The Selling of the Babe by Glenn Stout Page A

of a sore arm. When that raised eyebrows it suddenly morphed into a sore wrist, one that he decided to treat by wrapping with a leather strop just to make sure everyone noticed, a malady that miraculously disappeared as soon as he lifted a bat or had to make a throw in the outfield.
    It didn’t sit well with either Barrow or many of his teammates. They recognized that as much as they liked his bat, it was even more valuable when paired with his arm, and if Ruth couldn’t pitch, and Leonard went to “work” in a shipyard, they would not only have a short pitching staff, but one without any reliable left-handers, leaving them exposed.
    It was uncanny, almost even comical, but the uncertainty of the season left Ruth feeling immune. He received little criticism in the Boston press. The fans’ preoccupation with whether or not Ruth hit a home run sold newspapers, and in that pre-radio era, when the only way to know what took place at the ballpark was either to attend the game in person or cobble together a full accounting from several papers, Ruth moved newsprint.
    It almost didn’t matter if he hit a home run or not. Either one paper or another described damn near every swing in excruciating detail. There may never have been a player in baseball history whose pop-ups, fly-outs, foul drives, and grunting misses attracted more press, or apparently never committed an inconsequential act on the field. The newspapers had created a mythic Colossus and now they had to keep feeding the public appetite for it.
    Over the next few weeks, Ruth got his way, playing left field, first base, and even center, hitting relatively well but not quite to his earlier standard, his home runs much less frequent as the deader ball came into play. The Red Sox stumbled along, playing barely .500 baseball, clinging to a narrow lead of a game or two as New York, Chicago, and Cleveland remained in pursuit, with no team able to get any traction.
    The pennant was Boston’s for the taking, but the team could not overcome the twin loss of Ruth and Leonard, who last pitched on June 20 and then joined the Fore River team. After a slow start, he’d been Boston’s best pitcher over the last month, giving up only a single earned run in his final 32 innings. His departure from Boston’s rotation left it in shambles. After Mays, Joe Bush and Sad Sam Jones, Barrow was left flipping coins. Frazee picked up players when he could and even tried to entice former star Ray Collins, now retired, off his Vermont farm, but as more and more players left for jobs or joined the service, everyone was looking for help.
    Then Ruth made a bad situation even worse. During the brief home stand, he crashed his car into a telephone pole and although he escaped unscathed, it was his fourth or fifth car accident in the past few years and was almost certainly alcohol related. The Red Sox then went into New York and dropped three of four to the Yankees, although Ruth, as was his custom in the Polo Grounds, managed to crack a home run—significantly, in the first inning, before the ball got soft—one the Boston Herald described as a “tornadic thump” that caromed off the concrete facade of the upper deck in right field. Although good ole Bob Dunbar, the Herald’s faux byline, offered, “Babe can hit telegraph poles as hard as he hits the horsehide. We love him just the same,” Barrow didn’t share the sentiment.
    He didn’t just want Ruth to pitch—he needed him to, even after he cracked another home run, his 11th of the year, off Walter Johnson in Washington.
    Everyone seemed caught up in the hype—at least everyone with a typewriter. Dispatches to soldiers in Europe supplied only the scores—unless Ruth hit a home run. And there was all sorts of wild speculation, or at least speculation that seemed wild at the time. One writer in the Boston American calculated that if Ruth remained in the lineup “his