A Shadow of the Babe

A Shadow of the Babe

By A.M. Stein

I.

George Herman Ruth, “the Babe,” famously referred to anyone whose name he had forgotten, or never tried to learn, as “kid.” Less generally known is that “kid” was short for “kidney bean.”

Ruth had asked Brother Mathias, athletic director and father figure at the St. Mary’s Industrial School where he was raised, what he would have looked like when he was still in his mother’s stomach.

Brother Mathias thought for a moment, then told George (as he was then called) that he would have looked like a very large kidney bean.

II.

The one thing Ruth could not just naturally do better than anyone else on a baseball field was run fast. He ran fast enough, but not as fast as he believed. And that was strange because when it came to his talent, Ruth did not have many blind spots. He knew where he liked the ball. Either down and away, or up and in. For the pitch that came at him up and in, just under his chin, Ruth would lean back in the batter’s box, like a boxer avoiding a hook, and swipe at the ball with a furious uppercut. Whoosh! if he missed and the bat whipped through thin air, and wham! if he connected. For the pitch thrown down and away, he would lean out over the plate and club at the sphere like it was a fat piñata. Four hundred feet into the left center field bleachers. Three hundred and eighty-five feet into the right centerfield bleachers. Raining candy and confetti and coins of the realm, as it flew.

Ruth also knew where he didn’t like the ball. If the pitch was down and in, he got all knotted up. He had to slap at it, like a man in a chimney with a boat oar trying to smack a bee. With the pitch that was up and away, the best he could usually manage was to punch it, against the grain of his natural swing, and power, down the left field line, thereafter chuffing around the bases on his ballerina ankles, carrying his beer barrel of a body, into second or third base with a statistically valid, but distinctly dissatisfying, extra base knock. “A bum double” or “a bum triple” Ruth would call these. As in, “any bum could have hit that one.”  

III.

Off the field, Ruth was a showman who grew his own legend. One afternoon before a game Ruth disguised himself with a broad brimmed hat and false beard and joined the crowd outside Yankee Stadium. When a limousine pulled to the curb, the murmurs around Ruth were filled with his name. “That must be the Babe….the Babe, arriving in style.”

This taught him something about what the people wanted from him. After that, he traveled only by luxury automobile. A 12-cylinder, burnt umber, Packard being his vehicle of choice. “The people want the Babe,” said Ruth, “and the Babe wants the people, so there is accord.”

IV.

When Ruth began hitting home runs at an unprecedented pace (three and four times as many as the greatest amount anyone had ever hit, in a single season, before him) the only people who could believe it were Ruth himself and Brother Mathias.

Brother Mathias had become a local saint. He was the friar who had discovered a miracle trapped inside a stone and somehow released it. Parents with children who were troubled, or sad, or wounded, brought them to Brother Mathias to be blessed.

“Did you always know the Babe would become a professional ballplayer?” a reporter asked Brother Mathias.

“I thought it was the best chance he would ever have,” the Franciscan replied.

Brother Mathias thought of the power packed into the boy’s swing. And he thought of the boy, almost totally broken, when he arrived.

Ruth came to Saint Mary’s as an “incorrigible.” His father was a Baltimore saloonkeeper with a furious temper who once beat him with a horse-whip for stealing from the till. His mother was an invalid, sick with tuberculosis.

Brother Mathias took the seven-year-old to a field where other boys were already at play.

“Do you like baseball?” asked Brother Mathias. “That’s what we do here after the studying is done. There are other games. But a lot of people here like baseball and we find it builds camaraderie. Have you ever played baseball, George?”

Ruth hoped furiously that he wouldn’t be sent anywhere else.

“Sure, I like baseball,” he said.

“Have you ever played?” asked Brother Mathias.

“No,” said Ruth, “but I’d like to.”

“Let’s see if we can’t get you into a game right now,” said Brother Mathias.

