Babe Ruth hit the first of his 714 major league home runs, 100 years ago, on May 6, 1915.
By Michael K. Bohn/McClatchy-Tribune News Service
As the visiting Boston Red Sox took the field in the bottom of the first inning, a tall and barrel-chested pitcher walked to the mound. Both the crowd of 5,000 in New York’s Polo Grounds and the Yankees in the dugout watched the left-handed George “Babe” Ruth prepare to face leadoff hitter Fritz Maisel. The game was 100 years ago yesterday on May 6, 1915, and it was Babe’s first full season in the majors.
The year before, the minor league Baltimore Orioles had sold Ruth to Boston, and Babe split his time between the parent club and the minors with the Providence Grays. In his first start of the 1915 season against Philadelphia, Ruth had given up five runs before being pulled in the fifth. On April 26, Ruth pitched well and gained a 9-2 win over the Athletics. Although not in the starting rotation, Ruth again got the nod on May 6 in the first of a four-game series against New York.
In 1913, the Yankees had begun renting the Giants home, the Polo Grounds, when the National League club was on the road. For the next 10 seasons, the two New York teams played in the period’s most unorthodox major-league ballpark. Although polo had never been played in the fourth version of the stadium, it certainly could have accommodated a match or even a track meet. In the giant, elongated “bathtub,” home plate lay at one end and deep centerfield at the other. It was located hard by the Harlem River and 115 feet below the crest of Coogan’s Bluff.
Ruth held the Yankees scoreless for two innings and came to bat for the first time in the third. He faced Yankee starter Jack “Chief” Warhop. A submarine-throwing right-hander, he was in his eighth and last season with the team. Called Chief because his name sounded like “war whoop,” he still holds the Yankees’ career record for hit batsmen, 114.
Warhop, who had yielded two hits in the first inning, started Ruth with a low fastball, perhaps hoping the big fellah might be taking. Babe wheeled on the pitch, sending it high into the second level of the right-field grandstand. Babe Ruth had hit his first major-league home run.
The New York Times reported Ruth homered with “no apparent effort.” The writer Damon Runyon, covering baseball for the New York American, gave his take: “Ruth knocked the slant out of one of Jack Warhop’s underhanded subterfuges.” Babe pitched into the 13th inning and lost the game when he gave up an RBI single for the game-winner.
Another homer on July 21 garnered national attention for the young pitcher-hitter. Against the St. Louis Browns, he hit one that cleared the right-field bleachers in Sportsman’s Park, bounced on the sidewalk across Grand Boulevard, and then broke a window of a car dealership. Certainly a Ruthian home run, writers estimated it carried about 415 feet.
Until then, reporters never wrote about “tape measure” home runs because major-league teams played “scientific” or “inside” baseball. Managers played percentages and prized a run produced by timely singles, stolen bases and sacrifice flies. Historians called the time the “dead ball era.” Umpires kept the same ball in play for the entire game, a practice made easier because so few home runs were hit then. Continued use made the ball soft, and many pitchers loaded it with dirt and tobacco juice. By the middle innings, the ball was more brown than white. Few players hit home runs because they couldn’t get the squishy ball to carry. Writers gave Frank “Home Run” Baker his nickname for hitting two in the 1911 World Series, but he had only 11 for the season.
In his first full season in the big leagues, Ruth won 18 and lost 8, batted .315 in 92 at-bats, and hit four home runs. Fifteen of his 29 hits went for extra bases.
FROM MOUND TO RIGHT FIELD
Ruth pitched his way to his profession’s pinnacle in 1916 and 1917. The best left-hander in the major leagues, Ruth may have been simply the best all together. To baseball purists, his records for the two years speak for themselves: 23-12, 1.75 ERA in 1916; and 24-13 and 2.01 the following year. In 1917, Ruth completed 35 of his 41 starts.
The move from the mound to the outfield took place slowly over the 1918 and 1919 seasons. The transition sped up when he hit mammoth home runs or game-winning triples. It slowed when Ruth the pitcher won important games. Ruth’s fights with the new Boston manager, Ed Barrow, over regular pitching starts hindered the move. Injuries to the rest of Boston’s rotation also interfered. Ultimately, Barrow, who had a piece of the gate money, joined Boston owner Harry Frazee in recognizing the increased revenue when Ruth was in the lineup.
