by
Fritz Peterson
The first person I want to see won't be Abe Lincoln or George Washington or even Lou Gehrig for that matter. It will be Babe Ruth. I already knew Mickey Mantle when he was here because he was a teammate of mine from 1966-1968. There will be plenty of time to reunite with Mickey at a later date since I'll have an eternity to do so. Babe Ruth will be my first stop.
I have a million questions I want to ask him especially since we were both left handed pitchers and both held the bat the same way when we in the batters box. Although he hit 712 more home runs than me, I had a lower career e.r.a. at Yankee Stadium than he did. The fact is, I had a lower career e.r.a. than any pitcher in the history of “The House That He (Ruth) Built”. He may not like it that I came in ahead of him in the e.r.a. category but if he had spent his entire career pitching I think he could have beaten me in the e.r.a. category too? He ended up 5-0 in only 31 innings pitching for the Yankees. The Yankees correctly opted to take Babe off the mound so he could get more at bats due to his propensity to hit the “long ball”. I'm glad that the Yankees knew better, they usually do. Now we both have records we can be proud of.
The first question I will ask him will be about his wives, we both had two. I'll ask him if he loved his second wife, Claire as much as I loved my second wife and what happened between he and his first wife, Helen Woodford, that broke up their relationship. I suspect that it was Babe's carousing that did it but I'll ask to be sure. They say there are always two sides to a story but in this one I think Babe might have stepped out too often on Dorthy??
Claire was the one who held the Babe in her arms when he took
his last breath on earth. She was a
trooper! Then, I'll ask him what he did
on road trips. There are so many stories
out there about his extra curricular activities that I'm going to have to find
out the truth. I love the truth. I expect to spend weeks listening to his war
stories. Guys tell guys the truth,
unless they are politicians. Babe wasn't
a politician and knew very little about politics. The one time he commented about politics was
when someone asked him how he could ask for more money than the President
(Herbert Hoover) of the United States got in 1929. His answer was very interesting; “I had a
better year than him. How many home runs did he hit?” Babe had hit 54 home runs in 1928.
Then I'll ask
him the baseball questions like who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced and
then did he really point to center field indicating that he would hit a home
run there for a little boy in the hospital.
What was Ty Cobb like? Then I
will tell him about some of the practical jokes I did that he would enjoy like
the Thurman Munson holster one and about Moose Skowran's pacemaker going to the
Hall of Fame. Babe was a great practical
joker too. I expect he'll tell me some
of his best.Even though I'm sure he was sad that he was brought to an orphanage at the age of 7, I want to know about that experience because he made to most of it, something most people don't do. He had fun in life. I do too. People say he actually lived like he had been here for 150 years although he died at the age of 53. I'll tell him that he is one of the reasons that my wife and I party every single night. We're trying to squeeze in a few extra years like he did. On the other end of that is what Mickey Mantle told me after his baseball career was over about his lifestyle. He said, “Fritz, if I knew I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself”. At the time, none of the men in Mickey's family had lived longer than 40 years. Mickey's dad died of Hodgkin's Disease when he was 39 years old in 1952. I really don't think Mickey would have lived differently knowing he would live till the age of 63 instead of 40. Mickey had fun in his life although he suffered the last couple of years he played both from the pain he endured in his legs but even more-so because the Yankees had imploded from 1965 until he retired after the 1968 season. Baseball was no longer fun for him and all of his friends had left. Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin all were gone before Mickey played his last game in 1968. I had the pleasure of being the last starting pitcher for the Yankees the day he hit his last major league home run in September of that season off of Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg. Mickey was a great teammate as I expect Babe Ruth would have been as well.
As
I said in my book, “Mickey Mantle is Going to Heaven”, I really
miss Mickey and with all the reading I've done about Babe Ruth, I
miss him too even though I didn't know him. Having met his wife
Claire at several Yankee Old Timers Games before she died in 1976 I
feel like I'll have a little “in” with the “Bambino” when I
finally see him. He was so much of baseball and so much a Yankee it
will be a real honor! I just hope the movie that Warner Brothers is
making about me is better than the one Twentieth Century Fox made of
Babe called “The Babe Ruth Story” in which William Bendix played
Babe Ruth. Babe hated the movie and watched only half of the
premiere before going back into the hospital where he ended up dying
a couple of weeks later. Babe had been hired as a “technical
adviser” by Twentieth Century Fox to show Bendix how to swing a bat
like he did. He couldn't do it. Warner Brothers has hired me as a
consultant for my movie that will be called, “The Trade”. I have
confidence that Ben Affleck will do a better job playing me than
William Bendix did of playing Babe Ruth. Anyway, I'm interested in
seeing who my new wife will be in the movie. The ones I've seen on
the internet that are interested in doing it sure look pretty! I may
have to come out of retirement like Andy Pettitte did??
Fritz
Peterson
fritzpeterson19@gmail.com
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