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

ride had now lived in three different cities and played for three different teams. He had traveled to at least a dozen cities, slept in starched sheets, sat in hot tubs and smoked a cigar whenever he wanted. He had won 26 games and lost 8 in the International League. He had won two and lost one in the American League. He had hit one professional home run, but none in the United States. Elevators no longer were a great mystery.
    Somewhere in all of this he had asked Helen Woodford to marry him, and somewhere she had said yes, and he bought a car and they drove down to Ellicott City, Maryland, and said “I do” to each other on October 17, 1914. Some people said they already were married, had done the deed in the middle of the season in Providence, but that didn’t matter. They were too young, 19 and 16, to get married in the first place, doomed to failure, but that was part of being young.
    There is no record of a honeymoon. He and Helen went to Baltimore and—the fog comes in here again—spent the winter over his father’s bar on Conway Street at the edge of Pigtown. His father? Had he made peace with his father? How had that happened? His father had remarried. Had that settled the situation? Fog.
    Yes, quite a year.

CHAPTER FOUR

    O N THE NIGHT of May 6, 1915, a black-tie banquet was held at Carnegie Hall in New York City as the Civic Forum awarded its gold medal to 68-year-old Thomas Alva Edison. The inscription on the medal was “Inventor and World Benefactor.” President Woodrow Wilson and ex-presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft sent congratulations, as did Alexander Graham Bell. Guglielmo Marconi and a host of dignitaries spoke.
    The list of Edison’s accomplishments ran long, from the electric lights that illuminated the evening to the movie cameras that recorded the speeches to the phonographs that sat back at every home. The white-haired old man, who declined to speak, listened quietly to the compliments delivered in the environment he had altered, if not fully created.
    “He has made more men and women and children laugh than any other man, and has made it possible for more people to be amused than has anyone else in the history of the world,” former New Jersey governor J. Franklin Fort said. “Nothing is impossible to Edison…he is an uncrowned king among men.”
    In the Bronx that very afternoon, a subway ride from these proceedings, the start of another advance in amusement and laughter had begun. Babe Ruth, destined himself to be another uncrowned king among men, had begun to reinvent the home run four games into his second professional baseball season.
    The moment wasn’t exactly on a par with the creation of the lightbulb or Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” but in the measured confines of baseball it was the start of a seismic shift that eventually would turn the game upside down. In the third inning, leading off, batting ninth in the order, no one on base, Ruth measured the “rise ball” of New York Yankees pitcher Jack Warhop and clocked it into the right-field stands at the Polo Grounds for home run number one in his major league career.
    Warhop, a tiny man, was a figure from baseball’s past. One writer said that he was so small the grounds crew at the Polo Grounds cut the grass down an inch and raised the pitching mound two inches just so the paying customers could see him. He was in his eighth and final big league season, 31 years old, a craftsman, a manipulator with a submarine delivery that unleashed the soft and dead 1915 baseball. He was a coy strategist, a participant in the chesslike game that baseball always had been.
    The Babe—“built like a bale of cotton” was one description—was the arrival of the baseball future. Chess? He would turn the table over, let the pieces clatter to the floor. That was how he would end games. Strength and brawn had stepped to the front.
    No one knew, of course, at the time of his