7

Babe Ruth and the Roaring Twenties (1920 to 1929)

the 1920 census was the first that indicated a majority of Americans were living in urban areas. Americans began to believe that they were living in a new era that was different from the Gilded Age of their parents or grandparents—they believed that they were living in “modern times.” Capitalizing on this sense of progress, America entered nearly a decade of prosperity. Calvin Coolidge, who became president when Warren Harding died in 1923, summed up the decade by proclaiming that “the business of America is business.” Coolidge’s statement described the policy of his administration. Unlike the Progressives, who attempted to regulate society, the Coolidge administration tried to stay out of the way of business. The prosperity enjoyed by Americans in the 1920s created a consumer society, as innovative products—such as the radio, new automobile models like the Ford Model A, and new forms of financing such as the installment plan—appeared. Out of the prosperity of the decade, an entirely new culture emerged and flourished. The twenties were a period of indulgence. Americans still drank in spite of Prohibition, and many people abandoned Victorian sexual mores. The twenties also saw the emergence of jazz music, a fusion of two different genres of African American music: soulful blues and rhythmic ragtime. At parties, dancing replaced card games and charades. The 1920s were also the Golden Age of Hollywood, as movies became a very popular and influential form of entertainment. Celebrities captured the public’s attention. The best known was Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 became the first person to fly alone from New York to Paris, but movie stars and sports heroes also became a national obsession. American women also took on new roles. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, granting woman suffrage, became a part of the Constitution. Emboldened, many women adopted new, modern lifestyles and fashions. For some people, however, the transformation caused tremendous anxiety. They were worried that urbanization was destroying small-town values and that immigration and the changing role of women were threatening the domination of white Protestant males. As a result, the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted blacks, Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and women who refused to be bound by traditional roles, grew to three million members during the 1920s. Evangelicals, who opposed the social liberalism of the era as well as the teaching of evolution, tried to stem the tide of modernity and excess. In baseball, one player came to symbolize the impact of modernism on America.

In October 1926 an eleven-year-old New Jersey boy named Johnny Sylvester was recovering at home from osteomyelitis, a bone infection he contracted after being kicked in the head by a horse. His father sent a telegram to New York Yankees star Babe Ruth, who was in St. Louis for the World Series between the Yankees and the Cardinals. Sylvester’s father was hoping that Ruth might lift his son’s spirits by sending him an autographed baseball. A few days later, an airmail package arrived containing two baseballs—one autographed by the members of the Cardinals and the other signed by the Yankees. The package also contained a note from Ruth that said, “I’ll knock a homer for you on Wednesday.” Keeping his promise, Ruth hit three home runs in Game 4, which was played on Wednesday, October 6. The press learned about the incident and quickly reported it—except the newspapers included all sorts of fictional details. According to the papers, Sylvester was bedridden in a hospital and dying from a variety of diseases, including blood poisoning, a spinal infection, and a sinus condition. One report stated that his doctor gave him only thirty minutes to live. In every account, Ruth’s home run miraculously saved little Johnny’s life. The nation’s fascination with Sylvester’s recovery demonstrated the power of Ruth’s reputation in the mid-1920s.

In the wake of the Black Sox Scandal, Yankees’ slugger Babe Ruth restored the public’s confidence in baseball. The Library of Congress Online Photo Archive

Baseball rebounded from the Black Sox Scandal and became more popular than ever, but not just because a commissioner restored the public’s faith in the game. Baseball also revived because of a player named George Herman “Babe” Ruth. In the 1920s, Ruth, sometimes called the “Bambino” or the “Sultan of Swat,” was more than a baseball star; he was an icon. And the celebrity-obsessed press of the twenties, in which the media sought out heroes in sports as in other walks of life, followed everything he did. Brash, bold, and confident, Babe Ruth personified the decade Americans called the Roaring Twenties.

