One Summer: America, 1927

month. What Ruth almost certainly didn’t know was that even Graham McNamee, the radio broadcaster, was on a higher salary than he was. It would be wrong to say that Ruth was paid appallingly, but he certainly wasn’t paid a penny too much.
    Ruth made the bulk of his money off the playing field. In the winter of 1926–7, he is estimated to have brought home nearly a quarter of a million dollars from newspaper columns that he didn’t write, endorsements for products that he was mostly unacquainted with, a short but lucrative vaudeville tour, and his beloved movie, Babe Comes Home . Despite all that, he still had to borrow $1,500 from Ruppert to pay his 1927 tax bill. Money and Ruth were never in each other’s company long.
     
    On 8 August, the Yankees departed on their longest trip of the season – to Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and St Louis for three to four days each; back to New York for a single make-up game against the Red Sox; then on to Philadelphia and Boston for six days more. In addition, Ruppert managed to squeeze in a side trip to Indianapolis on 15 August for an exhibition game against a minor league team there. Exhibition games were highly lucrative to Ruppert and he packed them in whenever he could. Altogether, in thirty days the Yankees would travel 3,700 miles, play twenty-seven games and make a dozen separate train journeys, several of them long.
    Babe Ruth quite liked road trips. They gave him a change of scene and a chance of sex with new acquaintances. They alsoprovided a welcome breather from the complexities of his personal life, which had become uncomfortably numerous. Ruth had fallen for a model and actress named Claire Merritt Hodgson. A native of Georgia, Miss Hodgson had – to put it mildly – a full and lively past. Married at fourteen, a mother at sixteen, a widow at twenty-three, she had come north seeking fame and fortune, and somehow had discovered a taste for ballplayers. Among her several reputed conquests the most notable was Ty Cobb. Ruth, however, adored her and they were soon all but living together. Exactly when and how he broke the news of his new relationship to his existing wife – still living on their rural estate in Massachusetts – is unknown, but it was some time after the disastrous World Series of 1926, which was the last time they were ever seen in public together. In short, Ruth’s life by 1927 had grown awfully complicated. As the author Leigh Montville has written: ‘He now had a wife, a full-time mistress, a farm, an apartment, a mistress’s apartment, an adopted daughter [and] an adopted family.’ So the chance to get away from all that for a while had a certain appeal.
    Miller Huggins, the Yankees’ manager, loved road trips, too, though for entirely different reasons. It wasn’t that he longed to be close to his players, or they to him – surprisingly little affection flowed in either direction – but because it gave him a chance to indulge his favourite pastime, which was to visit roller rinks and just sit and watch. Huggins didn’t skate himself, but his dream was one day to own a rink of his own. As far as anyone could tell, watching people roller-skate was the only thing in life that gave him pleasure.
    Huggins was an oddity. He was for a start quite small – sources rarely agree on just how small, but in the region of five foot four or five – and so boyishly built that he was sometimes mistaken for the batboy. Forty-eight years old in 1927, he had grown up in Cincinnati. His parents were English immigrants; his father had been an excellent cricketer. Huggins studied law at the University of Cincinnati, where one of his professors was William Howard Taft, the Supreme Court chief justice who was at the presentmoment declining to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
    To the delight and pride of his parents, Huggins qualified as a lawyer in 1902, but then dismayed them by declining to practise. Instead he took up professional baseball, which in 1902 was only about two steps up from working in a brothel, or so at least it must have seemed to his parents. For the next dozen years Huggins performed competently if not outstandingly as an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds and St Louis Cardinals before eventually becoming player-manager and then just manager of the latter. When invited to take over the Yankees in 1917, he was sceptical and reluctant. The Yankees were a mediocre team and he viewed it as a