He walked alongside the new boy, toward the diamond where orphans and delinquents and paupers, Ruth’s new family, were shouting and playing and learning the rules of the game.

V.

Life at St. Mary’s was regimented. Whenever Ruth finished one task he began another. This is the key to success everywhere. “Do not hurry, do not rest,” wrote the poet Goethe. In the morning Ruth washed his out-sized head, with its frying pan face, out-stuck ears and wide flat nose. Then he attended breakfast, which began with a prayer. After breakfast, except on Sundays, Ruth went to work sewing shirts in the tailor shop. All the boys at St. Mary’s were meant to learn a trade. Perhaps the time spent concentrating on needlework helped train Ruth’s eyes to a finer focus. It was later said that Ruth could count the number of stitches on the baseball and assess the direction of its rotation as it hurtled toward him. In any case, his stint in the tailor shop didn’t seem to have done Ruth’s natural gifts any disservice.

VI.

“Let me feel your muscles, George,” one St. Mary’s boy asked, after witnessing Ruth’s long home run. “It’s not just the muscles,” Ruth confided, “I make the ball go where I want it to go with my thoughts.”

“Can you teach me that?” asked the boy.

“Sure,” said Ruth. “It’s easy. I just picture the baseball already in the grass on the other side of the fence. It is already there. I just have to swing the bat and pow! a homerun. It was always going to be a home run. Even before I got to the plate. Because it already is a homerun. Do you see how simple that is? It already is in the grass on the other side of the fence. All I have to do is take my best swing.”

VII.

In 1983, Christie’s Auction House sold the Dorothea Tanning portrait of Babe Ruth, “A Shadow of The Babe” (circa 1933) for 3.8 million dollars. The portrait depicts Ruth as possessing several blood red mouths (“representing the hungers that drove him,” the cognoscenti understood) on various parts of his body, and brandishing three sky-blue bats, as big as old trees, between his enormous, forest-green hands.

VIII.

“How does it feel to be a hero,” a reporter once asked Ruth. “I’m not a hero,” Ruth replied. “The mothers and fathers who don’t horsewhip their children and then abandon them to work houses, they are the real heroes.”

“Yes, but how does it feel to have thousands of people cheering for you?”

“Oh, that. Yes, well, that feels just like jelly-roll.”

IX.

“Babe, can I get your autograph?”

“Sure thing, kid,” said Ruth.

For a while he would still sign “George Herman Ruth.” Then : “George Ruth.” Then: “George ‘the Babe’ Ruth,” when somebody showed him how that looked. Finally, he just thought of himself as “Babe” the way everyone else did, and signed that.

X.

Every day, Ruth did things on the ball field nobody had ever done. One afternoon, he launched a home run entirely out of Yankee Stadium. Not just over the fence, but out of the stadium itself and onto the boulevard beyond. A boy found the ball, a few days later, in a patch of long scrub. It had the name of the commissioner of baseball stamped on it, so the boy knew it had come from the stadium, but he could not figure how it had ended up in the scrub beyond the stadium’s exterior walls.

The boy and his friends used the ball in sandlot games until it was worn out and the commissioner’s insignia could barely be deciphered. Then someone’s kid brother got it and then a dog and then it is hard to know what became of it.

XI.

Ruth sat before his locker in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse after home games, smoking big cigars and fielding questions from reporters. “Babe,” a reporter once asked, “some consider you the greatest left-handed slugger of all time. Is the thought of greatness something that motivates you when you step into the batter’s box? ”

“I have hit some baseballs mighty high and far,” Ruth replied, “and I hope to hit some farther and higher still, but when I step into that batter’s box, I am not worrying about being the greatest anything, except being the greatest Babe Ruth I can be.”

XII.

One time Ruth was visiting a sick boy in a hospital. Ruth promised the boy he would hit a home run in that day’s game. “Just for you, kid,” Ruth insisted. In return, he exacted the promise that immediately after the home run the boy must get up from his hospital bed in perfect health and go play games with other children.

