Babe Ruth aka Daddy

Baseball is a game of legends.

Some become legends long after they retire, after many years pass and they are finally recognized by the Hall of Fame for their efforts, given that instant status symbol of admission into baseball's most exclusive club.

Then, of course, there are those players who are so incredible and larger than life that even while they play they are already legends -- and with each strikeout, each hit, each home run, they only add to their prowess and stature.

I could rattle off so many names of players who have achieved this kind of hallowed glory while still active: DiMaggio, Mantle, Musial, Mays, Williams are just a few from the Golden Era.

But the one who was the king of baseball legends, the one whose very name could send a shiver up the spine of opposing pitchers, was Babe Ruth (just as the name of his legendary team, the Yankees, also sent opposing pitchers of the mid- to late-1920s into a state of panic).

There is nobody still living who actually played in a major league game with Ruth, but I've talked to maybe 10 or 20 players who met him one way or another. Ed Mayer, for example, was given a trophy by Babe Ruth in 1947 after an American Legion All-Star Game out in California.

With each mention of the Babe's name, I too would get a shiver up my spine, but for a different reason than the hurlers of old. For me, it was the thrill that I was talking to someone who'd actually met the great Babe Ruth.

There was one person, however, that I was hoping beyond hope to speak to: Babe Ruth's daughter Julia Ruth Stevens. Born in 1916, she was adopted by Ruth when he married her mother in the 1920s.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I found what I thought might be the correct number for Mr. Stevens. Incredibly, she answered the phone and was happy to talk to me. We spoke for about 45 minutes about her life and about her famous father, a man she knew simply as "Daddy."

The golden rule of interviewing is never to allow yourself to become intimidated or starstruck, because that will contaminate the quality of the interview and make you forget what to ask. It wasn't easy, sitting there and talking to Babe Ruth's daughter, to not be at least a little bit in awe. For one, she was well into her 90s and still sharp as a tack and full of stories.

What was Babe Ruth really like? How did he treat people?

“People would ask him for so many things, and if he could, he’d give them to them. I mean, he would have given away every cent that he had if it hadn’t been for mother. Out of generosity, when one of the players, or someone, a friend, you know, “Babe, could you let me have so-and-so” he’d always say “Sure” But mother put a stop to that, because there would have just been no end to it.”

What strikes one about Ruth, at least in the legend, is his kindness. It seemed to be quite true. As Mrs. Stevens emphasized:

"He was always so genuine, and his love for children was very very real.”

Ruth would sign autographs for kids waiting outside his hospital window even when he was very sick, she told me. How many of today's stars would do that?

Sometimes the smallest details are the most precious, a sentence or two that paint an intimate portrait of baseball's most legendary figure. For me it was this little nugget: 

"I remember that we lived on the seventh floor and the rooftop was the ninth floor, so we could use the back stairs and we’d have picnics up there.”

Babe Ruth and family having rooftop picnics...nine floors above the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan. That picture is a happy and fascinating one to imagine.

More from my interview with Babe Ruth's daughter in a future post. 

Walter Johnson Through His Daughter's Eyes

By many standards, Walter Johnson (nickname The Big Train) was the greatest pitcher who ever lived (He is ranked #1 according to the Fan EloRater on Baseball-Reference.com). Sure, Cy Young had more victories. Others had more career strikeouts and lower lifetime ERA. But Walter Johnson had the most shutouts of any pitcher ever - 110. He was incredibly durable, winding up with the 3rd most innings pitched and the 3rd highest number of batters faced. Johnson put together some of the best pitching seasons in history. He was twice AL MVP, and thrice the pitching Triple Crown winner.

Walter Johnson, who died in 1946, is long gone. But his legacy lives on through his daughter Carolyn Thomas, who was born in 1923, toward the end of her father's baseball career. Her mother died when she was 7, so Carolyn was raised in large part by her famous dad.

In the course of my research, I was fortunate enough to speak with Ms. Thomas, who still lives in the vicinity of her father's old team, the Senators, at some length and get some firsthand accounts of this amazing legend.

We all know that some of the great players were not especially congenial people. So, what kind of person was Johnson?

“He was a quiet person. He just wanted to lead a quiet life. He didn’t like the spotlight very much. He realized he had to put up with some of it, and he was gracious about it, but he certainly never sought it out, and certainly he was not interested in politics, he was a county commissioner…I think the way I would describe him is good natured. He was a really nice guy. He wasn’t pious, pontifical. He wasn’t judgmental or anything like that, he was a nice guy. He had a nice sense of humor. He loved ice cream. We could always go to the store and eat as many Eskimo pies as we wanted. He tried awful hard to make up for mother’s loss.”

