By Sal Maiorana
January 2025
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Sal Maiorana, a friend of the site, shares some of his thoughts on the Yankees.
For Sal's complete analysis on the New York Yankees, you can subscribe to Sal Maiorana's free Pinstripe People Newsletter at https://salmaiorana.beehiiv.com/subscribe.
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It is one of the most famous moments in World Series history, and it certainly is the most disputed famous moment in World Series history. So, did Babe Ruth really call his shot on the afternoon of Oct. 1 during Game 3 at Wrigley Field against the Cubs?
This Series was a bitter grudge match for two reasons. First, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy was returning to Chicago where he’d been fired, and the sweet taste of revenge was rolling around his palate.
Cubs owner William Wrigley wasn’t satisfied with the 1929 pennant McCarthy had won because the Cubs went on to lose the Series to the Athletics. So, late in 1930, when it was apparent the Cubs weren’t going to repeat in the National League, Wrigley fired McCarthy in favor of Rogers Hornsby because, as Wrigley said, he wanted, “somebody who can get me a world championship.” In his pre-Series meeting with his Yankees, McCarthy told them to “kill” the Cubs.
Second, the Yankees were perturbed at the Cubs for voting their former teammate, Mark Koenig, a mere half-share of the Series prize money. Koenig had left the Yankees following the 1930 season, played a year and a half in Detroit, then joined the Cubs in August 1932 and proceeded to play a key role in their surge to the pennant. He’d been a popular player in the Yankee clubhouse and still had many friends on the team, so when the Yankees found out the Cubs were slighting him monetarily, they verbally accosted the Cubs, Ruth leading the way.
“Hi Mark,” Ruth said during the workout before Game 1. “Who are those cheapskate nickel-nursing sons-a-&^%$ you’re with?” Other Yankees joined the act, the Cubs counter-cussed, and the war of words was vicious during the first two games in New York, both of which the Yankees won. It then grew to outlandish heights during Game 3, prompting baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to warn both teams that if the foul language did not cease during Game 4, there would be heavy fines.
It was as mean-spirited as baseball could get, and the fans got involved as well, throwing fruit at the Yankees during both games that were played in Chicago. “I’d never known there was so many cuss words in the language or so many ways of stringing them together,” said Yankees third baseman Joe Sewell. Cubs’ second baseman Billy Herman agreed, saying, “What were jokes in the first game became personal insults by the third game. By the middle of that third game things were really hot.”
And that’s when Ruth took center stage and he either called his shot, or he didn’t.
He had already hit a three-run homer in the first inning off Charlie Root, but the Cubs had rallied to tie it at 4-4 in the fourth and they and their fans were really chirping when the Yankees came to bat in the fifth.
After Sewell grounded out, the fans roared their disapproval as Ruth stepped up to the plate. He just listened to the noise, smiled, and stared out at Root. Root’s first pitch was a called strike and the Cubs’ bench really tore into Ruth, so Ruth responded by holding up one finger as if to say, “that’s only strike one.” Root threw two balls, then came in with another strike and Ruth - who hadn’t yet swung - held up two fingers and yelled to Root, “Throw it in there and I’ll knock it down your*&^%$ throat.” He also allegedly muttered to Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett, “It only takes one to hit.”
This is where the confusion starts. On a home video that was unearthed decades later, you can see Ruth raising his arm, and everyone who claimed he called his shot said he was pointing to the center-field bleachers in that moment. More likely, he was motioning at the Cubs bench, mockingly dismissing their taunting.
Root then delivered his fifth pitch and Ruth swung with all his might and launched a home run exactly where everyone thought he had pointed, and thus was born the myth.
Sewell, who’d only been a teammate of Ruth’s for two years, was astonished by the display. “He rubbed his hands, looking square into the dugout, and what was coming out of there was just turning the air blue,” Sewell recalled. “The ball was just above Ruth’s knee, a good pitch, a strike. Babe uncoiled one of those beautiful swings. I can still see that ball going out of Wrigley Field. He called it. He probably couldn’t have done it again in a thousand years, but he did it that time.”
Again, he probably didn’t, but Sewell - like so many other players, writers and fans - was caught up in the moment, and you couldn’t blame him or anyone else.
“Naturally the writers made something that wasn’t,” Frank Crosetti said years later when he was a Yankee coach. “And (Ruth’s) reaction was, ‘If the writers want to think I pointed, let them, I don’t care.’”
Besides, as the Cubs’ Herman correctly pointed out, “If he’d pointed, do you think Root would’ve thrown him a strike to hit? I’ll tell you what he would’ve done. Ruth would’ve been sitting in the dirt, maybe rubbing himself where it hurt.”
