Agate Type

ruth meets dean

There are many versions of Babe Ruth’s meeting with Dixie Dean, some of them pretty obvious exaggerations.  The most important, I’d say, is Dean’s own account, given in an interview with the journalist John Roberts in 1977 or 1978, just a couple of years before Dean’s death.  (You can listen to it here.  Also see transcripts of other parts of the interview, here, here, here, and here.)  He recalled meeting Ruth in 1934 after a game at White Hart Lane, the home grounds of Tottenham Hotspur.  Ruth came down to the dressing room.  “You’re that Dixie Dean guy,” he said.  “Jeez, you’ll get some cash today.”  (The crowd was huge.)  When Dean said he’d get just £8, Ruth exclaimed, “Jesus Christ—I’d demand two thirds of this gate.” 

In fact, Ruth visited England in 1935.  It was part of his 1934/35 off-season world tour, which started with the visit of a major league all-star team led by Connie Mack and featuring Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Al Simmons, Lefty Gomez, Earl Averill, and many others to Japan and the Philippines in the fall. The Japanese portion of the tour was the most significant.  Seven hundred thousand fans turned out for the 18 games to watch Ruth hit .408, smash 13 home runs, and play first base holding an umbrella, while Gehrig took to the field wearing rubber galoshes and Simmons reclined in the outfield grass between hitters.  Moe Berg, the catcher/spy, lurked about Tokyo with a camera under his kimono.  For some reason this crew managed to inspire the founding of Japanese professional baseball.

After the All-Stars played in Manila in December, the team split up, all the players going their separate ways.  Ruth went on to Java, then to Europe via the Suez Canal, visiting Switzerland and Paris in January before arriving in England on February 7, 1935.  He stayed less than a week.  It was a hectic few days, though, packed full of events.

Most intriguingly, on February 8 he strapped on leg pads, picked up a cricket bat, and faced off against two fast bowlers.  Needless to say he smashed their offerings all over the field.  “Sure, I could smack that ball all right,” he said later.  “How could I help it when you have a great wide board to swing?”  His coach, the former Australian star Alan Fairfax, gushed about his star pupil.  “I wish I could have him a fortnight.  I could make one of the world’s greatest batsmen out of him.”  Ruth tried bowling, less successfully.  The afternoon ended with an argument about whether baseball pitchers were faster than cricket bowlers.  There was a plan to bring Harold Larwood, one of the top bowlers of the day, down to London to undertake a test against Ruth, but it didn’t come off.


The matchup that never happened.

Of cricket, Ruth said, “I guess it’s a better game than I thought but I think I will stick to baseball.  They tell me $40 a week [£8 a week, same as football’s maximum wage] is top pay for cricket.  I believe I had rather be a club owner than a player.” There was subsequent speculation in the press that Ruth’s remarks would bolster the case for a rise in players’ pay in England, though that didn’t happen until after World War II.

The next day, February 9, Ruth was to go out to see “his first British soccer match.”  Dixie Dean said he met Ruth at Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane.  Unfortunately Everton did not play Tottenham that day.  Everton’s league match at Tottenham that season had already been played on August 25, 1934, when Ruth was still in the United States.  On February 9  Everton were playing a game 200 miles northwest of London at their own home grounds, Goodison Park in Liverpool, thrashing Wolverhampton Wanderers 5-2.  The match at White Hart Lane that day was between Tottenham and Derby County.

My access to British newspapers of the period is pretty limited, and I haven’t been able to find any contemporary mentions of exactly which match Ruth attended on February 9, 1935. This website, though, claims it was the Tottenham/Derby County game at White Hart Lane: “Jimmy McCormick scored both Tottenham goals in this match at White Hart Lane, but Derby took a point in front of baseball star Babe Ruth courtesy of goals from Scots Hughie Gallagher and Dally Duncan.”

February 9 was the only day during Ruth’s stay in England on which Football League games were played.  There weren’t any F.A. Cup ties during this period either.  He departed for the U.S. on February 13, six days after he arrived; within two weeks he had signed with the Boston Braves for what was to be his major league swan song.

Now, it’s also true that I have no way of knowing whether or not Dixie Dean was actually in the lineup for Everton up in Liverpool that day.  (He didn’t score, at any rate.)  So it’s theoretically possible that he was not playing and made his way to London to meet Ruth at White Hart Lane—though that certainly doesn’t match his story that the two met in the locker room after a game in which Dean played.

