Goldman’s baseball quotables #12: Unlike Derek Jeter, Babe Ruth did not leave on his own terms

During Derek Jeter’s memorable final bow at Yankee Stadium on Thursday night, ESPN’s Wallace Matthews tweeted:

That’s factually incorrect. Williams did end his career on a home run. Ruth did not. His ending wasn’t anything like Derek Jeter’s or Williams’. On May 25, 1935, he hit three home runs in a game. That’s part of Ruth’s legend. That he played in another five games, batted 13 times without a hit, and then quit in a huff because he wasn’t allowed to leave the team to go to a party for a boat apparently is not. That matters, because hero-worship is inherently misleading as it is. Their real value is in teaching us that even the very gifted almost always don’t get to decide their own destinies. Ruth did not, and the desire to fall all over Jeter in an effort to elevate him to a Ruthian level that Ruth himself did not obtain does a disservice to both players and miseducates the public.

It’s warming to think of Babe Ruth hitting three home runs in a game and retiring, head held high. It ain’t necessarily so. This is very basic baseball lore, so I’ll try to go fast: By 1934, Ruth could still hit at a high level but he was out of shape, frequently injured in the way a man going on 40 often is even with better conditioning, and he was frustrated with Yankees ownership for not letting him manage the club. The feelings of frustration were mutual, but the Yankees were between a Ruth and hard place -- as much as they wanted to be shut of Ruth, you couldn’t just release him. That would be like releasing the flag or dropping Derek Jeter in the batting order.

Ruth did the Yankees an incalculably huge favor when, as his contact was winding down at the end of the season, he told reporters he would never sign another player contract with the Yankees -- that is, let me manage or let me go. The Yankees had a well-regarded manager in Joe McCarthy (an eventual Hall of Famer) so they were free to choose the latter option without fear of backlash.

Meanwhile, the underfinanced Judge Emil Fuchs, owner and sometime manager of the Boston Braves, was looking for a drawing card. Fuchs was one of the stranger owners in the history of the game. The Giants’ lawyer and one of the thralls that John McGraw casually seeded throughout the game, he was a fan who bought into the Braves because he wanted to give Christy Mathewson, gradually coughing himself to death in upstate New York, something to do. Life lesson from baseball: There are many ways to blow your life savings, but doing so in order to hang out with the tubercular post-career Derek Jeter of the day is probably not the best reason. Mathewson wasn’t up to running a team, Fuchs didn’t have the money or the know-how to do it on his own, and the club rapidly spiraled into debt, with the Judge borrowing against his shares to keep up with expenses.

His initial plan for 1935 had been to move from Braves Field to Fenway Park and lease the former out for dog-racing. Both the Red Sox and the National League objected. In fact, the National League told him to get the hell out of the league by May 1. Fuchs had one last gambit before letting go: Sign Ruth and market the hell out of him, spike attendance by booking Ruth-headlined exhibitions on every off-day, and make enough money to pay off his creditors, redeem himself in the eyes of the NL owners, and thereby keep the team. The sweetener to get Ruth to buy in: make him a vice-president and “assistant manager,” offer him shares in the club, tell him that if he acquitted himself well in the behavior department, he would get a crack at replacing manager Bill McKechnie, who would be promoted into an advisory role.

McKechnie, with two pennants and a World Series win already on his resume, was already considered one of the best managers of the day (and like McCarthy would eventually be inducted into the Hall of Fame). He was quietly assured by the people really in charge of the Braves -- Fuchs’s creditors -- that he wasn’t going anywhere.

And so the stage for what would be one of the worst, and in many ways most inexplicable seasons in baseball history, was set. To start with the ending, the Braves went 35-115 (.248), which remains one of the poorer records in the history of the game. It also was a total outlier given the team’s record the year before (78-73) or the year after (71-83). Ruth was terrible, hitting .181, although he spiked that with enough walks and home runs that his offense wasn’t as bad as all that. The team was 8-18 in games he started, but without him they were even worse, with losing streaks of 14 games in July and 15 games in September. The record in the latter month was 5-25. Not even the 2014 A’s did that.

Nonetheless, Ruth was chronically sick, gimpy, fat, unable to bend over for a ground ball -- the Braves pitchers were in a state of mutiny over how many hits were getting past him and rolling around for extra bases -- and disgruntled over the way that whenever he turned around Fuchs was asking him to play an extra game against some minor league team on a gopher-ridden, glass-strewn field guaranteed to aggravate his legs or, on his rare days off, open a grocery store or a haberdashery or a discotheque. Simultaneously, McKechnie showed no particular interest in treating him as a coach or manager or anything but a player.

As he continued to struggle, Ruth began to talk publicly of retirement. Privately, McKechnie was telling Fuchs that Ruth was done and had to go. Ruth’s friends were telling Ruth that he was done. Publicly, McKechnie was supportive. “The Babe will quit talking about leaving the game after he cracks out a few homers,” McKechnie said on May 18, “which he will do shortly because the weather is sure to warm up and put everybody in better spirits.”