Baseball also entered modern times in the 1920s. Baseball writers have labeled the first two decades of the twentieth century the dead-ball era because baseball games played during that period were often low-scoring affairs that relied on speed and defense. Stars like Ty Cobb—who, with a .367 career batting average, still holds the highest lifetime batting average in history—bunted to get on base and then exploited the sacrifice, the stolen base, and the hit-and-run to advance around the bases. In the 1920s the larger-than-life Babe Ruth, with his powerful home runs, changed the game, and the excitement generated by Ruth’s home runs lured back disaffected fans who had become disillusioned with baseball in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal.

Ruth was born in Baltimore in 1895. His mother died when he was young, and when he was seven, his father sent him to live in an orphanage called St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. It was at St. Mary’s that Ruth learned to play baseball. He was good enough to play for the Baltimore Orioles of the International League in 1914. Because of competition from the Federal League’s Baltimore Terrapins, the minor league Orioles were losing money. In July, desperate for cash, Orioles owner Jack Dunn sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox for $25,000. Ruth broke into the Red Sox starting rotation during spring training in 1915. He quickly proved himself to be one of the best pitchers on the team, which won the World Series in 1915, 1916, and 1918. As a pitcher, Ruth compiled a lifetime record of ninety-four wins and forty-six losses, for a remarkable .671 winning percentage. Ruth won eighteen games in 1915, twenty-three games in 1916, twenty-four games in 1917, and thirteen games in the war-shortened 1918 season. In 1916 Ruth led the American League with a 1.75 earned run average.

When Ruth played for Boston, the Red Sox discovered he could also swing the bat. Boston manager Ed Barrow started playing Ruth in the outfield on days he was not scheduled to pitch, and by 1918 the Red Sox were using Ruth more as an outfielder than as a pitcher. The following season, Ruth hit twenty-nine home runs, breaking the old major league record set by Ned Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings in 1884. Williamson had hit twenty-five of his twenty-seven homers in Chicago’s tiny Lakeside Park. In 1919 Ruth knocked the ball over the wall in every ballpark in the American League.

Harry Frazee, the owner of the Red Sox, often found himself in financial trouble. In addition to owning a baseball team, Frazee was also a Broadway producer, and his plays almost always lost money. Whenever he found himself in a financial jam, he would extricate himself by selling a member of the Red Sox to another team. In 1920, again facing financial difficulty, Frazee sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $200,000. Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert agreed to buy the star for $125,000 in cash, with an additional $75,000, plus interest, to be paid in three increments spread over nine years. Frazee used the money to finance his latest Broadway production, a play written by Frank Mandel called My Lady Friends, which would by 1925 evolve into No, No, Nanette. For Frazee and for Yankee fans, the deal was a win-win situation: The Yankees acquired the best player in baseball, while Frazee finally had his hit. For Red Sox fans, however, the trade marked the beginning of the Curse of the Bambino, an eighty-six-year drought during which the Red Sox failed to win a single World Series.

As a Yankee, Babe Ruth became an immediate sensation. He hit fifty-four home runs for New York in 1920. That year, the Yankees set a new major league attendance record, drawing 1,289,422 paying customers and becoming the first major league team to draw more than a million fans in a single season. Starting in 1921, Ruth would lead the Yankees to three straight American League pennants. The Yankees would win a total of seven pennants and four World Series championships before Ruth was sold to the Boston Braves in 1935.

Ruth dominated baseball. In 1921 he set another major league record, hitting 59 home runs. Ruth would go on to hit a total of 714 regular season home runs in his career, a record that would stand until Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th home run in 1974. Under modern rules, Ruth may have had even more home runs. When Ruth played, a ball that hit the foul pole was a ground rule double, one that curved foul after clearing the outfield fence was considered foul, and the game ended the moment a walk-off run was scored; as a result, walk-off home runs did not count as home runs unless the run scored by the batter was needed to win the game.

Ruth not only hit for power, he consistently hit for average. In 1924 Ruth led the American League with a .378 batting average. The previous year, Ruth hit .393, just four hits shy of batting .400. Ruth’s lifetime batting average is .342, only two points below the lifetime batting average of Ted Williams, considered one of the best natural hitters of all time. Today, players who win a league batting championship often do not compile a batting average for the season that is as high as Ruth’s career batting average.