So Babe Ruth did, apparently, attend a game at White Hart Lane, and he did make public comments about the paltry pay of English athletes (though cricketers instead of footballers).  But I can’t establish that he saw a game in which Dixie Dean played, and can’t even place them in the same city at the same time. 

This was Ruth’s only trip to England as far as I know, certainly the only one made during his active playing career.  So it would seem to be the only chance for the fabled meeting to have happened in just the way Dean described it.

UPDATE 12:22 pm  I should add that of course it’s possible that Babe Ruth visited England another time, though I haven’t seen any reference to such a trip.  And the press in 1935 certainly made it sound as though Ruth had never been there before.

60

     

One number binds two of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century. 

On September 30, 1927, Babe Ruth hit his record 60th home run in a 4-2 win over the Senators.  Seven months later (May 5, 1928) and across the Atlantic, Dixie Dean of Everton netted a hat trick against Arsenal in the last match of the 1927/28 season, earning his club a 3-3 draw and giving him a record of 60 Football League goals for the season.

Both just edged the previous record of 59.  In Ruth’s case it was his own record, set in 1921; in Dean’s case he was nudging past a mark set by Middlesbrough’s George Camsell the previous year (1926/27). 

The coincidence partly reflects parallel developments in the two games.  Both baseball and English football experienced scoring inflation in the 1920s.  Baseball’s deadball era came to an end as a result of the spitball ban, the emphasis on fresh baseballs, and the example of Ruth’s relentless uppercut.  Scoring rose by 40% in the American League from 1918 to 1921.  Football’s transformation took place when the offside rule was revised in 1925, reducing the number of defenders required to be ahead of an attacker who played the ball from three to two.  In the first season under the new rule, Football League scoring rose by 36%, from 2.54 goals a game in 1924/25 to 3.45 in 1925/26.

But there were also remarkable similarities between the two men, Dean and Ruth.  Both were working-class kids first hired by their hometown teams, Dean by Tranmere Rovers and then Everton, Ruth by the Baltimore Orioles before his purchase by the Red Sox.

Both were credited with Herculean long-distance feats. Ruth hit many famous tape-measure home runs, including an alleged 576-foot clout over the right field roof in Detroit (the one Jimmy Rollins recently tried to surpass). Dean is supposed to have once headed in a goal from the halfway line, which if true is frankly even more preposterous than a 576-foot home run, given the heavy leather footballs of the time.

Both Ruth and Dean were known almost exclusively by their nicknames rather than their given names. 

The legacies of both players took on nationalist overtones when World War II pitted their countries against enemies who also played their respective national games. It’s claimed that Japanese soldiers in the Pacific shouted “To hell with Babe Ruth!” as a way of taunting Americans. Similarly, there’s a story that an Italian prisoner of war in North Africa snarled to his British captors, “Fuck your Winston Churchill and fuck your Dixie Dean!”

Most strangely, though, especially given their significance as national symbols, both Dean and Ruth were victims of on-field racist abuse and subjects of rumors about mixed-race heritage.  The most common explanation for the nickname “Dixie” is that it was some kind of reference to the American South and to his dark complexion and curly hair.  Dean and his family detested the nickname.  Dean’s obituary in The Times—published in 1980—commented, astonishingly, that there was “something of the Uncle Tom in his features.” 

There were also some striking differences between the two stars.

Ruth may have had the “stomach ache heard ‘round the world,”  but Dean suffered a fractured skull and lost one of his testicles.  Ravaged by injuries, he lasted in Everton’s first team only until he was 30 years old.  Ruth played until he was 41.

While both led their teams to championships in their “record 60” seasons, Ruth’s teams won the World Series seven times, while Dean’s Everton only garnered two First Division championships.  Ruth, of course, also set the career home run record with 714, obliterating the previous record of 138 by Roger Connor.  Dean, by contrast, fell seven short of the record at the time for English top flight goals.  That record, 317, was held by Steve Bloomer of Derby County, who had retired in 1914.  (Bloomer was also one of the best baseball players in England—but more on that another time.)  Jimmy Greaves with 357 is the current record-holder, leaving Dean in third place—same as Ruth, as it happens.

In 1927 Ruth was breaking his own record for the third time; he’d held the single-season mark since 1919.   Other guys started making runs at 60 more or less right away, starting with Hack Wilson, who hit 56 in 1930.  In the three decades after that, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, Ralph Kiner, Johnny Mize, and Mickey Mantle would all threaten before Maris finally got the asterisk in ’61.  And since then PEDs, maple bats, and whatnot have pretty much buried Ruth’s record.