Ms. Thomas remembers attending baseball games with her dad: 

“We didn’t think of him as a baseball player, of course. Although we did when we went to the stadium. It always took forever to get in because people wanted his autograph. I can remember being kind of surly about that, taking so long to get into the stadium for the game. People recognized him. He never brushed anybody off. He would always stop and sign whatever they handed him.”  

Talking to the baseball players of the 40s and 50s is a great thrill. But talking to the child of one of the greats of an earlier era is a very special and different kind of thrill, a leap even further back in the baseball time machine. There is nobody alive who knew Walter Johnson better than his daughter. I am grateful that she took some time to help me get to know him, too.

A Father's Day Salute to Baseball Dads

This Father's Day, I would particularly like to salute baseball fathers, for two reasons.

Baseball fathers? you ask.

Indeed. The baseball season is very long, and most baseball fathers don't get to see that much of their kids. It was bad enough when there were only 8 teams in each league - which meant 7 cities to travel to during the season. These days, that number is much higher, and the teams are spread across more of the country (as opposed to the concentration mostly along the east coast in the old days), making it less likely for baseball offspring to see their dads on the road.

It must be pretty tough for baseball players with a family to make it through the season. Even all the money of today's contracts can't buy during-the-season time with one's kids. I mean, theoretically, one could use that money to follow dad around the country on road games, but that's simply not practical nor desirable. No, there's just no easy way to see much of your kids during the season. The one beneficial difference is that today's players don't have to work during the off season and therefore can spend some extra time with their kids while players of old were out working.

So that's the first salute to baseball dads - who have to make fatherhood work in tough circumstances, where their kids may see them more on television than in real life between April and September.

But the second salute to baseball dads rises from the many conversations I had with Golden Era players. So many of them told me that the reason they called it quits was because they were raising a family, kids were reaching school age and the baseball life was not conducive to kids having a stable and steady life. Especially in the days when you could be traded at any moment.

And so far as I can recall, none of those players regrets what they did. Playing was their boyhood dream, but once they became men, they realized they had to balance boyhood dreams with the realities of manhood...and fatherhood. So they found other work, raised their families, and still cherish their baseball memories. But they also cherish the fact that they made the right decision, the decision that put their families, their kids, ahead of the uncertain future of their playing days. Most of them went on to make far more money doing other things than they would have (in those days) if they continued playing baseball.

Happy Father's Day to all baseball fans out there, and especially to those former players who made a tough choice and cut short their dreams in favor of fatherhood.

Oh Mickey, You're so Fine

My interviews feature an approximately equal number of words of praise for Ted Williams and for Mickey Mantle. I'd have to say they were the two players in whom the major leaguers of the 1950s were in greatest awe. 

A year or so ago, I had the good fortune to interview Lou Sleater, a Senators pitcher who was a witness to the first "tape measure" home run, on April 17, 1953. Sleater has since passed away, but his memories now live on below, and in my forthcoming book (to be released next spring):

“I was sitting on the bench right next to Bucky Harris, who was the Senators’ manager. When Mantle hit it, it looked like the ball went up, straight up, and then it started going to the outfield. It just kept carrying out and carrying out, it was like an unbelievable thing. There was a National [Bohemian] Beer sign out there at the time, and it just nicked that sign going out, and so Red Patterson, who was the traveling secretary for the Yankees, he went and got a tape measure and tried to get the measurement, the footage and everything…he said that’s the first tape measure; he named it right then and there, tape measure shot hit by Mickey Mantle…It was unbelievable. It just went up, and just kept on carrying out, and carrying out, and next thing you know, it was all the way out.”

Practically all tape measure homers are disputed in some way, but there's no arguing about one thing: Mickey Mantle could hit the ball a long, long way!

The 400

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times the players I spoke to mentioned the fact that back when they played, there were only 16 teams, 8 in each league, and only 400 players in the big leagues. It was almost like a mantra. I never brought it up; it always came up somehow during the course of conversation. by "Don't forget, back in those days..."

Not only that, but there were a whole lot more farm teams back in those days. The Golden Era players are not exaggerating when they tell me it was harder to make it to the majors back then. There were tons of guys who played pro ball in the 40s and 50s, but only a fraction of them made it to the bigs. Some “D” class teams sported only one future major leaguer. Others actually had none, in certain years, on their rosters. That’s how hard it was to make it.

