Sunday, May 30, 2010

This Day in Baseball History (Ruth Plays Last Game)


May 30, 1935—Once better paid than the President of the United States, not only credited with spurring the New York Yankees to their tradition of glory but even with saving the national pastime itself in the wake of the “Black Sox” scandal, Babe Ruth bowed out of major-league baseball in a quiet, most un-Babe-like way: not at the cathedral of sports, Yankee Stadium, but at the Philadelphia Phillies’ decrepit Baker Bowl, grounding out meakly to first base, misplaying a ball in left field, injuring his knee in the process, then taking himself out at the end of the first inning.

Playing out the string and out of condition, The Babe had, only five days before, given fans one last reminder of how he had transformed the game—and why he had been its principal box-office attraction—by clubbing three homers for the visiting Boston Braves at Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The last of the trio was so Ruthian—sailing over the right-field grandstand, rolling over into neighboring Schenley Park, in what witnesses claimed was the longest drive ever recorded at Forbes—that fans might have been forgiven for thinking he was reviving his game.

If only he’d retired immediately afterward…

Not Quitting While Ahead

But professional athletes never know to quit while they’re ahead, do they? We love the storybook ending—Ted Williams homering in his last at-bat (and, characteristically, almost as a point of honor, perversely refusing to tip his hat to the Red Sox crowd that had sometimes booed him); John Elway and Michael Strachan, going out as Super Bowl champions; or Rocky Marciano, retiring undefeated and unscarred as heavyweight champion.

Instead, we get Mickey Mantle, hanging around for four seasons too long on weak knees, his lifetime batting average diping below .300; Muhammad Ali, refusing to retire after taking back the heavyweight championship from Leon Spinks, until his nervous system had sustained more blows from ring foes; or the New York Giants’ Y.A. Tittle, in an unforgettable image, knees sunk to the turf, his bald head smeared with cuts from the beating he took from the Pittsburgh Steelers in his final season.

Most of these latter athletes didn’t realize until too late that their skills were irreversibly declining. To his credit, that couldn’t be said for Ruth. He had wanted to call it a day after his 1934 season with the Bronx Bombers, when his 22 homers were nearly half of his total from only two years before that.

No, The Babe stuck around, despite his age (40), terrible knees and dismal playing condition (245 pounds, the heaviest of his career), for another reason: to fulfill his dream of managing a major-league franchise someday. To do so, he was prepared to part ways with the team on which he became an American legend.

A Quest to Manage

Ever since the death of Yankee skipper Miller Huggins, Ruth had hoped to segue from player to player-manager to strictly manager. In those years, it was not uncommon: John McGraw, Rogers Hornsby and Bill Terry had done so. There seemed no reason, the Bambino thought, why he couldn’t, too.

Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert demurred. Ruth might have resented the man who settled in eventually as Huggins’ successor, Joe McCarthy, but Ruppert felt loyalty to this crusty baseball man who had brought another world championship to Yankee Stadium in 1932.

There was another, not unimportant factor at work, too. McCarthy might have excelled at strategy and teaching players the fine points of the game, but he was even better at discipline, at making players cut out the crap and concentrate on winning.

Ruth could never compete in this area. As a player, he had been a virtual law unto himself, a hellraiser of awe-inspiring proportions. As a manager, any attempt he would make to enforce the kind of rules he had so blithely disregarded would be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.

“Colonel” Ruppert had made it a point that he would not release Ruth before the end of his playing career, but the owner’s commitment to McCarthy brought a parting of the ways. Ruth had missed out on a chance to manage the Detroit Tigers, but the Yankees got word that another franchise might be interested in the services of their on-the-way-out legend.

That led to the formerly unthinkable prospect of the greatest slugger in baseball history belting his final round-trippers not with the Yankees—not even with the team who hired him (and let him go) originally, the Boston Red Sox—but a squad that had been finishing out of the running for even longer than the Bosox: their hometown rivals (if you could call them that), the Boston Braves.

Beantown Fiasco

Enter Judge Emil Fuchs, president of the lowly Braves, desperate to stave off bankruptcy. A bug planted in his ear by Boston Mayor James Michael Curley—that Ruth, a huge draw in the city the prior year, would be great to have as a manager—made the financially strapped owner consider this as an option.

Fuchs already had a manager in Bill McKechnie, but there were ways of getting around this. He could secure Ruth’s services first as a player, then promise more.

