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Out of Left Field |
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Babe Ruth’s called shot: The arguments still rage
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Thanks to the hucksters who hustle Budweiser Beer, the Babe Ruth called-shot debate gets a reprise. The commercial shown during the baseball playoffs mixed actual footage of Ruth in action with faked black-and-white shots of a Ruth-like figure pointing to the stands and hitting a home run there.
I have done some research on the legend and pretty much have come down on the cynical side of the issue.
The background: The Yankees won the first two games of the 1932 World Series over the Chicago Cubs. The first two games were in New York. Amidst much bench-jockeying in Game 3 at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Ruth hit a three-run homer off Charlie Root in the first inning. The Cubs rallied and the score was tied, 4-4, when Ruth came up in the fifth inning.
He pointed, or did not point, to the center field bleachers before hitting a long home run to that sector. A cloud of myth surrounds that action. Even the count is different in many recollections. Significantly, only one game story among dozens of dispatches said Ruth actually pointed, though several accounts written a few days and weeks afterward alluded to Ruth calling the shot.
The only immediate relevant description was written by Joe Williams in that afternoon’s NY World Telegram. He wrote: “In the fifth, with the Cubs riding him unmercifully from the bench, Ruth pointed to center and punched a screaming liner to a spot where no ball had ever been hit before.”
Williams made a few other references to the incident in a collection of columns in the book, ‘The Joe Williams Reader,’” compiled by his son, Peter. On Feb. 7, 1950, Williams quoted Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs catcher at the time. Hartnett says, “Ruth waved his hand across the plate toward the Cub bench. At the same time he said--and I think only the umpire and myself heard him--‘it only takes one to hit it.’ ”
On June 24, 1953 Williams wrote, “The most fascinating stories, unhappily, are not always true…And now comes reliable testimony that Ruth didn’t call that celebrated home run.” He quotes Mickey Walker, the prizefighter pal of Ruth. “There came a night when the Babe and Walker…were sitting around nibbling on nutritious, body-building scotch, and the fighter put the question flatly to the old King of Swat. Did he or did he not call the home run off Root?
“He didn’t. ‘I had two strikes on me and the pitcher was leveling with speed curves,’" the fighter quotes Ruth. ‘We were kiddin’ one another and I swept my arm, motioning to the outfield trying to rib him into a fastball. I waiting for the pitch and when it came, I belted the ball over the centerfield fence.'"
Williams writes, “Ruth did make the gesture; in fact he made several gestures, some even before the second strike. It was just as easy to believe Ruth had actually called the shot as not, and it made a wonderful story, so the press box went with it.” (Williams doesn’t mention here that only he put it in the paper at the time).
In a July 14, 1945 column Williams wrote, “‘There was no talk about it in the dugout at the time,’ recalled Art Fletcher [a Yankee coach]. ‘Lou Gehrig said he read about it in the papers the next day. And that was the first I’d heard about the Babe claming the shot.’”
Williams added, “I think I was as close to the Babe as any sportswriter of the era…I was often a houseguest. I sensed early it was fruitless to draw him out on matters of controversy or personal conflict. I’ve always thought it significant that he never once stated in my presence that he had called that home rim--except possibly by inference. …Did the Babe deliberately evade the baited question? It was my surmise that he did. In interviews he could be surprisingly adroit.”
Bill Bryson, an Iowa sportswriter (and the father of current best-selling author Bill Bryson) published a collection of his columns entitled, “The Babe Didn’t Point” that is of note because Bryson knew Charlie Root, the pitcher victimized by Ruth.
Bryson got to know Root when he managed the Des Moines team in 1950. Bryson wrote, “The legend always made the old pitcher furious…. He admitted that Babe, before his second homer, made certain gestures in answer to hecklers in the Cubs dugout. Ruth held up one finger after the first strike, and two after the second-both called strikes. Also, Root said, Babe had a habit of swinging his bat with one hand as he took his stance.
“‘But,’ Charlie explained, ‘he did this before every pitch. If he had really pointed, everybody who knows me knows that Ruth would have been on the seat of his pants on a knockdown pitch.’’’
Root was so vehement about this that when he was offered a chance to play himself in the movie “The Babe Ruth Story,” he turned down the role and the money because the movie propagated the called-shot myth.
A curious note here: Lost in the legend was a paragraph discovered by Bob Creamer in his definitive biography, “Babe,” that could suggest Ruth called his shot earlier in the game. Before Ruth hit his three-run homer into the rightfield bleachers in the first inning, Richards Vidmer wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “He paused to jest with the raging Cubs, pointed to the rightfield bleachers and grinned.”
In view of the fact that only one writer mentioned the Ruth gesture at the time, I have always wondered why the myth took off and grew. So I was intrigued by a letter I got from a nameless correspondent in reaction to one of my essays. He was 15 at the time and he wrote:
“We were kids in an orphan home outside Erie, Pa., and we were gathered around the table model Atwater Kent radio, all staring at the sound [listening to Graham McNamee on NBC]. McNamee described Ruth sticking one finger in the air after the first strike, two fingers after the second and then Ruth pointing toward the centerfield bleachers…Of course, there was no television at the time, but millions of radios heard McNamee’s broadcast, and it originated with him as he saw it.”
In view of McNamee’s penchant for hoking up details and the power of radio at the time, I am inclined to think that the McNamee explanation is the best one for understanding why the myth got such circulation and continues to grow so that it breathes life today--given even more juice by the current Budweiser commercials.
©2005 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Oct. 10, 2005.
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