Free The Original Curse by Sean Deveney Page A

swing-for-the-fences approach was unique. He tried for a home run every at bat. That just wasn’t how things were done. The focus of hitters was on making contact, not busting home runs. The fact that Ruth was a pitcher early in hiscareer probably enabled him to become a power hitter later—had he been an everyday player, some manager surely would have forced him to cut down his swing and focus on contact.
    Ruth’s spring success with the bat made an impression—with Barrow, with Hooper, and, most important, with Ruth himself. He was a pitcher, but he liked hitting. His home runs riled the fans. In the Red Sox’s 14 games with Brooklyn that spring, Ruth hit .429 with four homers in 21 at bats. No other Red Sox player hit more than one home run. The
Globe’s
Edward Martin described the home run Ruth hit on March 24: “The ball not only cleared the right field wall, but stayed up, soaring over the street and a wide duck pond, finally finding a resting place for itself in a nook of the Ozark hills.”
    Ruth joked, “I would have liked to have got a better hold on that one.” 15
    On April 3, the Cubs arrived in Bakersfield, California, from Fresno, prepared to wrap up 17 days of training on the West Coast and begin the trek back to the Midwest. It hadn’t been a good trip. Mitchell was having the same trouble in California that Barrow was having in Arkansas. Conditions were bad, and not enough players were on hand. A weeklong holdout by Grover Cleveland Alexander hadn’t helped. Now there was one last game before the team would begin heading east, a trip that promised to be a slow crawl, because the Cubs were scheduled for a packed slate of games against minor-leaguers throughout the Southwest. The final game before they left California was in Taft, 46 miles west of Bakersfield, and—this was fitting, given the Cubs’ spring travel woes—the only way to get to Taft was by stagecoach. This helps explain why, over the course of the California mis-adventure, the Cubs called themselves “Weeghman’s trained seals.” 16
    Still, the Taft game drew 3,000 fans. Before it started, a band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a practice that was becoming more common during the war. Most of the Cubs were not quite sure what to do. Outfielder Les Mann, who had served in a quasi-military position in the off-season, training soldiers for the YMCA at Camp Logan in Houston, instructed them—
take off your caps, put them over your hearts, face the band, and, for Pete’s sake, shut up!
    Miserable travel conditions notwithstanding, there were some positive aspects to the Cubs’ stint in California. Already, it appeared that 21-year-old shortstop Charley Hollocher—who stood just five-foot-sevenand weighed about 150 pounds—would make good. Hollocher showed terrific bat control and plate discipline, nearly impossible to strike out. He was also quick, with good footwork in the field. This was a relief for Mitchell, who worried about his infield.
The Sporting News
wrote, “Too much boosting has been the handicap that many a likely youngster coming up to the majors has found his undoing, but Charley Hollocher, the new shortstop of the Chicago Cubs, gamely faces the barrier and believes he can make the jump, however high the bar has been set…. He is a mite of a fellow physically, but bold with the bat and shifty as a rabbit in the field.” 17 In the course of spring training alone, the
Daily News
ran two feature stories on Hollocher and his St. Louis background. By the second week in April, James Crusinberry wrote that it was “Little Charley Hollocher, the boy shortstop of the Cubs, upon whom hinges the success or failure for the Chicago team this year.” 18
    Another travel problem struck the Cubs on their way back to Chicago. On April 4, they were late leaving California on their way to Deming, New Mexico, and were delayed further when their train died because the engine ran out of water outside Yuma, Arizona. By the