“Agreed?” Ruth asked the boy, extending his massive paw.

“Agreed,” said the boy, shaking that paw.

The mother of the sick boy asked Ruth what he and her son had been discussing. Ruth told her the bargain they had struck.

The boy mother pulled Ruth by the ear into the hospital hallway where she gave him a slap on his stupid pie-face. “You fool,” she told Ruth. “Now he thinks he is going to rise from that bed.”

“Yes,” Ruth replied, “And I think I am going to hit that home run. What makes you think we can’t?”

“The two things are not connected,” she said.

“They are,” said Ruth, “I’ve just connected them.” He poked his head back through the doorway and gave the boy a big smile. “See you kid,” he said.

That afternoon, in the eighth inning, with the count on him at two balls and two strikes, Ruth blasted a titanic home run to dead center field.

In his hospital room, listening to the game on the radio, the sick boy understood that his hour had come around.

“I’m going to walk,” he said. “Mama, I am going to walk.”

Ruth, rounding the bases, with the roar of the crowd raining down upon him, had forgotten the sick boy entirely.

XIII.

Ruth spent his days at the ballpark and his evenings everywhere but home. He had married a kind, intelligent woman named Helen, but Helen did not exert much hold over him. Sometimes she could slow him down for a while by threatening to tell Brother Mathias. The disapproval of Brother Mathias was the only thing Ruth truly feared. “It is not that George is fearless,” Helen once told her sister, “but he has no thought of the future. To fear, you must be able to think ahead, at least the span of an instant. George cannot, or will not, think ahead even that far.”

“Brother Mathias must never know,” Ruth would plead. “He’d be terribly disappointed. It would hurt him to know I was not living up to his hopes for me. I will become a better husband and father, Helen, you just wait and see. I’ll come straight home every night. I’ll say no to everyone and everything and come straight home to you.”

At heart, Ruth was still a little boy and he had a little boy’s bluster. Did he listen to himself? He didn’t. He might have been able to, but it would have put him fractionally behind the moment to try. Ruth couldn’t afford to be even fractionally behind the moment. The difference between catching up with a high heater and smacking it into the center field bleachers, and swinging hard at one but fouling it back into the screen behind home plate is the difference of just such a fraction.

“Say, Helen,” said Ruth, suddenly changing tack, “do you think I’ve got what it takes to be a movie star?”

“Why on earth would you want to be a movie star?” Helen replied.

“For one thing, you get into all the movie theaters for free,” said Ruth. When Helen looked skeptical, he added, “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“You should sleep,” Helen told her husband. It was three a.m. Ruth had just rolled in. He was exhausted and full of alcohol and he smelled like a mixture of perfume and tobacco. Really, he was a brutish, beastly man, but there was something comforting about his presence, when one could get it, like in the end he could do no real harm to anyone. A sweet boy whose early deprivations had scarred him irreversibly.

XIV.

But, when things became intolerable, Helen filed for divorce. “She wants to hurt me,” Ruth thought. But Helen wouldn’t allow the proceedings to become painful for either of them, beyond the component of public humiliation neither had any control over. She made sure Ruth knew she understood he never meant to hurt her. In her heart, she was glad to be rid of him. Except that marriage quickly becomes a habit, she had never been quite the right match for this man-child. He needed a partner who could mirror his narcissism back to him as perfectly ordinary self-regard. He did not need a skeptic, or a critic. Not even one whose criticisms were the best way she could find to tell him how deeply she cared about what became of him. He needed a partner to applaud his appetites and make him even hungrier. Yes, and God speed him to that one, Helen thought, as they signed the legal documents before a magistrate and were pronounced free from one another.

Afterward, as they stood together on the sidewalk, Ruth was looking at her in that funny way he sometimes had and Helen knew just what it meant. “I’m taking a taxi now, George,” she warned him.

