When Babe Ruth turned St. Petersburg upside down

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On the first day of March 1925 the 5:30 p.m. train from Hot Springs, Arkansas pulled into St Petersburg’s Seaboard Station as a boisterous crowd gathered on the platform. The revelers focused their attention on two round, jowled faces among the disembarking passengers. One belonged to Teddy, a Boston bull terrier puppy. The other was that of the world’s most recognized athlete of his day, and for thousands of days to come.

Stepping onto St. Pete’s sandy soil for the first time, Babe Ruth held tightly to the pet that he had purchased five days before for his beloved 3-year old adopted daughter, Dorothy who had arrived in the city with Helen, Ruth’s first wife, three weeks before while the overweight Babe was futilely sweating it out at what he called his annual “boiling out” spa retreat in Hot Springs.

In his absence, mother and daughter had represented the Bambino at the Feb. 23 grand opening of the Yankees’ new $45,000 spring training facility at Crescent Lake Park, the city’s second largest public park and the offering that sealed the team’s decision to move its preseason camp from New Orleans. The pair left the 10 a.m. ceremony early however; Dorothy had been ill since her arrival, but she appeared to have recovered judging from her joyous reaction upon seeing Babe and Teddy at the station.

The boisterous, celebratory welcome featured a brass band, St. Pete’s legendary baseball ambassador and former mayor Al Lang and numerous civic and business leaders. Historian Tim Reid likened Ruth’s arrival to that of the Beatles at Kennedy Airport 40 years later. In his book, The Making of St. Petersburg, Will Michaels called it “Ruthmania” and included this description from The New York Times: “The earthquake in Northern regions yesterday was a mild little affair compared to the reverberating tremors which shook St. Petersburg when the Sultan of Swat joined the social colony here. All the beauty and chivalry of St. Petersburg was on hand to welcome the great Babe.”

(Twenty-four hours earlier, states in the Northeast experienced a “vigorous little earthquake” that caused minimal damage, according to the Associated Press.) It was, after all, the Roaring Twenties and the Burg was bursting at the seams.

Arriving almost simultaneously, with much less fanfare, was the Orange Blossom Special from New York City carrying, among its passengers, a shy, humble rookie named Lou Gehrig.

The entourage followed the Ruths as they were motored from the station at Ninth Street and Second Avenue South along the city’s darkening brick streets for nine blocks to the three-month old, eight-storied, Princess Martha, one of St. Pete’s first million-dollar hotels.  

For years afterward, New York‘s baseball writers joked that it was actually the spring of 1925 that St. Petersburg was discovered and not, as textbooks claimed, a century earlier. Historian Gary Mormino wasn’t joking when he wrote, “It was 1925. Americans discovered St. Petersburg.”

Sarcasm and hyperbole aside, however, Lang’s successful courtship of what would become the most iconic sports franchise of the 20^th century was considered by civic leaders at the time to be “the greatest event in the history of the city from the standpoint of publicity,” according to the St. Petersburg Times. 

With the Boston Braves already training there since 1922, it would mean that St. Pete would not only be the first city to host two teams for spring training, it would also be home to media members from two of the country’s three largest markets ushering the city into the national spotlight for just the second time. The first came 11 years earlier when Tony Jannus flew his Benoist Airboat biplane 23 miles from the Central Yacht Basin over the bay to Tampa’s Hillsborough River, completing the first-ever commercial airline flight.  

While Lang’s adopted home was already experiencing a period of unprecedented growth (the city’s population jumped from 14,000 in 1920 to 37,000 in 1925, including 6,000 registered real estate agents), Michaels noted, “More than any other factor, Ruth and the Yankees and their cohorts gave St. Pete national fame and served as a major force in attracting tourists and seasonal residents.”

