-than-life drama and dazzle, Gehrig doing the job with quiet professionalism. Gehrig didn’t swap insults with opponents or call his shots…he just smacked them.
After Gehrig trotted round the bases, Charlie Grimm shuffled out to the mound to take out Charlie Root, and Pipgras shut them down the rest of the way. I never found out if the fans continued to throw lemons at the Yankees. I did wonder where the fans got them, but I guess if New York had apple sellers on every corner in the Great Depression, Chicago had lemon sellers.
That evening, Yankee Manager Joe McCarthy told his players to pack their kit in the morning, as they would be going home after Game Four…there would be no Game Five at Wrigley Field. The Yankees did just that.
In Game Four, the Yankees sent Johnny Allen out to cope with Guy Bush. Three years later, Bush would serve up home runs number 713 and 714 to Babe Ruth in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. Bush disliked the Babe, and probably had good reason. This afternoon, the Yankees opened up with an Earle Combs single, a Joe Sewell single, bringing Ruth to the plate.
Bush sent a message from the Cubs, by hitting Ruth on the wrist with a pitch, loading the bases for Lou Gehrig, who rapped a run-scoring sacrifice fly (they didn’t record them then, but that’s what it was) that advanced the runners. Bush then walked Tony Lazzeri, to load the bases with one out, and Grimm had seen enough. The Cubs were about to dribble away the Series in four games. Bush departed in favor of the Cubs’ ace, Lon Warneke, who was 22-6 with a 2.37 ERA that year, both league leaders. Too bad they didn’t have the Cy Young Award back then…Warneke might be better remembered. Warneke went on to become a National League umpire after he couldn’t pitch, which is another thing you don’t see any more. I can’t even imagine Derek Jeter or Andy Pettitte becoming umpires when they hang up their spikes.
So Warneke jogged in from the bullpen and did his job…he got a force out at the plate and then a ground ball to end the rally, and I’ll bet every Chicago fan at the park was giving Warneke a huge ovation.
Ruth was badly hurt…his wrist swelled up and in the clubhouse, trainer Doc Painter put hot towels on his arm. Later Painter said that if the series had continued, Ruth would have been shelved. Today they’d have something better than hot towels. But now it was Allen’s turn, and the big myth about the Yankees is that you give them a lead, and they hold it. Wrong. Allen had two outs and a runner on first. Then he gave up two singles and a home run to Frank Demaree, so he could earn his quarter-share. After Crosetti made an error, the Cubs got two more singles, and that was all for Allen. If you told Allen before the game he’d last a third of an inning more than Bush, he probably would have been very pleased. Well, he did, but I don’t think was happy about it.
McCarthy brought on Wilcy Moore, and he faced Warneke, the ninth batter of the inning, and induced a pop fly. The Cubs now led 4-1, and they were back in the game and maybe the Series.
Not for long. The Yankees got two runs in the third on a Tony Lazzeri home run to make it 4-3. Warneke came out in the fourth when he gave up a leadoff single and a walk, and Jakie May, pitching his last major league game, came on. He struck out Ruth and stopped the bleeding. In the sixth, May gave up two more runs when Gehrig singled in Combs and Sewell, to make it 5-4.
The roof fell in on the Cubs in the seventh. May gave up a single to Bill Dickey, erased
Ben Chapman on a fly out to center, and then Frankie Crosetti doubled. Dickey had to stop at third on the throw and his catcher’s legs, bringing up pitcher Wilcy Moore. Even the rankest baseball fan knows that this is a pinch-hit situation. So who do the Yankees send to bat? Another pitcher! Yep, Red Ruffing, Bill Dickey’s favorite pitcher. What a lot of people don’t know about Red Ruffing – and nobody seems to know much about him any more, which is sad – is that he won 273 games, and drove in 273 RBIs, the most for any pitcher in the 20th century. He often batted more than .300, and even .364 in 1930, with 36 lifetime home runs. He also lost four of his toes on his left foot to a mining accident as a teenager in Nokomis, Illinois.
Ruffing came up as an outfielder and pitcher with the Boston Red Sox in the 1920s and did badly. That team stank, of course, but Ruffing had trouble with his follow-through, because he had to land on the side of his left foot.
Amazingly, the Yankees saw something in him. In May 1930, the Yankees traded Cedric Durst and $50,000 for Ruffing, who was 39-96 with the Red Sox. With the Sox, he led the American League in defeats in 1928 with 25 and again in 1929 with 22. But that year, the dying Miller Huggins took Ruffing aside when the Sox were at Yankee Stadium, and told Ruffing the Yankees were going after him. Today that would be “tampering” and a fine, and splashed all over ESPN and “Mike and the Mad Dog.”
