The Other Babe

An Ebbets Field of the mind was the only Ebbets Field I ever knew. And Babe Herman played there.

If there is such a thing as “a fully matured baseball fan”, I was one when the Dodgers left New York. Unfortunately, I was only nine years old. Trapped in a child’s body, I couldn’t convince my father that, although we lived only a crosstown bus away from Yankee Stadium, going there just wouldn’t do.

I was a Dodger fan and I wasn’t interested in any house that Ruth built. But I never did get to the tangible Ebbets Field before it was too late.

I took the departure of the Dodgers as a test of faith. Descended from a people for 800 years heartened by the knowledge that the British would soon be leaving their island I knew that the Dodgers had been around longer than O’Malley and would be around when he was gone.

Turning away from my team was the last thing on my mind. Instead I learned what I could about the players who called Ebbets Field home. I was most surprised to find that the Dodgers, too, once had a guy named Babe who had hit .333 one year- as high as Ruth or any other Yankee ever had.

And there was more — the 241 hits — a total never matched by a Yankee; the 143 runs scored, 416 total bases, and .678 slugging average — figures unequalled by any other New York National Leaguer, although none would lead the league in 1930 as Hack Wilson, Chuck Klein and Bill Terry racked up still unbroken records. (This wasn’t new for Herman, I found -the year before he had hit .381 and missed the batting title then too.)

But the final surprise Babe Herman would give me waited until 1981, as I watched the introduction of players of six decades in a Dodger Stadium World Series pre-game ceremony. There in my TV screen stood the guy Dazzy Vance called “the Headless Horseman of Ebbets Field” — a man I always assumed already belonged to the ages — Floyd Caves Herman.

For a few months before he died I spent a lot of time thinking about Herman because I had landed a bit part in the writing of an encyclopedia of baseball biography and drew him as one of my assignments. The 150 words allowed me to depict a man who left as strong an imprint on the Dodgers as any who ever set foot on Ebbets Field, did not allow me to do justice to him. And so I toyed with the idea of writing or even calling him, with the vague notion of maybe putting together something longer to try and set the record straight on a few things.

Of course, I had always known that there were severe limits as to how straight the record could be set. We, after all, talking of a man who had to deny having been hit on the head by a fly ball, admit to having been hit on the chest, and refuse bets on whether he might be hit on the shoulder.

Some, like Casey Stengel, claimed that these stories were misleading — that Herman really wasn’t a bad fielder, just a little absent minded.

While I suspected that, on the while, they were correct, it is a matter of record that after Herman led all national league first basemen in errors in 1927, manager Wilbert Robinson decided to move him to the outfield to get the bat of the less mobile Del Bissonnette into the lineup.

As far as putting some jolt into the batting order, the move worked. Herman batted .340 and Bissonnette hit 25 home runs to set a new record for rookies. But the results in the field were at least as impressive.

Bissonnette more than filled Herman’s shoes — leading both leagues in errors at first base. And the Babe didn’t let the move affect his defense at all — he led the majors in errors at his new position.

Since my initial discovery of New York’s forgotten.390 hitter, I had come to realize that Herman’s batting achievements were eclipsed more by these tales than by anything Wilson, Klein or Terry achieved. Herman personified the madness of Brooklyn baseball during the 1920-1941 pennant drought. When his name was mentioned, no strange story seem out of place.

Still, I was a little surprised when the news of his passing reached us here in the northern suburbs of the Bronx a while back, and the Boston Globe described him, not as a slugger, but as a base stealing star with the ‘Daffiness Boys’ Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1920’s.

I wondered was this a subtle, and astute allusion to the fact that Herman also finished second in the National League in steals the same year he had done all that hitting, or simply a reference to Herman’s most famous steal of third base-the time there were already two guys on it?

Herman used to argue that the incredible scene with the three of them on third base was Dazzy Vance’s fault, as the pitcher shouldn’t have been running back to third while Herman was sliding into it. But that really didn’t speak to the fact of Chick Fewster in there between the two of them.

But then even history has not spoken on the question of who was coaching the whole mess. It’s twenty five years since Otto Miller, the Dodgers third base coach of the time, went to his grave privately claiming not to have been out there that inning. He used to explain that he took credit for it at the baseball dinners anyhow, because it was easier to take the bows than to tell the story of who had actually been in the coaching box — and why.

In the Bronx, back when the Yankees were the only team in town, they used to think that Babe Ruth’s records would never be broken. That was before Roger Maris and Hank Aaron. And Lou Brock and Pete Rose were no kinder to Ty Cobb.

Some will claim that the pages he wrote in the history of the national pastime were the work of a baseball dyslexic, but the fact remains that Babe Herman’s legacy cannot be eroded in the same way as Ruth’s or Cobb’s.”

The Bums got three men on base. “Terrific — which base?” You can’t top that — no one is going to put four men on third base.

But as to the question of putting a woman on base — well, Herman came about as dose to doing it as anyone. In 1935, from the midst of a raucous Cincinnati crowd watching one of the first major league night games, strode a female night club singer, bat in hand. The chanteuse made her way to the plate and told Dizzy Dean’s brother Paul to pitch to her.

The on-deck batter who gave her the bat she grounded out with? As Leo Durocher put it-Who else would it be? — Babe Herman.

We won’t get to find out what was going through his mind as he handed over the bat that night in Cincinnati, or even who was coaching third on the day he became a myth.

I knew that I should have written to the Brooklyn’s Babe, but at least, I made sure to write to Duke Snider when he had his recent triple bypass operation a while back — they’re just not making Brooklyn Dodgers anymore.

It would have been great to know Floyd Caves Herman. But it was real good just to know that we Dodger fans had our Babe too, back before Ebbets Field was a high rise.