There was plenty of evidence to support that claim in 1925. Four months before the Yankees’ arrival, the Atlantic Coast Railroad line announced it would add two extra cars to accommodate passengers bound for the Sunshine City. In March, the St. Petersburg Times reported that the city’s tourist season had been extended 30 days longer than ever before as tourists – many celebrating their first “paid vacations”- lengthened their stays through March and into April as the winter population swelled to over 100,000.  Was it coincidence that in the same month the Yankees first pitched their tent, the city issued a record number of building permits, or that on Feb. 24, the day after the Yankees’ first workout, the Burg’s iconic open-air post office saw its busiest day on record with more than 50,000 letters dispatched?  Perhaps.   

The St. Pete Chamber of Commerce was only too happy to tell the story increasing its advertising budget for the year from $45,000 to an unheard of $160,000, according to R. Bruce Stephenson in his book Visions of Eden.  

But with the Florida land boom about to crest and the Great Depression looming, the arrival of the Yankees and Ruth could also be described as the exclamation point capping what the Times later called “the last of the really good years.”

Even the skeptical New York press took notice. That spring, Charles A. Taylor of the New York American wrote, “The enthusiasm of St. Petites for St. Pete, the ceaseless energy they have expended in transforming a tiny hamlet into a thriving and ever-growing city also affords a valuable lesson for ball players who hope to battle their way into a World Series.”

For the game’s greatest ball player, however, that first spring in St. Petersburg – a 25-day stay – was, as author of The Big Bam Leigh Montville described, “a succession of days when nothing good seemed to happen.” Among other calamities, Babe was plagued by reports of his financial troubles brought on by a year-old gambling debt, a left ring finger fracture suffered while receiving a throw at first base on his sixth day in camp, and chronic health issues ranging from blisters and boils on his feet, legs and hands to symptoms suggesting acute indigestion or influenza, or other less talked about disorders. “I always have a little something the matter with me in the Spring,” he told the Associated Press.

None of it seemed to lessen Ruth’s unquenchable desire for food, fun or firewater. But it all came to a screeching halt when the big man collapsed on the platform at a train station in Ashville, North Carolina, 10 days after the Yankees had departed St. Petersburg for points north. Ruth soon underwent stomach surgery and didn’t return to the field until June 1, at which time the Yankees were 13-1/2 games out of first place and heading for what would be their worst season over a 42-year span from 1914 to 1965.

His affliction may well have been traced to Hot Springs where, according to The Sporting News, he weighed in at 246 pounds – the heaviest he had ever been prior to spring training- and for the first time in 11 preseason visits, failed to shed his usual offseason expansion.

Much, but not all of his misfortune was self-inflicted. “Ruth’s money has been taken away from him by sharks,” wrote the New York Evening World’s Robert Boyd. “He has given freely to charity. Just a few days ago he was having his finger x-rayed in a doctor’s office when a cripple came in. He handed him a dollar and said, “Gee, here I am complaining about a busted finger.”

It was that March 9 appointment, with Dr. O.O. Feasler at his downtown office in the First National Bank Building that kept Ruth from joining his teammates on a charter fishing trip in the Gulf, an adventure the Babe would have undoubtedly enjoyed.

And, on top of it all, Ruth’s marriage was all but over. In her New York Times best-selling book The Big Fella, Jane Leavy recounted the notoriously carousing Ruth as being on his best behavior when Helen and Dorothy were around that spring, but he broke loose as soon as they were apart. Predictably, the couple separated a few months after the Yankees left Florida.

According to Leavy, “(Ruth) played day and night despite increasing chills, a chest cold, stomach cramps, and a fever.”  Evenings were likely spent at Walter Fuller’s naughty new Gangplank, St. Pete’s first nightclub, where patrons were entertained by “Earl Gresh and His Gangplank Orchestra” as they sipped their whiskey from teacups.

“If anyone can have fun in this town, I can,” Ruth reportedly remarked to a reporter. The New York Daily News wrote that spring: “George Herman has an inclination in indulging excessively in any amusement which fascinates him.” Years later, one of his grandchildren, Donna Pirone, took it a step further suggesting her grandfather had what would now be considered Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.

The New York newspapers often assigned one writer just to cover the man who, in 1920, in his first season after moving from the pitching mound to the outfield and an everyday spot in the lineup, hit more home runs than any other single team in the American League.