During the 1918 season, Ruth played every day and pitched regularly, and the Red Sox clinched the pennant on Aug. 30. (World War I and a threat to draft ballplayers forced a short season, which ended on Labor Day.) Boston won the World Series against the Cubs, 4-2. Ruth won two of the games and extended his World Series scoreless streak, one carried over from the 1916 Series, to a record 29 2/3 consecutive innings. It wasn’t until 1961 that Whitey Ford broke this record.
Babe staggered baseball during the 1919 season when he broke the major-league home run record for a single season — Ned Williamson’s 27 in 1884. On Sept. 24, Babe hit the record-breaking 28th out of the Polo Grounds. The New York Times reported the “Colossus of Rhodes catapulted the pill for a new altitude and distance record.” Ruth hit his 29th and last home run of the season in Washington on Sept. 27.
Three months later, Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 cash and a $300,000 loan from Colonel Jacob Ruppert, one of the Yankees’ owners. Ruppert and his partner, Colonel T. L. Huston bought Ruth because they wanted to turn the perennial doormat Yankees into a winning team. When they asked their manager, Miller Huggins what he needed to contend for the 1920 pennant, he answered, “Get me Babe Ruth.”
Once the deal was done, both the owners and Huggins decided immediately to cease Ruth’s pitching career. “I will play Ruth in right or left field,” Huggins later told the press, “probably in right.”
THE BABE’S LAST HOME RUN
On aging legs, Ruth struggled through his last two seasons with New York, 1933-34. His only highlight was a home run in the first All-Star game on July 6, 1933, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Midway through the 1934 season, Ruth, the unfailingly positive player, found himself in a horrible situation. According to his second wife, Claire, his poor fielding distressed him, sitting on the bench dismayed him and Yankees manager Joe McCarthy enraged him. “He was unhappy away from the park,” she wrote in 1959, “because he was so exhausted and wracked with pain he could barely eat.”
The Yankees released Ruth on Feb. 26, 1935. Yankees owner Ruppert, Ruth and the National League Boston Braves’ owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, had negotiated a deal. Once released, Babe would sign with Boston as club vice president, assistant manager and part-time player. Boston fans still liked the Babe, and Fuchs hoped to raise attendance by playing the 40-year-old superstar. Ruth soon cooled to the arrangement and by mid-May talked of retirement. But Fuchs asked him to stay on for one last road trip.
Eighty years ago this month, on May 25, 1935, in Forbes Field In Pittsburgh against the Pirates, Ruth enjoyed one grand and glorious day at the ballpark. He hit his fourth home run of the year in the first inning, career number 712, off Red Lucas. In the third, Ruth faced Guy Bush and hit number 713, which barely cleared the right field fence, and followed with an RBI single in the fifth. In the seventh, 10,000 fans rose to their feet as the sore-legged Ruth came to the plate. Bush was still on the mound, and the Pirates led 7-5. Bush said later, “I’m going to throw three fast balls right by that guy and see what this crowd will do and get my laugh on him.”
Babe took the first strike, but on the second pitch he took his customary full bore, uppercut swing. “I never saw a ball hit so hard before or since,” Bush said. Ruth hit the ball over the upper deck of the right field stands. Number 714. No one had ever hit a ball that far in Forbes Field.
“So when he rounds third base,” Bush recalled, “I just look over there at him and he kind of looked at me. I tipped my cap just to say, ‘I’ve seen everything now, Babe.’ He just looked at me and kind of saluted and smiled, and that’s the last home run he ever hit.”
Ruth left the Braves on June 2. Except for a brief and unproductive stint as the Dodgers’ first base coach in 1938, Ruth sat by the phone and waited for a manager’s job that he had long coveted. None came. When minor-league positions opened up, Ruth emphatically declined, “I ain’t no busher!”
After Lou Gehrig fell ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Ruth appeared at the Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day on July 4, 1939, at Yankee Stadium. Their relationship had waned years before, but on this occasion, Babe gave Lou a big hug at home plate. In 1946, doctors diagnosed Ruth’s head and neck pains as throat cancer. An operation helped, but his health began a slow decline. The Yankees honored him with Babe Ruth Day on April 27, 1947. On Aug. 16, 1948, Babe Ruth died.