With Ruth playing right field, the Yankees were so popular that Jacob Ruppert decided to build the team a new stadium. His team had been sharing the Polo Grounds with the Giants since 1913. In 1923 Ruppert’s club opened Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, directly across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds. Unlike facilities labeled “parks” or “grounds,” the very name “stadium” evinced a modernist outlook. Often called “The House that Ruth Built” because it was paid for with money earned from Ruth’s popularity, Yankee Stadium held eighty-two thousand fans when it first opened, making it the largest stadium of its era. The ballpark was specially designed to take advantage of Ruth’s swing. As a left-handed batter, Ruth naturally hit the ball to right field, so the stadium was built with a right field wall only forty-three inches high, placed only 296 feet down the line from home plate. Ruth’s salary climbed during the decade. In 1919, his last year with the Red Sox, Boston paid him $10,000. The Yankees doubled his salary when the club obtained him in 1920, and in 1921 the Yankees gave Ruth a $10,000 raise. The following year his salary rose to $52,000, and by 1927, Ruth was earning $70,000 a year. Ruth was obviously worth the cost to the Yankees, as they insured him for $300,000.

Just as America seemed to be entering modern times in the 1920s, with Ruth’s home runs, so did baseball. Ruth transformed the game. In the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, baseball was a scrappy, low-scoring game that centered on speed and pitching , while baserunners got on base any way they could and then attempted to advance around the diamond. Ty Cobb, who is arguably the greatest hitter of all time, excelled at this style of play. With a single swing, a home run could score a run or more if runners are on base. With the effectiveness of the long ball, however, baseball teams began to rely on the “big inning,” using homers to score runs in bunches. Ever the traditionalist, Cobb—whose career was ending as Ruth’s was peaking—hated how Ruth and the sluggers who imitated him were changing the game. Believing there was little challenge in hitting home runs, one day in 1925 Cobb remarked to a reporter, “I’ll show you something today. I’m going for home runs for the first time in my career.” That afternoon, Cobb hit three homers against the Browns. After making his point, Cobb returned to his old style of play. And although Cobb is still considered one of the greatest players ever to play baseball—he was the highest vote-getter in the first class elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1936—the game passed him by.

Babe Ruth’s style of play was the most obvious example, but baseball was changing in other ways in the 1920s. Historically, major league batting averages have tended to hover around .260, but from 1920 to 1940, batting averages rose to between .270 and .280. In addition to the strategy adopted by Ruth and others, a couple of other factors contributed to the demise of the dead-ball era. First of all, the baseball itself changed in the twenties. In 1920 the Spalding Sporting Goods Company started using Australian wool, a higher quality yarn, in the manufacture of baseballs. Around the same time, Spalding, like many American companies of the time, adopted automation, using machines to wind the yarn around the baseball’s cork center. Baseballs wound by machine were much tighter than baseballs made by hand. Hitters received another break in 1920 when Major League Baseball banned the spitball. The application of saliva, grease, or some other foreign substance to a portion of the ball’s surface created wind resistance that altered the ball’s flight path. Facing a ball that did not travel smoothly through the air, batters found it hard to predict where the ball would cross the plate. Baseball, however, did not uniformly ban the spitball overnight; pitchers who were already throwing it were allowed to continue to do so until they retired. Burleigh Grimes, who finished his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934, was the last major league pitcher to legally throw a spitball.

The death of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in 1920 led to changes that further enhanced offensive production. At the Polo Grounds in August, pitcher Carl Mays of the Yankees threw a pitch that struck him in the head. Witness reports that Chapman failed to move out of the way as the pitch sped toward him indicate that he may not have seen the ball coming. Seconds later, with blood pouring out of his ears, Chapman collapsed. He died the following day in a New York hospital; he remains Major League Baseball’s only fatality. Following Chapman’s death, Major League Baseball adopted a rule requiring umpires to replace the baseball if it becomes dirty or scuffed. Like a spitball, a scuffed ball is susceptible to wind resistance that alters its flight path, and a bright, clean baseball is much easier for a batter to see coming.

