Comm Voice
His own paradise: Babe Ruth in St. Petersburg (Part 2)
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Not surprisingly, Ruth found his remedy in the kitchen. The Evening Independent called it a “clubhouse treasure,” but team trainer Doc Woods had other words for the robin’s egg blue tinted rolling pin when Ruth first handed it to him, according to Marshall Hunt from the New York Daily News.
“What do you want me to do with this blue thing?” Woods asked.
“Roll it over my tummy,” Ruth replied from the trainer’s table inside what was called the rubbing room. “Roll it as hard as you can.”
Woods response was to throw Ruth’s roller into a pile of wet shirts. “You can take this thing and throw it in the lake,” he cried. “A rolling pin for me? I’m a trainer not a baker!”
Unperturbed, Ruth later declared to The New York Times, “I’ll be down to 215 pounds by the opening of the season. That will be slightly over my usual weight, but I’m not worrying. Anyway, if the American League pitchers walked me as much as they did last year, I won’t have to be in condition. Anybody can walk to first base.”
Eight inches shorter and 75 pounds lighter than the Babe, Huggins, the Yankees’ exasperated Hall of Fame bound manager, finally chased the home run king from Crescent Lake Park’s expansive, 52-locker dressing room onto the practice diamond admonishing him to “run around a bit and bag a few flies. You look like the size of an Iowa barn,” according to the Daily News.
Barely a month beyond his 30th birthday, Ruth also had to contend with the fallout from a meritless March 10 story by Boyd that claimed he “has passed the shadow of his youth. He is growing fat and old. His best days are behind him.” Even the well-respected baseball writer and sports editor of the New York Telegram Fred Lieb wrote, “It is doubtful that Ruth will again be the star he was from 1919 through 1924.” (The Babe would go on to play another 11 seasons and hit 430 more home runs.)
St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 9, 1926.
And there was a report in The Sporting News that Ruth and his teammates were on a “large rampage,” after they learned that several out-of-town sportswriters informed their prohibition era readership that “some of the Yanks had been flirting with the town bootlegger.” Retribution was planned, but apparently never carried out.
While Ruth’s first weeks in St. Pete didn’t include the temptations of Mardi Gras that punctuated the Yankees’ previous two spring seasons, he was never far from St. Pete’s own growing spotlight. Yet, amidst the swirl of attention, the affable idol found himself at home in the Burg. In the first week, he was loaned a new deluxe model Jewett sedan by a local garage owner for his use while in the city, purchased two villa lots in the neighborhood of Pasadena Golf and Country Club (celebrated by the opportunistic sellers with near full-page ads in the local papers) and signed off on the St. Petersburg Kennel Club’s creation of the Babe Ruth Cup honoring the top performing greyhound of the spring session, a successful promotion that led to track attendance records. By the second week he agreed to help coach the St. Petersburg High School baseball team’s pitchers and outfielders. There were, of course, other invitations.
Although he judged a boxing match the night before at the local Knights of Columbus Hall, Ruth’s injury kept him from playing in the Yankees exhibition opener on Thursday, March 12 at Waterfront Park, constructed three years earlier by the St. Petersburg Athletic Club. Located at the intersection of First Avenue and First Street SE, it was there where both the Yankees and Braves played home games. He was introduced by the ballpark’s public address announcer in the second inning with the promise to the sold-out crowd in the maroon and while painted wooden grandstand that he would play in the team’s second home game four days later. In street clothes, the Babe smiled graciously and bowed awkwardly at the mention of his name. Meanwhile, the Independent devoted five different stories about the idle Bam in that evening’s edition.
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According to author Kevin McCarthy, that assurance from the game’s promoters was standard practice when it came to Ruth “To say that George Herman was the whole show would not be a distortion of the truth,” McCarthy wrote in his book, Babe Ruth in Florida.
The Babe was in fact in the lineup that following Monday afternoon in front of a crowd estimated to be 2,750, one of the park’s largest ever. Despite delivering two well-struck singles in a loss to the Braves, he was among those expecting more from his first game in St. Pete. Wrote the Evening Journal’s Frick: “Singles mean little in the Babe’s life, and he was a sore and disappointed young man when he pigeon-toed his way from the park.” He begged off marching with his teammates in the next morning’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, noted Frick.
The New York Evening Post called Ruth the team’s most consistent hitter that spring. He batted .375 in seven games at Waterfront Park, but it wasn’t until his next-to-last at bat that he delivered the first of 13 career home runs there off Brooklyn’s Andy Rush in a 10-5 loss on March 24. The Robins’ Jack Fournier also homered in that game, giving the locals a rarity: home runs by both reigning league champions in the same game. (It should be noted that hitting a home run was no small feat at Waterfront Park where the dimensions were vast: 412 feet to left field, 515 to center and 385 to right.)
The Bam crushed an even longer ball the previous day in an 8-3 win over Boston, but that spring, even the ballpark’s ground rules conspired against him.
St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 6, 1932.
The St. Petersburg Times described it this way: “Ruth was robbed of a four-base clout when his drive in the sixth inning over the right field bleachers was made into a two-base hit by ground rules. The hit was one of the longest ever seen at Waterfront Park clearing First Street and dropping in the yard of a home just inside the extended foul line. He was allowed but two bases with the explanation being given (from a minor league umpire assigned to the game identified as arbiter O’Toole by the New York Daily News) that a ball being driven between the two telephone posts near the right field foul line is good for but a half trip no matter how far it goes.”
Huggins called it “the only fault to find with St. Petersburg during the training season.” Ruth complained to the Times, “These folks around here have been at me for more than a week to park one and when I do, I only get two bases. Say, where do I have to hit the ball for a free trip around? But I am satisfied. The people here can rest assured that they have seen the longest two-base hit of their lives.”
The Bambino would return to St. Petersburg for 10 more springs, ending in 1935 as a member of the Braves. “It was said that the population of St. Petersburg tripled when Ruth was playing baseball there,” wrote Will Michaels.
Despite that difficult first spring and his habitual indiscretions, Ruth found his own paradise and a sense of belonging in the Sunshine City. Only at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, where he played for the Red Sox from 1914 to 1919, did he play more home games than at Waterfront Park.
It would be impossible to measure his impact on the city, particularly its youth. Michaels described a little-known incident from that first spring when the Babe led a fundraising campaign to help orphans whose parents were killed in a crash on the recently opened Gandy Bridge. Among his many charitable efforts was his work toward establishing the Crippled Children’s Hospital. Today, it is known as Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.
“Both parties,” wrote McCarthy, “the ballplayer and the state, prospered from encounters with each other. He spent many springs there to get his body into shape, show his employers that he was still able to hit the long ball and enthrall a public that never got its fill of the man. Florida likewise gained from his presence not only in the increase in the number of tourists who flocked to the state each March to watch the boys of summer, but also from the ballplayers who returned there after their careers were over, from the millions of words written from the Sunshine State and from the high praise that Ruth always had for the state … Florida and Babe Ruth came of age together.”
