While doing research for my new book, Babe Ruth’s Called Shot: The Myth and Mystery of Baseball’s Greatest Home Run, I obviously wanted to talk to eyewitnesses who attended Game 3 of the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field.
Unfortunately, the great moment occurred more than 80 years ago, limiting my ability to get first-hand testimony on whether the Babe really pointed. Fortunately, I did talk to two people who were at the game: Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Lincoln Landis, the nephew of baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered there is a Called Shot eyewitness living only a few blocks from me.
Wednesday, Jamie Bradley of the Highland Park Landmark did a nice story about me and the book. That prompted a call from Marv Freeman.
“You don’t know me,” Marv said. “But I just read the story and wanted to let you know I was at the game.”
I was floored, especially when he told me where he lived. I definitely would have included him in the book. Since it is too late for that now, I’ll do it here.
Marv is 89 and still practices law. He was just short of his eighth birthday when his father took him to the big game.
“We had box seats between first and home plate,” Marv said. “My father pointed that Franklin Roosevelt (running as the Democratic candidate for president) and (Chicago mayor) Anton Cermak were sitting about 10 rows in front of us.
“When Ruth came to bat in the fifth, the crowd started to roar and taunt him. The players on the Cubs bench were also yelling. Since we were sitting on the first base side, his back was turned to us. What he did, I don’t know for sure.
“When he hit the homer, my father knew right away that it was a big deal. Back then, you could walk on to the field after the game. There was no outfield wall. It was just an open paved area with a wire fence.
“We wanted to go to see where he hit the ball (it traveled an estimated 490 feet, the longest homer in Wrigley Field at that point). The ball landed near a flag pole. When we got out there, I still remember an usher saying, ‘That’s where the ball landed.'”
Like Stevens and Landis, Marv was very proud to have been a witness to baseball history. He was very interested in my book and asked where he could get a copy.
I told him I would personally drop off a book. It’s the least I could do for someone who saw the Called Shot.
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Also want to thank Chicago Tribune page 2 columnist John Kass for the tremendous write-up on the book Thursday. Appreciate him looking out for a fellow White Sox fan.
Kass writes:
One of the great things about baseball in America is that while the games are played in the present, baseball also lives on in the past. And part of that past involves what I’ve come to understand is the Church of Baseball, that sentimental yearning for a certain type of myth.
That American yearning turns “The Natural,” Bernard Malamud’s novel of dark gluttony and guilt, into a happy ending of a movie with Robert Redford. It’s what prompts Hollywood to offer that soliloquy by James Earl Jones in the movie “Field of Dreams,” with Jones in his Darth Vader baritone waxing on about how the game remains constant, even as America tears itself down and rebuilds again and again.
So I was pleased to see that the introduction of Sherman’s book understands that yearning and begins with a quote, not from a baseball man but from a fictitious newspaper editor in the classic Western film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
After he learns the real story, Maxwell Scott, the newspaper editor, gives instructions to a young reporter:
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Did Ruth call the shot? Did the writers provide the myth to feed an America hungry for such stuff?
I guess you’ll have to read about it yourself.