With pitches that followed smoother arcs and baseballs that were easier to see, batters found it much easier to make contact with the ball. The machine-made balls also traveled faster and farther when struck by a bat. Major League Baseball embraced these changes, as increased offense made the game more exciting, and a more exciting game attracted more fans to the ballpark. Fans turned out to see the home run hitters. Babe Ruth was the premier slugger of his time, but he was not the only one. In 1930 Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs hit fifty-four home runs, while Jimmie Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics smashed fifty-eight home runs in 1932.

Due in part to the prosperity of the decade and in part to the excitement increased offense generated, attendance at major league games climbed to 9.5 million in 1924, and all sixteen major league teams made money between 1920 and 1930. Major League Baseball was still confined to ten cities in the northeastern quadrant of the United States in the 1920s, but the innovations of the twenties helped bring the game to more people. At first, major league owners feared the new technology available in the twenties would hurt attendance. For instance, in the 1920s the popularity of the automobile, which was now affordable for most middle-class Americans, soared. It made Americans more mobile and, by severing the restrictions imposed by the trolley map or the railroad timetable, gave them considerably more freedom. The car also gave fans access to other entertainment opportunities, such as a Sunday drive in the country. Still, the automobile made it possible for baseball fans who lived outside the city to attend games. The automobile, however, illustrated a problem many baseball teams overlooked when building new stadiums—where to park cars in urban neighborhoods. Lack of parking would be one of the reasons the Dodgers would leave Brooklyn in the late 1950s, and even today, parking is scarce near some major league stadiums.

Many club owners also worried about the effects of radio. Fearing fans would stay home and listen to ball games—and other programs—rather than attend games at the ballpark, St. Louis Browns owner Phil Ball attempted to ban the broadcasting of baseball games. Newspaper publishers also feared that if baseball fans listened to games transmitted over the air, they would no longer buy newspapers to read about them. But others saw value in broadcasting ball games. In 1921 a radio station in Newark, New Jersey, aired the World Series between the Yankees and the Giants. Sportswriter Sandy Hunt of the Newark Call attended the games at the Polo Grounds, phoning in the descriptions to the station, while in the studio, broadcaster Tommy Cowan relayed the details over the airwaves. In 1925, Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley allowed all Cubs games to be broadcast on the radio; instead of keeping fans away, the broadcasts built interest in the Cubs. People who could not attend the game listened to it on the radio, and as fans became more excited about the Cubs, they were more likely to attend on days they could make it to the ballpark. The radio also brought the game to people who lived far away from a major league team: People in cities hundreds—or even thousands—of miles away could still follow the game.

If it was not possible to broadcast the game live, radio stations, especially in minor league markets, often re-created ball games. Announcers in radio studios, working from a written description of a game that had taken place hours earlier, gave a play-by-play account of the game, augmenting the narrative with sound effects that gave the impression of a live broadcast. One of future president Ronald Reagan’s first jobs in broadcasting was re-creating Chicago Cubs games on a small radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, in the early 1930s.

Like other businesses in the twenties, baseball turned to scientific management to produce a better, cheaper, more efficient, and more profitable product. One of the challenges faced by major league teams was finding quality players. Branch Rickey, the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, knew he could not compete with wealthy clubs like the Yankees for new players. Even if he could discover future stars, rich teams would outbid him for their services. Instead Rickey invented another system to supply the Cardinals with ballplayers: He began buying up minor league teams, starting with the Houston Buffaloes of the Texas League and the Fort Smith Twins of the Western Association in 1920, and the Syracuse Stars of the International League in 1921. At the time, minor leagues were separated into five categories—Class AA, Class A, Class B, Class C, and Class D. Class AA was the category with the highest skill level and had teams in the largest minor league cities, while Class D was the lowest skill category and had teams in small cities and towns. Once he took over control of minor league teams, Rickey could sign unproven ballplayers for very little money and assign them to his Class D teams. With proper coaching and experience, some of the players improved. As they did, Rickey promoted them up his farm system. In time, the Cardinals not only had a readily available supply of quality players, but often had a surplus at many positions. Rickey was able to use that surplus to supplement the club’s profit. He could sell minor leaguers he did not need to other clubs. And if the Cardinals had a future star waiting in the wings, Rickey could sell an established player he no longer wanted, as other teams were often willing to pay premium prices for famous names.