The pre-expansion era was, in many ways, a completely different time for baseball. Once that first expansion draft was held at the end of 1960, things changed forever. The National League lagged a year behind, but that was it. There were now 20 teams. The notion of the 400 players was no longer valid. And the quality of players on these new teams was, well, sometimes less than stellar. To begin with, the new teams were allowed to “protect” some of their players, leaving others (not their most valued ones, of course) open to be drafted. As one player explained, the unprotected ones were likely to be "long in the tooth."

The number of teams changed again in 1969, and again several times more after. Look how many teams and divisions we now have. The idea of "playoffs" was only born due to the increased number of teams. There are a lot of teams, and a lot of players.

This is not to say today's players are not excellent athletes who are deserving of their spot in the bigs. However, it is an affirmation of the difficulty of making it back in the day. A player who is drafted and signs these days, is far more likely to make it to the majors than one who signed 50 years ago.

So it follows that when asked what their best memory of their career was, many a player simply told me - "Just putting on that major league uniform and taking the field."

The Questions Not Asked

The questions not asked.

A sore point for any journalist.

In the ideal world, I'd be completely prepared, having devoured every single piece of pertinent information about a baseball player that can be found, all the statistics, the trades, the mentions in books and articles, and of course, the trivia.

Almost every player did something that was somehow noteworthy. That's the beauty of the game, and of statistics. Practically everyone gave up someone's first or last home run or base hit, played with or for future Hall of Famers, or was involved in some notable trade or notable game.

Sometimes, players bring these little factoids up to me without prompting (and thankfully, especially if it is something I hadn't known about). But a grain of salt must be applied. Several times when someone has told me "I was the first" or "I was the only" it turns out not to be quite true.

In any case, the questions not asked still bug me. Like when I neglected to ask pitcher Dick Welteroth (who has since passed away) about his part in the game where the Senators gave up 17 walks in a game, including 11 in a single inning (he gave up 4 of those). Not critical, but still irksome.

With all the research I've done, I know a lot. And yet it is only a fraction of what is to be known, what can be known, about baseball's history. So I shouldn't feel too bad about forgetting to ask a question and instead think of all the unplanned questions or conversational tangents that yielded much richer fruits than any forgotten question could bring.

A good interview is NOT just a question and answer session. If both of us stayed exactly within the lines, it would be quite a boring interview. Conversation must occur, and that's when the subject opens up and goes beyond your questions.

Here's a little gem from former Tiger George Lerchen, about his manager Red Rolfe, who played for the Yankees in the 1930s:

His wording was: "Isn’t that the way we used to do it at the Yankees?" No matter what you did, hit a home run or double, he said "Yup, that’s the way we did it at the Yankees. Isn’t that right, Charlie Keller?" Keller was on our ballclub at Detroit. And he said "Isn’t that right Charlie?" So you know, what can I say, he was a Yankee man. He lived and died for the Yankees. 

Close Encounters of the Rusty Kind

My first personal encounter with a baseball player (and actually, my first encounter with any kind of celebrity) came when I was 14 years old and I went, quite excitedly, to New York Met Rusty Staub’s newly opened Manhattan restaurant. Sure enough, there at a nearby table was Le Grand Orange himself, with a couple of other people. Now that I think about it, those others were surely baseball folks also, but Rusty was my big hero at the time, so he was the only one I recognized.
I gathered up my courage, and timidly approached, pen and paper in hand. I asked for his autograph, and told Rusty that I thought he was a really amazing baseball player (which, if you check his stats, he was) – albeit not with any eloquence, rather with the enthusiastic nervousness of a gangly teenager.

He thanked me, and signed the paper for me. And of course, in the days before iPods and cell phone cameras, that was it. No photo to document the moment. No questions or further interaction from me. I smiled and scurried back to my table, my day made. I’d been so nervous, I hadn’t even thought to grab a napkin or placemat or something Rusty-related for him to sign. Just a slip of paper. Oh well!

A few years later I visited Mickey Mantle’s restaurant, also in New York. I can’t recall the experience, but I am certain I was on the lookout for #7 while I was there. Alas, I only made it to his place that one time. For all I know he *was* actually there when I visited, and I just missed him.

In the years since, I’ve had personal and close encounters with several more players – George Foster (who gave a hitting clinic on Long Island years ago and signed my baseball cap), Reggie Jackson (I took pictures that I wish I could find!), Darryl Strawberry, and Derek Jeter to name a few.

But nothing was quite as thrilling, or nerve-wracking, as that first baseball encounter all those years ago.