The Birthplace at spring training
The Hot Springs Baseball Trail commemorates the special place The Spa City holds in baseball’s past.
HOT SPRINGS — This feels like a village of secret histories and forgotten lore. It was a haven for gangsters to mingle and take the waters. It has a racetrack and had underground casinos. It’s where a president was reared. (And where some will tell you that a 15-year-old Bill Clinton heard Tony Bennett’s first performance of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” As the Amazing Criswell might say, can you prove it isn’t so?)
The Hot Springs Baseball Trail, which opened March 29, documents what might otherwise be the lost chronicle of baseball in this city. It comprises 26 cast-aluminum plaques positioned at places within the city where significant events occurred. Affixed to each plaque is a Quick Response Code that visitors can scan with their smart phones to hear audio explaining the significance of the site. A dedicated website — hotspringsbaseballtrail.com — and a printed brochure (available free at the downtown Visitor Center) supply more information.
Baseball greats from 19th-century titans Cap Anson, Buck Ewing and Mike “King” Kelly to Hank Aaron are represented by stops on the tour. Even the most obsessive baseball fan is likely to learn something on the tour — Honus Wagner coached high school basketball here? Jackie Robinson played here? John Mcgraw was arrested (for gambling) at the Arlington Hotel? But it’s not just the stuff of trivia. Hot Springs may very well be where the history of baseball was changed — in Whittington Park, which stood on what now is the parking lot of the Weyerhaeuser Corp. The alligator farm still operating across Whittington Avenue was a witness, too.
That’s what baseball historian Bill Jenkinson thinks, and he may well be right.
STORY STARTS IN 1918 The story starts in 1918 with a relatively svelte — 194pound — George Herman “Babe” Ruth, a 23-year-old left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox who was coming off a year that had established him as the best left-handed hurler in the American League — if not all of baseball. During the previous season, Ruth had won 24 games and compiled an earned run average of 2.01. Most amazingly, he pitched a major league-leading 35 complete games in 38 starts.
In these pre-designated hitter days, Ruth had also had a very good year at the plate — and not just for a pitcher. He’d hit .325, with two home runs, which brought his career total to nine.
Still, when the Red Sox opened spring training camp in Hot Springs in March 1918, there was no indication that the Red Sox envisioned Ruth as anything other than the ace of a fine pitching staff that included Hall of Famer Herb Pennock and Carl Mays (who probably would be in the Hall had he not thrown the pitch that killed Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman in 1920). When Ruth signed his yearly contract in January 1918 (for a princely $7,000), he boldly announced his intention to win 30 games in the 1918 season.
But the Red Sox had a new manager, the bearish Ed Barrow, former president of the International League. (To get a little ahead of ourselves, Barrow would later go on to become the general manager of the New York Yankees, and — from 1921 to 1945 — win 14 pennants and 10 World Series.)
But in 1918, Barrow was a by-the-book baseball man, disinclined to buck the sport’s conventional wisdom. But he was also a hard-nosed businessman who thought that major league teams carried too many pitchers on their rosters. He thought pitchers were pampered and underworked.
So when Red Sox first baseman and cleanup hitter Dick Hoblitzell, who’d started 120 games during the 1917 season, showed up in camp out of shape and unable to play in the opening exhibition against the Brooklyn Baseball Club (usually called the “Robins” in those days — they became the Dodgers in 1932) on St. Patrick’s Day, Barrow started Ruth at first base. It was the first time he had played as anything but a pitcher against any major league team.
In the fourth inning, Ruth hit a drive to left-center field that landed in a woodpile. Home run. But that was just a warm-up.
HOME RUN HISTORY In the sixth inning, Ruth launched a prodigious drive that might be the most important home run in the history of baseball — it flew over the right field fence, cleared Whittington Avenue and landed in the still-extant Arkansas Alligator Farm and Petting Zoo.
“The blow was so amazing that even the [Brooklyn players] stood up and cheered,” Jenkinson writes on his website. “None of them had ever seen anybody hit a baseball with such astonishing force. It is likely that this second Ruthian homer was the longest that had ever been hit (to that time) in the history of baseball.”