It was almost as big a robbery as the Ruth trade, but again, nobody remembers it. Too bad. They should. Ruffing was 234-129 for the Yankees, with four straight 20-win seasons. In 1932, he led the American League in strikeouts. His World Series record was 7-2, and he remains the leading Yankee right-handed pitcher in all the major lifetime categories: wins, starts, games, and strikeouts.
Maybe they should have called it “the curse of Red Ruffing.”
The Cubs were impressed by Ruffing’s hitting ability. They walked him intentionally, loading the bases with one out. Myril Hoag ran for Ruffing, and Earle Combs came up. He smashed a single to left that scored Dickey from third, keeping the bases loaded. Must have been a shallow hit. Sewell was next, and he singled to right, scoring Chapman and Hoag. Ruth got his only hit of the game next, singling in Combs, and then May loaded the bases again by hitting Gehrig.
And that was all for Jakie May, literally. His last major league appearance. The booing must have hurt. Someone named Bud Tinning came on, and he got a force out at the plate to erase Sewell for two outs, then struck out Tony Lazzeri looking to end the slaughter.
The Yankees now led 9-5.
Herb Pennock, the “Knight of Kennett Square,” came on to pitch the three-inning save for the Yankees, and he breezed through the Cub lineup. The Cubs hit for Tinning in the eighth, and sent veteran and legal spitballer Burleigh Grimes out to pitch the ninth inning. “Desperate measures must be took,” Grandpa and later my brother Andrew said. Earle Combs led off the ninth and homered. Joe Sewell grounded out. In his very last World Series at bat, Babe Ruth grounded out. Lou Gehrig walked, and then Tony Lazzeri smacked a two-run homer, making the game a 12-5 rout.
By this time, as my brother Andrew would say, “White flags were waving” in the Cub dugout. Bill Dickey hit a single to center, and Demaree, the home run star, misplayed it, enabling Dickey to reach second. I guess that quarter-share was not that bad an idea. Chapman scored Dickey with a single. 13-5. I n the ninth, Billy Herman singled, reached second and third on defensive indifference, and scored on a ground out by Woody English. Cuyler struck out and Riggs Stephenson lined out and the series was officially in the books, but the legends had only just started. Joe Williams, the sports editor for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain reported that Babe Ruth had called his famous shot in the afternoon papers on October 1, the day Game Three. Westbrook Pegler, writing a column for Hearst, and not yet denouncing anyone to the left of Francisco Franco as a Communist, claimed the same. He also got the pitch sequence wrong.
Herbert Simons, Dan Daniel, John Drebinger, Dick Vidmer, Warren Brown, and Damon Runyon, some of the biggest sportswriters in the business, all covering the game, did not mention it in their stories. Indeed, Cobbledick, who went on as a baseball writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 30 years, spent most of those 30 years denying Ruth called the homer. Runyon’s front-page story in the New York American ran two-and-a-half columns. No “called shot.”
Nobody else reported it for three days. Only then, when America’s sportswriters had acquired and read their competitors’ papers, did they start printing this legend, embellishing it with Ruth pointing at the center field seats to “call” the shot, and hitting it on an 0-2 count. But all the other contemporary accounts say that Ruth was merely telling the Cub bench that he had one more strike, and Root that the next pitch would go down his throat.
Joe McCarthy was evasive: “I’m not going to say he didn’t do it. Maybe I didn’t see it. Maybe I was looking the other way. Anyway, I’m not going to say he didn’t do it.” Sounds like McCarthy didn’t want to deflate his biggest star’s biggest moment. Charlie Root was furious. Asked to re-create the scene in the movie “The Babe Ruth Story” in 1947, Root refused. “Not if you’re going to have him pointing,” the pitcher snarled. “If he had I would have knocked him down with the next pitch.” Hartnett backed his pitcher.
Woody English, who was playing for the Cubs that day, also denied the story fairly indignantly. He was the Cubs’ third baseman, and he said that Ruth had gestured at the Chicago dugout, saying, “That’s only two strikes.” But when I went through the testimony of the writers who covered the game, the words of Crosetti, English, and Billy Herman, who were there, I had to agree. Ruth didn’t call the shot. He just told the Cubs he was going to stick it down their throats. That’s what he did.
The “Called shot” didn’t happen.
But what did happen was that Lou Gehrig got nine hits in the series, including three home runs, and was the real star of the series. But like most of his career, nobody remembers that.
So in the end, there really was an Indian Princess, and Babe Ruth really did shove it to the Cubs in dramatic fashion. But both of them were fakes.
I have to disagree with John Ford…when the legend is a fake, print the truth. Facts are better than fiction, and to perpetuate a lie is a disservice to the past. And Joe and Paul hated lying.
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