That was sort of what happened. On May 25, Ruth had the famous three-home-run game against the Pirates at Forbes Field. “I thought when I hit them three homers in Pittsburgh I was off. I thought everything was goin’ to be all right,” Ruth told the press later. That might have been a lie. His wife Claire later wrote:

This was the moment to quit, if ever there was such a moment. I told him that and he said, “I thought of it going around the bases the third time.” ...I begged him to quit. [Ruth’s press agent Christy] Walsh begged, demanded, cajoled, and screamed in an effort to get him to quit... “I can’t quit, dammit!” he roared. “I can’t... I gave that double-crossing old so-and-so in Boston my word I wouldn’t quit until after the Memorial Day double-header in Philadelphia. They’re running excursions into Cincinnati to see me play. Then we go to Philly. Then we go home to Boston. I’ll quit then. But I can’t quit now. I gave my word.”

And so he soldiered on, but his body was unwilling. In Cincinnati he hurt his knee. A few days later, on May 30, the knee went out again and he hit the bench, injured but not retired.

That’s where the boat entered the picture. It’s hard for us to imagine today in our age of air travel, but in Ruth’s day crossing the Atlantic by ship was considered a big deal, and even after the Titanic, the luxury liners still competed to set records getting across the big pond. In late May, the French liner SS Normandie was making her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. Ruth received an invitation to attend a party for her arrival in New York as an “ambassador of baseball,” whatever that means. A social animal, he really wanted to go.

He asked permission to leave the team. Fuchs refused to grant it, even if Ruth was incapable of playing -- the disabled list was strictly an informal affair at that point, but had there been one he would have been on it -- and, Matt Harvey-style, he saw no harm in taking a little trip given this enforced period of inactivity. “I believe that I can help more by representing baseball at a big thing like that than sitting on the bench,” Ruth said. Fuchs remained obstinate, so at that point, on Sunday, June 2, a week after the three-homer game, Ruth quit:

The blow-off came last night. What’s this big boat now? Yeah, that’s it, the Normandie. Well, they asked me to go to a party on board when they dock Tuesday night. I figured it would be great for baseball and what the hell. I can’t play before Thursday anyway on account of this knee. I told Fuchs about it and he said, ‘Nothin’ doin’.‘ Well, I ain’t goin’ to be treated like that. I don’t have to and I’m not goin’ to. That’s why I’m quittin’.

Even then, he wasn’t exactly retired. Fuchs had scheduled yet another exhibition based on a Ruth appearance, and the Babe wasn’t going to disappoint his public. “They’ve advertised me and if the people want to see me I’ll play, but it ain’t going to be any fun.” (Fuchs told him not to bother.) Further, Ruth still saw playing as a backdoor way of managing. He contradicted himself in this, saying, “I’m not through with baseball. I’m through as a player, of course, but I’m coming back as a manager -- if I can get a job.” However, he also said what is quoted on the image above. His full thought:

There’s no use kidding myself or the public. I’m through as a day-in and day-out player. I just can’t go out there every day and play. I’m through in that respect. But I can still play a few days a week. I can go in there and play maybe on Saturdays and Sundays. I can pinch-hit. I’m not through with baseball. At least, I hope I’m not.

Did he have any leads? “Not a thing, not a thing. I figure I’ll just wait around a while and see what happens.” As we now know, nothing happened. A few years later there was a coaching job with the Dodgers which came with another vague, wholly insincere promise of managing, but that was it. Fuchs survived him by about a month, surrendering his stock to his creditors and thereby bringing in the investors who, years down the line, would take the Braves out of Boston.

This is only my opinion, but I think “Baseball,” insofar as such a monolithic entity can be said to exist, hated Babe Ruth. I’m referring to the owners and executives, not the many fans who indisputably loved him. Yes, he had helped rescue the game from the ignominy of the fixed 1919 World Series, but this was a group of men often too stubborn or obtuse to recognize they were in need of rescue. Beyond that:

1. He changed the nature of baseball from the “inside” game of the bunt and steal to the big swing and the strikeout, something the purists hated.

2. He would not be controlled.

3. He had no respect for any authority figure.

4. He forced them to pay him something like what he was worth.

Heywood Broun said of Ruth, “His only weakness is a fast blonde on the outside corner of the park.” It would only be human nature that baseball’s pack of ruling plutocrats, aging males all, would resent him for that as well.

As long as Ruth was hitting .350 with 50 home runs a year, he had the upper hand. The moment he slowed down they were determined to make him pay for his every infraction of the rules, each blown curfew, maybe even every time he refused to play the sun field, and each of those blondes as well. The tragedy of his later life was that whereas he by no means lacked the intelligence to manage -- Ned Yost is headed to the ALDS for gosh sakes -- he did not possess the insight to see that the magnates would revenge themselves upon him for every good turn he had done them.

It was nothing like Ted Williams’ or Derek Jeter’s exits. It was the petering out of one of the greatest careers and one of the great American stories, the abandoned boy who conquered a country with a swing and a smile. The game celebrated Ruth later, when he was dying and it was far too late for him to take any real joy from it. Derek Jeter was privileged to enjoy a farewell tour and the luck of a well-timed final hit at home. Babe Ruth was quashed. To conflate the two is to miss one of the truest, hardest lessons baseball has to offer.