SOLD Babe Ruth Providence Ball Park Postcard circa 1914

[Shoeless Moe]

https://sabr.org/bioproj/park/rocky-point-grounds


One hundred years ago, the most iconic slugger in the history of baseball arrived in Providence as a little-known lefty pitcher. A month later, he had captured the city’s hearts by helping lead the way as the Providence Grays won a thrilling International League pennant race.

Babe Ruth won his first three World Series titles with the Boston Red Sox and became the legendary Sultan of Swat after he was sold to the New York Yankees and became a full-time outfielder. His ascent to stardom took a detour to Providence in 1914, one of the most exciting summers in Rhode Island baseball history.

Even though they finished in second place in the American League, the Boston Red Sox had quite the starting rotation during the 1914 season -- the foundation of the rotation that would win the Red Sox back-to-back World Series titles starting the following year. A young lefty named Dutch Leonard and his 0.96 ERA highlighted a rotation that also featured Rube Foster, Ray Collins and Ernie Shore, a midseason acquisition from the minor-league Baltimore Orioles.

That left no room on the Boston pitching staff for another young lefty who had come to the Boston organization in the $20,000 transaction with Baltimore. Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin instead assigned George Herman “Babe” Ruth to the minor-league team he’d purchased several weeks after he acquired Ruth and Shore -- the International League’s Providence Grays.

Ruth had pitched just twice for the Red Sox before he was sent to Providence, including a seven-inning outing the same July day he’d arrived after an overnight train ride from Baltimore. It was a little more than a month later that he arrived in Providence to boost the Grays’ pennant hopes.

Ruth making his mark
It wasn’t as though he was viewed as a savior. There was no mention of his imminent arrival in Providence Journal’s “Baseball Gossip” column the previous weekend.

The Grays already were in first place, moving ahead of the Rochester Hustlers with a win that The Journal correspondent said convinced “4,000 royal rooters” that “there is nothing in the way of Rochester or any other opposition that the Grays cannot demolish in retaining a firm foothold on the top rung of the ladder.” The Journal already had plans to send a reporter with the team on its upcoming road trip, a rare decision prompted by “the unprecedented interest in the Grays [that] has been aroused by their gallant fight.”

It didn’t take long for Ruth to make his mark.

The 19-year-old lefty pitched effectively into the seventh inning of a duel with Rochester in his Aug. 22 debut with the Grays, “urged on by the leather-lunged shouters who completely encircled the field,” as described by The Journal correspondent. “Barring one inning, the former Baltimore luminary gave a masterly exhibition. The crowd warmed up to him from the start, and even when he was being whacked soundly in the seventh, the fans cheered him on.”

One of the Rochester players on the other side was a first baseman named Walter Pipp, who later gained his own measure of fame as the first baseman Lou Gehrig replaced for the first of his 2,130 consecutive games played.

Ruth at bat
Though Ruth was a pitcher, as was the case until he became a full-time outfielder with the New York Yankees, his first memorable moment came with his prodigious bat.


The Hustlers led the Grays by a 4-1 score before “the most sensational ninth-round rally in the history of Melrose Park baseball.” There was a runner on third with one out when Ruth came to the plate. “The din was terrific,” the account went, “but it was not a market to the tumult that was to follow.”


Ruth hit a long blast to center field that flew over many of the fans restrained behind ropes in deep center field, “the longest hit ever made at the ballpark.” The ground rules in play at Melrose Park, the South Side home of the Grays except on Sundays, dictated that balls hit into the crowd in the outfield were scored as triples, not as home runs. The first official home run hit by Ruth for the Grays would have to wait.

Still, “a thousand straw hats were lost in the wild demonstration of joy” over the hit, and Ruth wound up scoring the tying run on another triple. The Grays won the game in come-from-behind fashion.

Road trip
From there, however, the Grays took to the road and stumbled, falling into third place. Their road trip took them to Buffalo and Rochester before a 24-hour voyage by boat across Lake Ontario and up the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. It was hardly a pleasant trip. “Nobody confessed to being seasick,” The Journal correspondent reported, “but nobody much wanted breakfast yesterday morning.”

Two weeks after his arrival in Providence, Ruth took the mound for the Grays in a sparsely attended game at Toronto. He threw a one-hit shutout from the mound, showing off “barrels of speed and some great curves that had the Leafs completely buffaloed.” He also hit his only official home run for the Grays, “a tremendous drive out of the park, over the right-field fence.”

It was the only home run he’d hit in his lone season in minor-league baseball. Over the next 22 years, he’d hit 714 home runs with the Red Sox, New York Yankees and Boston Braves.

That was the final game of the road trip for the Grays, who returned home for a doubleheader against Newark two days later. Ruth got the start in the first game and yielded just a pair of runs in a lopsided victory.

Back home
“Babe Ruth appears to have gotten in on the ground floor with the fans as a result of his baffling southpaw brand of pitching and his ability to give the horse-hide vigorous punishment with the wagon tongue,” wrote The Journal correspondent the next day.


From there, Ruth (“who is getting to a stage where he appears to be almost unbeatable,” The Journal wrote) and the Grays went on a tear -- winning 9 out of 10 games and surging to within a half-game of first place. One day against Newark, Ruth started the first game of a doubleheader and pitched in relief in the second game.


Ruth pitched just five innings in a mid-September game against his old Baltimore team, a Sunday affair played at the Rocky Point ballpark in Warwick, but he also drove “a tremendous wallop that almost hit the right field fence, counting for three bases. It was the longest hit ever sent to that part of the park.”

(In all, Ruth was credited with 10 triples in the 46 games he played in 1914 with Baltimore and Providence. Lost to history is how many of those triples would actually have been home runs under modern ground rules. Suffice to say that “the longest hit” to any part of any contemporary ballpark would be a home run.)

Ruth ran into trouble against the Jersey City Skeeters on Sept. 21, allowing four hits in the fifth inning as the fans “yelled lustily for help.” During a managerial mound visit, however, “the big flinger told [Grays manager “Wild Bill”] Donovan that he was only kidding the Skeets, and that if given a chance to return to the hillock he would demonstrate how elusive was his left-hand stuff. ‘Better be up and doing,’ said the chief when the sixth was ushered in and Ruth proceeded to strike out the side, thereby getting back into the good graces of all concerned.”

Three days later, Ruth struck out eight in a win over Baltimore that pushed the Grays toward the pinnacle of an International League title. They clinched the pennant the next day, their first since 1905. The title shared The Journal front page with the siege of Sarajevo and the bombing of Belgrade and other dispatches from Europe in the early months of World War I.

Final Grays game
The final game Ruth played in Rhode Island came two days later, a Sunday exhibition at Rocky Point against the Chicago Cubs, who were playing a four-game series against the Boston Braves. Ruth hit yet another triple that could have been a home run, “his tremendous wallop in the third session clearing the hill in right field by half a furlong and bouncing into the water on the other side, where a youth with more valor than judgment fell overboard in trying to recover the sphere for a memento.

“The drive was held to three bases by the ground rules,” the account went on, “but it would have been an easy home run if sent to the opposite side of the pasture.”

The next day, Ruth and teammate Carl Mays took a train to Boston to join the Red Sox. Ruth walked six but navigated nine innings in a victory over the Yankees -- and he swatted a double, his first major-league hit. “Ex-Gray Pitches Fine Ball in Contest With Yankees,” read the headline in the next day’s Journal, but there was not much said about it.


$60 Shipped (pix of Ruth and Ruth with Providence team not included, just taken from internet)

[Shoeless Moe]

and Sold