The “more” part is where it became interesting. Had Fuchs the owner presented to Fuchs the judge the kind of agreement he proposed for Ruth, he would have at least immediately hauled him into chambers and demanded what was going on. More likely, he would have judged the pact null and void.

A February 23, 1935 letter from Fuchs to Ruth spelled out in written form what they’d discussed over the phone the day before. In addition to $25,000 in a straight-salary contract as a player, he’d also receive “an official executive position as an officer of the corporation”; a share of the profits “during the terms of this contract”; an option to purchase “at a reasonable figure” stock in the Braves; exact amounts spelled out in a separate contract between him, the club, “and as the case may be, with the individual officials and stockholders of the club”; and appointment, for the 1935 season, as “assistant manager.”

That last position was especially curious, chiefly because it had never been created before. As Ruth was given to understand, it meant that McKechnie would consult with him on strategy in the upcoming season. In 1936, when the latter moved up to general manager, Ruth would succeed him in the dugout.

The letter became more and more curious as it went along. By its conclusion, Fuchs was writing that first, before Ruth became manager, McKechnie’s loyalty would have to be amply “rewarded”. Maybe Ruth would like to become a manager eventually, maybe even an owner or part-owner of a major-league club.

Or: “It may be that you may discover that what the people are really looking forward to and appreciate in you is the color and activity that you give to the game by virtue of your hitting and playing and that you would rather have someone else, accustomed to the hardships and drudgery of managing a ballclub, continue that task.”

Ruth was so desperate to manage that he was willing to look past all these mealy-mouthed promises and flimsy escape clauses. Before long, baseball fans were surprised to hear that he’d been given his unconditional release by Ruppert and was heading up to Beantown.

Ruth’s time with the Braves—the exhibition season and two months of the regular season—turned out to be disastrous for all concerned.

McKechnie, really not a bad sort, would have had to have been a saint to solicit Ruth’s opinion. He didn’t.

Ruth, already in sorry physical shape, wasn’t helped by various ailments. In the outfield, this player—once possessed of one of the most feared throwing arms in the game—needed constant assistance from his centerfielder.

Worse was what happened at the plate. In 28 games and 72 at-bats, Ruth compiled only a .181 batting average with six homers (half coming from the Forbes Field performance) and 12 RBIs.

Ruth should have heeded the advice of his wife Claire and quit immediately after his Forbes Field game, but he wanted to keep his promise to Fuchs to visit the remaining clubs on this road trip. But he and the owner were now feuding constantly, and two days after bowing out of the Phillies contest, matters had come to such a pass that Ruth gathered reporters together at his locker to tell them he was out of the game.

As bad as the Braves' experiment with Ruth was, it was also probably the highlight of that sorry squad that year. His six HRs, in only two months of playing time, ranked second for the entire team. Their 38-115 record was the worst recorded by a National League franchise in the 20th century. (The New York Mets, with a 40-120 record in 1962, had an excellent excuse: They were an expansion franchise with a combination of mostly untried youngsters and vets on the downswing in their career.)

McKechnie and Fuchs, each in his own way, got what was coming to them. The long-suffering manager, freed from his Job-like sufferings in Beantown, went on to manage the Cincinnati Reds to a National League pennant in 1939 and a World Series championship the following year. Fuchs was forced to sell the Braves one month after he gave Ruth his unconditional release, and resorted to bankruptcy in 1936.

The Greatest Disappointment of a Triumphant Career

Amazingly, though rejected once by the Yankees, Ruth looked to them again to revive his managerial hopes. But all they would offer was a post with a minor-league team, the Newark Bears. The proud slugger, believing that other former players—former players of less than his caliber, at that—had gone straight into leading at the major-league level, scoffed at it as an insult.

In 1938, Ruth jumped at one last chance to manage, this time with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who hired him as their first-base coach. But at the end of the season, his heart was broken once again when the team hired Leo Durocher—a player Ruth had once dismissed as “the all-American out”—as their manager.


His inability to become a manager was the greatest disappointment of Ruth’s career. To be sure, both the Braves and the Dodgers exploited his box-office appeal. But if he had looked deeply into himself, Ruth would have understood that ultimately he was the one chiefly responsible for this failure, because of his own lack of elementary restraint and self-discipline as a player and his proud refusal to manage at anything less than the major-league level.

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