By 1928 the Cardinals owned five minor league clubs and had a working agreement with several other minor league teams. For a period in the 1930s, St. Louis owned more than three dozen minor league clubs. With a cheap source of quality ballplayers, the Cardinals became very profitable and successful, winning five National League pennants between 1926 and 1934. Cognizant of the Cardinals success, other major league teams began to imitate the St. Louis farm system.

Branch Rickey revolutionized baseball twice—as the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s when he invented the farm system and as the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers two decades later when he engineered the dismantling of the color barrier. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

Not only did improvements in technology and changes in business practices impact baseball, but so did changes taking place in American society. Having won the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment, American women became more assertive in society and adopted new lifestyles and fashions. Young women called flappers acted differently in public than their mothers or grandmothers had in the Gilded Age. Flappers bobbed their hair and wore tight, short dresses and excessive makeup. They also flouted social and sexual norms, drinking and smoking in public and regarding sex in a more casual manner. Flappers even left their mark on baseball, as some determined women formed their own teams, most notably the New York Bloomer Girls and the Philadelphia Bobbies, which were named after their hairstyles. The Bobbies even toured Japan in 1925, playing games against male college teams. At first the women from Philadelphia were warmly received in Japan, but as word spread that they could not hold their own against the men, the crowds at their games started to dwindle. Attendance became so low that the team did not earn enough money to get home. After receiving a $6,000 donation from a British-Indian benefactor living in Japan, nine members of the twelve-woman team headed back to the United States in November. The other three women were not able to secure passage until January 1926. Sadly, their ship encountered a storm in the Pacific, and when the sky finally cleared up to allow passengers back on deck, the first baseman, seventeen-year-old Leona Kearns, was washed overboard by a giant wave and never seen again.

Although most Americans welcomed the arrival of modern times, some traditionalists opposed the changes taking place in society. Not only did the Ku Klux Klan grow in membership, but a number of states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. When a Dayton, Tennessee, science teacher named John Scopes taught science in his classroom in 1925, he was arrested and put on trial. The nation became obsessed with the Scopes Trial, which seemed to symbolize the struggle between modernists and traditionalists that characterized the decade. The conflict even spread to baseball in the 1920s as traditionalists fought to protect something they held dear: the Sabbath. Baseball teams had long recognized the advantage of playing games on Sundays. In the days before night games, many working people could not attend weekday games. The American Association permitted Sunday games in the 1880s, but Cincinnati and St. Louis were the only cities whose laws allowed it. World War I offered baseball owners an opportunity to experiment with scheduling games on Sundays, as major league teams played benefit games as fundraisers for the war effort, and by the end of the war, six major league cities—Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Washington, DC—allowed games on Sundays. But Sunday baseball was still illegal in the states of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The question of Sunday baseball divided public opinion in the same way the Scopes Trial split the country. Most Catholic priests and modernist ministers, who saw baseball as a wholesome activity the whole family could enjoy, did not oppose Sunday games. Fundamentalist ministers, however, rallied against Sunday games. When a team scheduled a game on Sunday, evangelicals would contact the local police to break up the game, and the players and managers involved were often fined. Clubs looked for ways around the ban. Some teams played games on Sunday without charging admission, but once fans entered the park, they were required to buy a scorecard at the normal cost of a ticket. Other teams scheduled Sunday games outside the jurisdiction of the city government. Both the Yankees and Dodgers played Sunday games on Long Island, where they knew local authorities would not enforce the Sunday ban. The Phillies and Athletics scheduled Sunday games across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. The Boston Braves played some Sunday games in northern New Jersey until the Giants, claiming the Braves were invading their territory, put a stop to it. Sometimes major league teams would ignore the law and play anyway, considering the fine a part of the cost of doing business.

