Play Ball – Remembering Babe Herman!

Baseball season is begun! In tribute to this fine game, allow me to reprint a post from ‘way back!

Whaddya mean, you don’t know who Babe Herman is?

My son Buster is down with a cold (this is what you get when you want to walk a girl home from school in the pouring, freezing cold rain, instead of calling your mother for a ride!) and he is watching Pride of the Yankees. Buster loves old movies, so he’s not put-off by the old-fashioned, innocent tone of it, and he’s loving the story, especially the part where Gehrig hits a homer off an intentional-walk pitch.

We forget about all these great baseball stories. I have one that is an especial favorite, though. It is a baseball story whose particulars really should be memorized by every apple-pie loving American with a kid in Little League, simply because it’s so wonderfully slapstick, and it concerns not a NY Yankee, but a Brooklyn Dodger – a Beloved Bum.

Floyd Caves (”Babe”) Herman, outfielder…a man with a habit of putting lit stogies into his suit pocket, a man who was so routinely hit by balls he was trying to field that he developed his own rules about getting hit: “on the shoulder don’t count.” He will go down in history as the only man ever to double into a double play, and he managed that, only because there was already one out…otherwise he would have tripled into a triple play.

But don’t let me tell the story. Instead, let’s allow the late, great Leo Rosten to give us the goods, courtesy of his (now sadly out of print) book, People I Have Loved, Known or Admired:

Mr. Herman came up to bat with the bases loaded and, as was his wont, dispatched a splendid high drive into deep right field. The Dodgers on first and second hesitated near their bases, naturally, before streaking ahead, in order to make sure that Herman’s drive would not be caught; and it was while they were hesitating, in the manner approved by every authority on the game, that Babe ran right past the man on first, full speed, head down, eyes glazed, intoxicated by team spirit and premonitions of glory. Herman’s illegal passing so electrified his friend on first, and so paralysed his colleague on second, that all three players reached third base at the same time!

This trail-blazing contretremps cause the beloved and long-suffering manager of the club, “Uncle” Wilbert Robinson, to announce: “That is the first time the men in this club have gotten together on anything!”

Babe also negated his own homer once. I know this sounds impossible but it is true. He accomplished it by swatting the ball far out of sight and running around the bases, with laudable speed and determination, in the recognized, counterclockwise pattern. The only trouble this time was that he overtook and passed two teammates who happened to be on the bases ahead of him. This negated three runs and made men delirious for weeks.

You’ve got to love baseball. No other sport has such stories!