Prior to the first game, Chicago player/manager Charlie Grimm boldly said, “We’re going to win. We expect a real battle, but whether it’s five, six or seven games, I feel that we’ll win.”
It was a ridiculous statement, and the Yankees proved that with a Series-opening 12-6 rout. The Cubs scored two in the first inning aided by a Ruth error, and their pitcher, Guy Bush, retired the first nine New York batters in order. But in the fourth, Ruth hit an RBI single and trotted home on Gehrig’s two-run homer for a 3-2 lead, and then the Yankees erupted for five runs in the sixth and it was over.
“Today’s game wasn’t any classic, but if you win it’s all right,” said McCarthy. “Our boys delivered when they had to.”
Grimm promised that his club would be better prepared for the second game and the Cubs were, but it didn’t matter as Lefty Gomez pitched a neat complete game and Ben Chapman came through with a go-ahead two-run single in the third to lift the Yankees to a 5-2 victory. “One of the greatest pitchers I ever saw,” said Grimm, who managed two of Chicago’s nine hits off Gomez. “He bests Lefty Grove with me. Today he was as fast as Grove and what control. There’s no other answer to that one. Too much Gomez.”
All the way out to Chicago the mood was light because the Yankees fully expected to make short work of the Cubs. What they didn’t expect was the greeting they received upon arriving at the train station in the Windy City the next morning. Word of the nasty tone set in the first two games had been widely reported in the Chicago newspapers, and a huge throng of fans came to the LaSalle Street station to “welcome” the Yankees. A police escort was needed for the team to get through the mob.
There were hundreds more Cubs fans at the Edgewater Beach Hotel waiting for the Yankees, too, and more vituperation was spewed, not to mention saliva. Fans actually spit at the players, and Ruth’s second wife, Claire, caught a healthy dose of it, infuriating the Babe.
When their practice session later that day at Wrigley Field was over, McCarthy held a team meeting. He told the players, “Take it in stride boys. We’re out here for a couple of ball games, maybe three. Don’t get excited. Just imagine you’re down on the South side getting ready for a series with the White Sox. There isn’t any pressure. All we’ve got to do is go out and play our regular every-day game.”
With that, the players cheered, and when they returned the next afternoon for Game 3, they were focused on the task at hand. It was warm, sunny and windy in Chicago and after Gomez ate breakfast at the Edgewater he walked outside and felt the stiff breeze. When he learned it would be gusting out toward right field at the ballpark, he came back into the restaurant and exaggerated, “The wind’s blowing 60 miles an hour ... Babe and Lou ought to hit a dozen.”
They didn’t hit a dozen, but they hit four during the 7-5 victory.
In the top of the first, Combs reached base when shortstop Billy Jurges fielded his game-starting grounder and threw it into the Yankee dugout. Sewell walked, and Ruth sauntered up to the plate with a cacophony of catcalls ringing in his ears. All was quiet, though, when he pounded a 2-0 pitch from Root into the right-field seats for a three-run homer.
Gehrig homered in the third inning to give New York a 4-1 lead before the Cubs lit up George Pipgras for two runs in the third and one in the fourth to tie the score. The fateful fifth inning began with Sewell’s groundout, then Ruth delivered his prodigious home run.
“As I hit the ball, every muscle in my system, every sense I had, told me that I had never hit a better one, that as long as I lived nothing would ever feel as good as this,” Ruth said.
On his home run trot, Ruth had words with Grimm as he passed first, Herman at second and Jurges at short, and then he clasped his hands over his head like a winning prize fighter as he rounded third and trotted home where Gehrig wore a wide grin as he shook Babe’s hand. What a showman.
Perhaps stunned by Ruth’s homer, Root grooved his next pitch and Gehrig launched his own cannon shot into the right-field stands for a 6-4 Yankee lead, and when Pipgras relaxed and blanked the Cubs over the next four innings, the Yankees were one victory away from the championship.
“Get your bags packed tomorrow morning fellas, I think we’ll be leaving right after the game,” said a confident McCarthy in the jubilant clubhouse afterward.
McCarthy was right, and he had his revenge when the Yankees completed the rout with a 13-6 thrashing. “I am the happiest man in the world,” McCarthy said when it was over. “I figured we could do it, we simply had too much power for them. I’m proud of the Yankees, proud of them as players and as men.”
The Cubs didn’t go quietly as they knocked out Yankee starter Johnny Allen in the first inning with a four-run uprising, but the Yankees chipped away and the game was even at 5-5 through six innings. New York then scored four runs in the seventh and four more in the ninth to put an exclamation point on its 12th consecutive Series game victory, a record that stood until 2000 when another group of Yankees broke it.
“Those guys were just too good for us,” said Hartnett.
That was usually the case in those days.
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