Gradually, the last states to prohibit Sunday baseball removed the ban. New York State legalized Sunday baseball in 1924. The Brooklyn Robins, as the Dodgers were called in the twenties, did not win any friends among the evangelical crowd, however, when the club scheduled its 1924 home opener against the Philadelphia Phillies on Easter Sunday. A state budget shortfall forced Massachusetts to legalize Sunday baseball in 1929, when it created a license fee that allowed the Red Sox and Braves to play on the Sabbath. Pennsylvania, the last holdout against Sunday baseball, finally relented in 1934 when the Phillies and Athletics threatened to permanently move to Camden. Fearful of losing its two Philadelphia teams, the state legislature repealed the ban.

Baseball players, like Hollywood movie stars, were popular—and marketable—figures in the 1920s. Every day, newspapers across the country printed a box called “What Babe Ruth Did Today,” which summed up the slugger’s accomplishments in the day’s game. Ruth, however, did more than play baseball. He starred in ten movies, starting with the silent picture Headin’ Home in 1921. Ruth hired Christy Walsh, one of the first sports agents, and, with Walsh’s help, secured numerous endorsement deals on consumer products ranging from automobiles to tobacco. Some companies used Ruth’s star power without his permission. In 1921 the Curtis Candy Company of Chicago introduced the Baby Ruth bar. Even though Ruth was a national sensation in 1921, Curtis claimed that its candy bar was not named after the ballplayer, maintaining instead that the candy was named after the daughter of former president Grover Cleveland, who had left office in 1897. Cleveland’s daughter, “Baby Ruth” Cleveland, had died in 1904 at age twelve. In 1995 the Nestle Company, which now manufactures the candy bar, finally reached an agreement with Babe Ruth’s estate to continue to use the name, and even to use Ruth’s likeness in advertisements for the candy.

Babe Ruth was big, loud, and rambunctious, like the decade itself. He personified the permissiveness of the twenties. He drank to excess, he partied, and he slept around. His Yankee roommate, outfielder Ping Bodie, once joked, “I don’t room with Babe, I room with his suitcase.” Unlike Hollywood movie stars like Fatty Arbuckle, whose reputations were dragged through the mud in gossip magazines, the press always portrayed Ruth in a positive light. Newspapers rarely published stories about his excesses, instead focusing on tales about his visits to sick children in hospitals. Ruth’s worst season came in 1925, when he became ill during spring training and missed fifty-six regular-season games. That year, the Yankees finished in seventh place. Ruth’s ailment was possibly caused by a sexually transmitted disease, but the press blamed it on intestinal problems. Calling it the “stomach ache heard ’round the world,” newspapers reported that Ruth had eaten too many hot dogs before a game.

Ruth bounced back. Two years after his illness, Ruth and first baseman Lou Gehrig led the 1927 Yankees to the World Series. That year, Ruth set a new record by hitting sixty home runs in the regular season. No other team in the American League had hit that many homers in 1927, and Ruth’s regular-season record would stand until 1961, when it was broken by Roger Maris. Some baseball fans consider the 1927 Yankees to be the best team of all time. New York won 110 games against 44 losses that year, compiling a .714 winning percentage. The Yankees won the American League pennant by nineteen games over the second-place Philadelphia Athletics. In October, New York met the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. The series was over before it even started. Pittsburgh players saw New York batters hit the ball out of the park during batting practice and became completely intimidated by the Yankees. The Yanks swept the series, four games to none.

In 1930, during the Great Depression, Ruth signed a new contract with the Yankees for $80,000. A reporter, pointing out that he was now making more money than President Herbert Hoover, asked Ruth if he thought it was okay that he made more money than the president. Realizing that many people were facing hard times, Ruth responded, “I had a better year.” The Roaring Twenties permitted such hyperbole, especially from a star who ranked, in most Americans’ eyes, higher than the chief executive of the nation.