The 1922 New York Yankees were supposed to be invincible. They had plugged holes in the roster by picking up durable infielder Everett Scott and two ace pitchers, Joe Bush and Sad Sam Jones, straight from the Red Sox. They also added outfielder Whitey Witt from the Athletics. The blueprint was simple: repeat as pennant winners. Instead, it became the year Babe Ruth’s legend cracked under pressure.
The Barnstorming Penalty
Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis tried to stop it, but he couldn’t. Ruth and Bob Meusel spent the offseason barnstorming—exhibition games that kept them away from training camp. Landis pleaded with teams to ban them. The Yankees ignored the warnings.
When spring finally arrived, the team showed up short-handed. Ruth and Meusel sat out the first few games. Reports suggested they had their tonsils out during this layoff, a common “preventive” measure at the time. Ruth arrived at one game with a two-year-old girl named Dorothy, telling the press she was his daughter. Years later, we’d learn she was adopted. It didn’t matter then. The Babe loved her.
The team didn’t care much either. Without their superstar, the Yankees still won 22 games to 11. But the fans stayed home. Estimates say the club lost $100,000 in gross receipts because Ruth wasn’t in the lineup.
The Booing Begins
Landis relented. He reinstated Ruth and Meusel for May 20, 1922. Ruth stepped back onto the diamond, grinning. He had no idea he was stepping into one of the ugliest chapters of his career.
His return was ugly. He struck out. He popped out. He grounded out. The Polo Grounds crowd, usually ready to worship him, turned hostile. The booing started early and got louder. When Ruth caught easy fly balls, fans offered sarcastic applause. He tipped his cap in response. It wasn’t charming. It was arrogant.
The pressure cooked him. In just his fifth game back, Ruth tried to stretch a single into a double and was thrown out. In a fit of rage, he threw dirt into the face of umpire George Hildebrand. Hildebrand ejected him immediately. As Ruth headed toward the dugout, a fan screamed an insult. Ruth charged into the stands. The heckler ran.
League President Ban Johnson suspended Ruth pending an investigation. It was a first. Ruth had never been ejected before. He had rarely missed a game, regular or exhibition. Now, he was suspended for the second time in a year.
The $200 Fix
Money solved the problem. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, was cheap but greedy. He made bank when Ruth played. Griffith called Johnson. Johnson reinstated Ruth after one day, fined him $200, and stripped him of his captaincy. The “promotion” to non-captain lasted six days.
The Yankees were winning, sitting close to the St. Louis Browns in the standings. But the locker room was a war zone. Manager Miller Huggins was suffering from severe ulcers. He hired a private detective to follow the team on road trips, posing as a wealthy sportsman. Dugout fights broke out between players. Huggins clashed with his own roster. Landis flew out to address the team in the clubhouse. Nothing changed.
Lefties and Umpires
The trouble wasn’t just behavioral. It was tactical. Ruth had a new nemesis: Hub Pruett of the St. Louis Browns.
Pruett was a lefty with a sneaky screwball that broke opposite to a standard curve. The first 14 times Ruth faced Pruett, he struck out 10 times and walked twice. The one time he made contact, he rolled a ground ball back to the mound.
It wasn’t until September that Ruth broke the curse. He homered and singled in consecutive appearances against Pruett. Pruett never pitched in the American League after 1924, which likely suited Ruth fine. But the legend of Pruett’s mastery over the Babe stuck.
George Uhle, a right-hander with an early slider, was also tough on Ruth. Unlike Pruett, Uhle was tough on everyone. If you argue that modern pitches like the slider and screwball suppressed Ruth’s numbers, look at 1922. Ruth struggled mightily against them.
The Pennant and the Postseason
By July, the Yankees had “Jumpin’ Joe” Dugan, another ex-Boston player, to help stabilize the infield. They held on to win the pennant by one game.
Statistically, the season was an anomaly. Ruth played only 110 games. Still, he led the league in slugging percentage. He batted .315. For context, George Sisler batted .420. Ruth finished third in home runs with 35. It was the first time in five years he hadn’t led the league in homers. Over the next decade, it would happen only once.
The World Series was next. The Giants were the opponent. The drama of the regular season bled into October. The Yankees won the series, but the cracks had already appeared. The Babe was human. And for one brief, ugly summer, the crowd reminded him of it.
It was the worst year of Ruth’s career by most accounts. The suspensions piled up. The fines accumulated. The booing from the stands grew louder. And then there was the World Series. He faced the Giants again, and it was a disaster.
John McGraw had a simple plan. He told his pitchers to throw nothing but curves “low on the outside” to the Babe. Ruth struggled. He managed just one single and one double in 17 at-bats. He drove in only one run. The Giants swept the Yankees in four games.
The crowds were cruel. The other players were worse. Ruth could usually handle the foul language from opponents. He could dish it out as well as anyone. But the personal attacks from the Giants bench cut deep.
After one game, he charged into the Giants clubhouse to challenge a particularly abusive player. Tempers flared. But luckily, no fighting broke out. The heat dissipated before fists started flying.
Off the field, the Yankees were falling apart. Colonel Huston disagreed with manager Miller Huggins. Huston signaled that Huggins’ days were numbered. Colonel Tillinghast Huston and Jacob Ruppert didn’t see eye-to-eye on the small manager.
Ruppert overruled Huston. The rift between the two was insoluble. The next May, Huston sold his share of the team back to Ruppert for $1.5 million. That was six times what he had paid in 1915.
The rough season on the field pushed Ruth to look elsewhere. He turned his attention to his personal life. Who he met next would change everything.
The Aftermath of a Sweeping
The 1923 World Series remains a stark reminder of how quickly momentum shifts. Ruth wasn’t just failing to hit. He was being outmaneuvered. McGraw’s strategy targeted Ruth’s known weakness against breaking balls away from the plate. The result was a statistical humiliation that added to the year’s growing list of grievances.
But the real story might be the front office. The sale of Huston’s stake marked a significant shift in power. Ruppert gained full control. Huggins kept his job. The internal strife that plagued the season ended with a massive payout for the departing owner.
Ruth’s life was changing. The baseball world was watching. And he was ready for what came next.