Dean’s single-season record, on the other hand, still stands.  Nobody else in the English top flight has even broken 50 since, the closest anyone has come being Tom Waring’s 49 league goals in 1930/31.  And George Camsell, whose record of 59 Dean broke, actually accomplished his feat in the Second Division, the equivalent of a minor league (well, sort of).  The previous First Division record was 43 goals, by Ted Harper of Blackburn Rovers in 1925/26.  This means that Dean’s 60 stands gloriously alone at the top of the heap, much like DiMaggio’s 56-game streak or Chief Wilson’s 36 triples or Lyman Lamb’s 100 doubles.

I wouldn’t presume to judge whether or not Dean was as valuable to his teams as Ruth was to his—the games are too different, and too much of 1920s/1930s-era football is probably unrecoverable for us to be able to estimate the value of individual players properly.

In terms of pay, there was no comparison. Baseball had the reserve clause, of course.  Even so, Ruth’s services as a player and personality were unique and irreplaceable enough that in 1927 he earned about $70,000, then a princely, in fact unprecedented sum for a ballplayer.

Football’s equivalent of the reserve clause was the maximum wage, which in the 1920s was £8 a week during the season, £6 a week during the off-season.  At 1930 exchange rates, then, Dixie Dean was paid just under $1,900 a year (!).  The maximum wage was set so low that most players on a First Division club were probably paid about the same; Ruth’s salary amounted to about 20 percent of the Yankees’ payroll, while Dean’s amounted to only 3 percent of Everton’s.

Both players scored lots of endorsement deals, but I think it’s fair to say that Ruth probably made a lot more money than Dean.  They both did cigarette ads.

  
(Ruth’s ad appeared in 1945, a year before he began suffering from nose and throat cancer.)

I don’t know if Dean ever appeared in exhibition games for pay, but Ruth played a ton of exhibitions, and may have at times made more money from those than from his regular-season Yankee job.  There can be little doubt that Babe Ruth’s baseball career was considerably more lucrative than Dixie Dean’s football career.

In fact, the one time they met, that’s exactly what they talked about—how much money they each made.

Or did they meet?  This post is long enough, so we’ll save that question for tomorrow.

parallel games, parallel lives

The first, very familiar photo shows Bud Fowler (standing in the middle) with the Keokuk team of the Western League in 1885.  Fowler, of course, was the first known African American professional baseball player.  The second photo, probably not so familiar to most baseball fans, shows Andrew Watson, the first player of mixed race heritage (Scottish/Afro-Caribbean) to play at the highest level of British football.

Fowler, literally isolated, with none of his teammates close by (an effect heightened by the retouching on some of the other players), looks stiff and awkward and uncomfortable.  Watson, by contrast, blends in easily with his team.  While it would also be easy to read too much into just two photos, clearly in this case their composition fortuitously reflects the real circumstances of their careers, at least at the moments they were taken.

The two men were virtual contemporaries, though from very different backgrounds.  Fowler was born John W. Jackson, the son of an African American barber in Fort Plain, New York, on March 16, 1858.  Watson was born in British Guiana on May 18, 1857.  His father was a wealthy (white) Scottish planter, who saw to it that Watson was university-educated.

Fowler had become a professional ballplayer, and had adopted his nom de guerre, at least by 1878.  He played in organized baseball, mostly as an infielder, before the color line was solidly drawn, off and on from 1878 to 1892.  He bounced from team to team, never having a serious chance to make the major leagues, but playing at the highest level of the minors.  Late in his career he helped to found the Page Fence Giants, one of the earliest black teams of the Jim Crow era and a precursor of the great Negro league teams.

Fowler was a professional; Watson was an (officially) amateur player at a time when the amateur game was still dominant.  He played as a full back for various Scottish clubs beginning in the mid 1870s before joining Queen’s Park, the premier club in Scotland and one of the very best in Britain at the time.  He played three times for the Scottish national team.  Eventually Watson became the first non-English player invited to play for Corinthians, the most prestigious and probably best side in England in the 1880s. 

Although Fowler remained active in baseball as a player, manager, and organizer well into his forties, he eventually fell into poverty, and died in 1913 in upstate New York, not far from where he was born, at the early age of 54.  Andrew Watson’s post-football circumstances are not well understood, though it is known that he emigrated to Australia and died there in 1902, at age 44.

forays into an alternate universe

The graphic designer Jimmy Nutini has re-conceptualized NFL jerseys as football (soccer) shirts.  If the American Soccer League had succeeded in the 1920s, maybe this is the world we’d live in.