Read Online The Selling of the Babe by Glenn Stout - Free Book Online

itself. It was made much the same way as it had been made forty years before when it was still allowable to “soak” a runner, or put him out by hitting him with a thrown ball.
    The first baseballs had been handmade, generally four pieces of leather stitched together over a tightly wound ball of yarn, known as a “lemon-peel” due to the configuration of the stitching, but by the 1850s organized teams tried to agree on a uniform size and method of manufacture. Still, it wasn’t until the 1870s that a true standard was set by the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, calling for a ball “formed by yarn wound around a small core … covered with two strips of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than 5.25 ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than 9.25 inches in circumference.” Manufacturers adopted the popular figure-8 style of stitching and the modern ball, constructed from a simple round rubber center wrapped in wool yarn and covered with stitched horsehide more or less, was born. It was tough, resilient, and almost impossible to hit more than a couple hundred feet, becoming softer and more lopsided with each use, and the game and its strategy evolved in line with the ball. Baseball was played primarily within only a couple hundred feet of home plate.
    In 1911 a rubber-covered cork center was introduced that caused a brief uptick in runs, but that was quickly offset as pitchers adapted—using the spitball and scuffing the cover to make it move—and penurious club owners kept the same ball in play throughout the game, turning softer—and deader—by the inning. The game wasn’t marked so much by the crack of the bat on the ball as a dull thud. Batters tried to place hits between fielders as if shooting pool with a moving target, taking a choppy, short, level swing designed as much to avoid the embarrassment of a miss as it was for the glory of a base hit.
    Although the modern game was only about twenty years old, it was already living in the past. Ever since Ban Johnson created the American League and major league baseball took on its now familiar two-league structure in 1903, the same few names had dominated the sport—batting stars like Detroit’s Ty Cobb, Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie of Cleveland, the White Sox’ Joe Jackson, Eddie Collins of the A’s, and the Yankees’ and A’s Home Run Baker, and the pitchers such as Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson. But by 1918, Cobb was entering his 14th season in the major leagues. Lajoie, Wagner, and Mathewson had recently retired, and the few remaining stars, like Jackson and Collins and Tris Speaker, lacked the charisma and appeal of their predecessors.
    The game needed a star. The last thing it needed was a war. In the end, it got both. In the long run, the carnage that overspread Europe was the best thing that ever happened to the game.
    For Babe Ruth, Opening Day on April 15, 1918, began just as it usually did for him. He arrived early and, as was his custom, probably helped the young vendors bag peanuts while scooping up great handfuls and leaving a hefty tip before taking the mound. Ruth spent nearly as much time with the people who worked at the park as he did the players—he didn’t see much of a difference, and in fact, that was how he met Johnny Igoe, a man who was becoming his best friend and advisor. Igoe, who now ran a drugstore, had started out at Fenway Park as a peanut vendor.
    Once he took the mound, the Philadelphia A’s found hitting Ruth about as productive as taking swings at peanut shells. After the usual pregame honorifics, which included the Red Sox marching out onto the field, raising the flag, and making appeals to the public to purchase Liberty Bonds to support the war, Ruth took the mound. He threw a scoreless first inning before giving up a run in the