The boundless, uninhibited Ruth rarely left them disappointed.  Before retiring that first night in St. Petersburg, the Babe, speaking from the Spanish-tiled, high-ceilinged lobby of the Princess Martha, told the New York media assemblage, “Tomorrow, I’m going to get up early and bust a lot of baseballs.”

The next morning the beefy Bam struggled to fit into his uniform even joking he had mistakenly been given the pants of the Yankees’ 5-foot-7, 160-pound catcher Benny Bengough, who, in sharp contrast to Ruth, never hit a home run in 10 major league seasons. Those anticipating Ruth’s first workout had to wait for a morning shower to clear before he stepped into the batter’s box at Crescent Lake Park amidst the queen palms, washingtonias and oleander.

A half-dozen photographers and 500 or so onlookers were present as the Babe took his first swing in St. Petersburg. Wearing a rubber shirt and brandishing his 54-ounce war club, the heaviest bat in all of baseball, he whiffed on a batting practice offering from little-used pitching teammate Walter Beall, setting the tone for a somewhat unremarkable first day.

It probably didn’t matter much to those on hand. As New York sportswriter Paul Gallico wrote, “He is the one player in the universe who can strike out as though he was accomplishing something  magnificent. I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps because with Ruth one realizes that a strikeout is merely a postponement of the lightning.”

Later, Ruth’s first day got considerably better when he and Mrs. Ruth, accompanied by several teammates, visited the St. Petersburg Kennel Club. The Bam cashed in more than one winning ticket and planned to go shopping for new spring clothes for himself and Mrs. Ruth before the next day’s 10 a.m. workout.

Once on the field that second morning, Ruth found his form, according to The St. Petersburg Evening Independent which described him as “having the time of his life” while sending “several good baseballs to the sand traps of Crescent Lake – so many in fact that (Yankees manager Miller) Huggins finally was compelled to call a halt. Baseballs are an expensive luxury these days,” continued the Independent, “and even so illustrious personage as our Mr. Ruth cannot be permitted to manhandle them without reserve.”

But Ruth soon discovered another impediment: Alligators. The 18-acre lake was nearly 400 feet from home plate in right field, but the fence-less field’s fresh Bermuda grass offered its slithering inhabitants a comfortable place to lie in the sun. Montville wrote, “Ruth went to his position in the outfield and found an alligator already there. “I ain’t going out there anymore,” he reported to Huggins when he returned to the bench. “There’s alligators out there.”

In the Yankees’ first intrasquad game a few days later, Ruth blasted a missile over the head of a young outfield prospect named John Levi, an Arapaho native American who Jim Thorpe called the greatest athlete he had ever seen. Racing after the would-be home run, Levi dove off the seven-foot high embankment into Crescent Lake’s swampy shallows clogged with water hyacinths and retrieved the ball, stopping the meandering Ruth at third base as several thousand spectators groaned at missing out on one of Ruth’s specialties. Afterward, the irked Babe remarked to The Evening Independent, “Someday that guy’s gonna go diving in there and coming (sic) up with an armful of snakes. He’s got no business going after a ball like that.”  

Later in the spring, the local Elks Club teased the Yankees’ herpetophobic slugger when they presented him with a baby alligator prior to a game with the Cincinnati Reds. Ruth promptly released it in the home dugout, which quickly emptied. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis witnessed the hijinks from the stands.

But it was the painful finger that kept Ruth off the practice field for the week leading up to the exhibition games. The New York Evening Journal’s Ford Frick, who 26 years later would become the  commissioner of baseball, described the Babe as “not needing the actual practice so badly, but he does need some violent form of exercise which will remove his excess poundage and keep it removed. During his idle moments Mr. Ruth has been known to put on as much as seven pounds a day.”

Rick Vaughn spent 31 years in Major League Baseball as a communications executive. He is currently a consultant for the Homeless Empowerment Program and is the author of two books: 100 Years of Baseball on St. Petersburg’s Waterfront: How the Game Shaped a City and Tampa Spring Training Tales. 

Wednesday: Part Two.