“I’ll ride with you,” said Ruth, like they hadn’t just been in the courthouse receiving their divorce decree. Helen had a sudden ghostly sensation of his strong arms enfolding her. She’d wondered where it began, her love for him, and she’d just received an inkling. He was a man who, if he wanted, could lift you and carry you with ease. But, how did that spell love? Helen had the urge to go back in time with him. That was what he wanted, too. She slid over, he slid in. “I’ve got to get some things at the house,” Ruth said to Helen. “Some things I need.” “Like what?” asked Helen. “Well,” said Ruth, “I have slippers that I must wear when I’m on the road. They make my feet feel good on the hotel carpets.” “Anything else?” asked Helen. Ruth thought a moment, “No,” he said, “I guess that’s it. But I really want those slippers.” He hadn’t thought about them since he’d moved out, a couple of months before, into that hotel where all the theater people hobnob.

What a great crowd. They really seemed to find his face fascinating. Sometimes they gathered around him and just stared. “What a face,” one said, wonderingly, as if Ruth was not there. “What a mug. Good god! Would it be worth it to have for the stage, though, if you had to wear it around all the rest of the time? It would, I suppose, if you were also Babe Ruth thrown into the bargain. Babe, I must say you are like no one who has ever been before, aren’t you? God save us all if you are a prototype, but as an anomaly you are marvelous.”

“I’m going to act in a play,” Ruth told Helen as their cab pulled into the street. “It’s called Macbeth. I’m going to play Macbeth. If I forget my lines I’ll be allowed to ask one of the other actors to remind me.”

“Where is this show going to take place?” asked Helen.

“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Some theater on Broadway.” 

“On Broadway, I don’t think you will be allowed to ask other actors for your lines. People pay a lot of money to see theater on Broadway.”

“I know. The producer says we are both going to get rich.”

“I mean, people come to Broadway to see good theater performed by trained actors.”

“Not the people who will come to see me,” said Ruth. “They’ll come to see the Babe perform Shakespeare. They won’t mind if I bungle my lines.”

Helen let it go at that. “Driver,” she said, “can’t you make this jalopy go any faster? I am trying to get away from my crazy ex-husband.”

Ruth didn’t understand the joke, but he saw that it had made her merry and he took his chance. “Helen,” he said, “just because we are not married….”

“Stop right there,” said Helen, still gleeful, “because that’s the judgment you just accepted. And I wouldn’t change it if I wanted to. I would look utterly the fool.”

Ruth didn’t understand what she was saying, but he felt the trail had gone cold. “Driver,” he called, “let me off here.” To Helen, he explained: “I’ll go to the stadium early for once.”

“But what about your slippers?” Helen replied.

Now Ruth was entirely at sea. He felt stupefied, ashamed and confused at the magnitude of what he had just accomplished. He had allowed himself to be separated from the only person who had any long term, intimate understanding of his history, his emotional life, and his private thoughts. Was she teasing him now to come back with her to the house? Or was she merely voicing a polite, empty, question? “Could I come get them after the game?” Ruth asked, carefully. “Yes,” Helen replied. “After the game.”

XV.

The match that afternoon was against the Detroit Tigers. Ruth hated playing the Tigers. Their centerfielder, Ty Cobb, was a malicious bully with no sense of boundaries when it came to insults. It was not just the name-calling. It was the aspersions Cobb cast on Ruth’s decency and the decency of his parentage. Ruth found it very difficult to control his anger when Cobb made remarks about his mother.

“He’s just trying to rattle you,” said manager Miller Huggins.

“Sure,” said second baseman Jumpin’ Joe Dugan. “He knows you’re the best, so he’s trying to make you forget what you can do. You won’t let him make you forget what you can do, will you, Babe?”