Jenkinson thinks it was also the moment that it became obvious to all concerned that Babe Ruth was destined to be more than a mere Hall of Fame caliber hurler. He was going to reinvent the game.
How different things might have been had Ruth not taken advantage of his almost accidental start. Jenkinson points out that if Ruth had gone 0for-3, the conventional Barrow might never have given him the chance to play in the field again. And when Hoblitzell got off to a slow start, and was injured in early May, Barrow would probably never have thought to insert Ruth in the lineup.
(On May 4, Ruth was the starting pitcher for the Sox against the Yankees — who were then playing in the Polo Grounds, with Yankee Stadium, “the House That Ruth Built,” obviously still undreamt. He had two hits, including a home run, that day. The next day the Sox played an exhibition game against the minor league Doherty Silk Sox in Paterson, N.J., and Ruth had a pinch-hit home run and stayed in the game to play first base. On May 6, the Red Sox started him at first base and batted him sixth — the first time he’d appeared in an official game as anything other than a pitcher or pinch hitter. He hit another home run. On May 7, he again played first base, batted fourth, and hit another home run. It was the first time a major league player had ever hit home runs in three consecutive games — the homer against the Silk Sox didn’t count.)
Jenkinson says that without Ruth’s St. Patrick’s Day massacre of baseballs in Hot Springs, the character of the sport may never have evolved, and dead-ball place hitters like Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie may have remained the game’s premier players. Sluggers such as Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx might have played football instead.
And Babe Ruth might be dimly remembered as a Hall of Fame pitcher.
SPRING TRAINING Hot Springs’ place in baseball history is well-established, if until fairly recently obscure. From 1886 to the 1920s, it was baseball’s most popular preseason training spot. (The Philadelphia Athletics began training in Florida in 1903, but it wasn’t until 1914 that more than two major league teams held their spring training camps in the Sunshine State. It wasn’t until 1929, when the Detroit Tigers trained in Phoenix, that Arizona entered the picture.
While some teams in the National Association — the 19th-century predecessor of the National League — were heading South (often to New Orleans) to play isolated spring exhibition games as early as 1869, the accepted legend credits Chicago White Stockings player-manager Cap Anson with inventing the organized spring training camp when he took his team to Hot Springs in 1886.
The White Stockings went on to win the National League championship that year, and when they returned in 1887, the city had extended several considerations. Most importantly the mule-drawn trolley line was extended to the ballpark — the Hot Springs Baseball Grounds, which stood on what is now the site of the Garland County Courthouse.
Within four years, there were so many teams training in town that The Sporting News referred to the city as a “Mecca of professional base ball players.”
No doubt part of the attraction for the players was the many distractions the city offered, including horse racing at Oaklawn Park (which opened in 1905), the vaunted restorative spas, hiking trails through the mountains and the golf courses. Hot Springs was at the time America’s answer to the famous German spa town Baden-baden. Although its population was only about 10,000, there were almost always about half again as many tourists in the Spa City.
Ruth, in particular, seemed to love the city with its wide-open amusements — he reportedly would play 36 holes at the Hot Springs Country Club before reporting to camp each day. And his evenings were his own to indulge.
RETURN TO VISIT Ruth continued to visit the city each spring even after he was traded to the Yankees — who had their training camps in St. Petersburg and Jacksonville, Fla., Shreveport and New Orleans, in the years (1920-1934) Ruth was with the club.
Ruth would come to Hot Springs a couple of weeks before the opening of training camp, and he may have left in worse shape than when he arrived. The Yankees ordered him not to return to the Spa City after he suffered through an infamous “stomachache” — an intestinal abscess brought on by overeating and drinking that required surgery — that kept him out a good portion of the 1925 season. (The Yankees finished below .500 that year — it would be 40 years before they’d have another losing record.)
Ruth was a frequent visitor to Hot Springs after his retirement in 1935 — until, the story goes, he lost a sizable sum in what he thought was a crooked poker game. He left the city in a huff and never returned.
So too did the major league training camps — incentives drew many of them to Florida (St. Petersburg businessman Al Lang played a role in luring several teams to his city) and, in 1946, the Cleveland Indians and New York Giants opened their camps in Arizona. By that time, spring training in Hot Springs was a memory.