The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth by Leigh Montville Page B

him on the road. Dutch Leonard was another late-night rambler, and the manager started ordering two adjoining hotel rooms at every stop. He put himself in one room with Leonard, coach Heinie Wagner in the next room with Ruth. That arrangement didn’t end the wanderings (no word on whether Ruth used Heinie Wagner’s toothbrush), but it did slow them down. Carrigan also tried to curb Ruth’s spending. He drew Ruth’s pay and attempted to ration out the money every day. This did not work as well.
    “He had no idea whatsoever of money,” Carrigan said. “You have to remember his background.”
    Carrigan had another plan for spring training in 1916. He invited the wives to come to Hot Springs. Helen made the trip. She was as much of a young, naive outsider with the other wives as the Babe was with their husbands. The couple did go out, however, with the Gardners one day to a carnival. The Babe paid the operator to stop the Ferris wheel while he and Helen were at the top, proceeding to rock the car back and forth and scare her witless. He loved carnivals, loved the midway at Revere Beach near Boston. Most kids did.
    Sometime during the day the party passed the monkey cages. Ruth started jumping around in front of a cage, doing monkey impressions. One of the monkeys started to do exactly what Ruth was doing.
    “Look, Babe,” Helen said. “He knows you.”
     
    The next two seasons—1916 and 1917—were his grand moments on the mound. No pitcher in baseball, certainly no left-handed pitcher, was better. He could throw a fastball past anyone, including the feared Ty Cobb of the Tigers. He was 23–12 the first year, 24–13 the second year. In 1916 he had a league-leading 1.75 ERA and a record nine shutouts. In 1917 he pitched 35 complete games in 41 starts. He was durable and consistent.
    The Federal League had folded after the 1915 season, creating a reverse stream of talent back to the major leagues in 1916, a situation that should have caused trouble for a young pitcher. Hadn’t the talent vacuum created by the Federals been one of the reasons he’d jumped to the American League so fast in the first place? Shouldn’t a tightening of talent make his job harder? Not really. He seemed to handle whatever came along.
    “One night he and Helen were out riding when their car ran out of gas,” Herb Pennock, a young patrician lefty from Kenneth Square, Pennsylvania, who’d joined the team in 1915 and oddly had become Ruth’s best friend, said. “Babe had to walk five miles to get some. He didn’t get to sleep until five in the morning. Then he pitched the first game of a doubleheader, won it, 1–0, and took the second with a homer. The next time Esther, my wife, saw Helen, she said, ‘What do you feed that man?’”
    His duels with Walter Johnson in 1916 were a memorable, season-long series of struggles. Johnson, the Washington Senators’ 28-year-old star right-hander, had established himself as the benchmark for all pitchers. He was in the midst of a string of 10 seasons when he would win 20 or more games, on the way to 417 career wins, second only to Cy Young in baseball history. He was a tall (6-foot-2) and gentlemanly character who didn’t smoke, drink, cuss, or throw at batters’ heads. Cobb always claimed he crowded the plate against Johnson because he knew Johnson was too nice to brush him back. Not that it mattered. Johnson had exceptionally long arms and threw only fastballs from a sidearm motion that froze right-handed batters in the box. He was called both “the Big Train” and “Barney,” after Barney Oldfield, the auto racer.
    Matched against Ruth, the emotional, developing reprobate, Johnson easily was cast as the white hat against the black hat, goodness against perdition. The problem was, perdition had the much better team behind him. The two men faced each other five times during the ’16 season:
    April 17—Ruth was a 5–1 winner in a rain-shortened, six-inning affair. He gave up eight hits,