In the first inning, Ruth drew a walk and was standing on first base admiring the pretty day and the crowd in the grandstands and thinking what a fine place it was to be, all things considered. First sack at Yankee Stadium, in a clean uniform, in the bright, afternoon sun. “How’s the divorce, Babe?” Ty Cobb’s voice broke in on his reverie. And a good thing too because the batter had just swung and missed and Ruth hadn’t even realized a pitch was being thrown. Concentrate, Babe, he told himself. Another pitch was thrown, a ball, outside, and then Cobb’s insinuating voice again, “Hey Babe, is your wife considered free range now? Do you mind if old Ty takes a crack at sticking his dick in her?” Good grief! thought Ruth. Can he hear himself? Between innings, Yankee shortstop Walter Koenig advised Ruth that the Yankees planned to “take Cobb down a notch.” Ruth replied that they shouldn’t do anything on his account, but he was secretly glad they were going to. That’s what teammates were for.

When Cobb came to bat the next inning the Yankee pitcher Waite Hoyt hit him on the shoulder with a fastball. Cobb crowded the plate. Menaced it, really. Stood practically on top of the dish. It was like he was asking to get hit. But, really, Cobb wasn’t asking anything at all, he was telling. This is mine, he was telling the opposing pitcher, do you understand? All of this is mine. If you want it, you are going to have to take it from me. The fastball would have smashed Cobb full in the face, probably blinding him or killing him, except he threw up an instinctive shoulder and deflected it. He was as quick as a lizard and had a lizard’s hooded eyes. Halfway down to first base, he charged the pitcher’s mound with his cleats high and slashed Hoyt’s knee and calf so that blood showed instantly on Hoyt’s uniform. Then he pointed toward Ruth in right field and shouted that he was next and had to be restrained and taken off the field. “Good grief,” said Ruth, in the dugout afterwards, “that guy gives me the heebie jeebies.” Many Yankees believed Cobb’s was a bonafide case of mental illness. Not just “a ferocious competitor” but a schizophrenic nightmare.

XVI.

The contests with Cobb’s Tigers were always exhausting and when Ruth arrived at Helen’s door later that evening, he regretted, more than anything else he had lost in the divorce, his lost security. The comfort of coming home to Helen, and to their house, at whatever hour that happened to be, from wherever he happened to have been. He regretted this loss more than he had ever regretted losing anything and he realized, too, for the first time, maybe, just how badly he had treated Helen.

When Helen opened the door to him, Ruth said, imploringly, “I am so sorry, Helen. I am so awfully sorry,” but by the next instant, the heat from Helen’s body had overpowered him.

XVII.

“Maybe I could just live here and we wouldn’t have to be married,” Ruth suggested, in the lull following their coitus.

“Yes,” said Helen, “that would work out marvelously…for you.” She hadn’t had an orgasm. As usual, she would have to wait until the big gorilla fell asleep and then help herself. Except tonight, apparently, he wanted to talk. What on earth was he even doing here? Hadn’t she just divorced him? And wasn’t this really the root of his problems with women? Not his excessive neediness, but his animal magnetism? What on earth could she possibly have hoped to achieve by bedding him again? Not climax, certainly. She knew enough of sex with Ruth not to have been hoping for that. Selfish beast! She was through with him and she was angry. She rolled onto her side, facing away from him, while he was still talking, and when he kept talking, she said: “Shhh!” without turning her head. Eventually Ruth got the point and left her bed for the last time. “Don’t forget to take your slippers,” she called after him.

When she heard his burnt umber Packard pulling out of her driveway, she got up and locked the front door.

A.M. Stein is a writer of historically reimagined biographies. His book, Variations in the Key of K, published by Etruscan Press, among other conceits, reimagines the life of Franz Kafka as if Kafka had been an Olympic javelin hurler. Stein’s love of baseball writing has its roots in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (that mosaic of prose poems disguised as a baseball diary) and in the magical interviews in Donald Honig’s oral history of baseball’s earliest years titled, Baseball When the Grass Was Real. Stein worked briefly as a sportswriter before the current of the river of his life carried him to the more stable career of librarian that allowed him to support a little family with children of his own for which he is very, very grateful. He lives in Boulder, CO.  

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