Overview:
Babe Ruth cleared the fences at Santa Barbara's original Pershing Park for the last of the 17 home runs he hit during a 15-game barn-storming tour in 1924.
Babe Ruth strutted to home plate, sucked the briny air into his barrel chest and pointed his bat toward the palm trees that swayed in the rainy breeze beyond the outfield fence.
And then … Bam!
Local legend has it that the Bambino hammered the ball so far that it scattered a formation of seagulls before plunking into the ocean somewhere off Leadbetter Point.
I can’t find anyone who was there to verify such an embellishment, but the prodigious home run did make all the newspapers.
It happened at Pershing Park in 1924 — exactly 100 years ago this month, and 99 before the only remaining daily newspaper in Santa Barbara was ash-canned into bankruptcy by its billionaire owner.
A century ago, however, the Santa Barbara Morning News thought enough of its town to pay the $1,000 appearance fee that got the Babe’s barn-storming tour to steer our way.
Ruth, along with New York Yankees teammate Bob Meusel, played in 15 cities in just over two weeks before an estimated 125,000 fans.
Santa Barbara played host to the tour’s final game on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
The Morning News — which Thomas M. Storke bought eight years later to merge with his Santa Barbara Evening Press — trumpeted the Babe’s arrival with a front-page spread in that day’s edition:
“Babe Ruth, the scintillating socker of the New York Yankees’ Murderers’ Row and champion hitter of the American League — to say nothing of being the home run king of all time — will lead Joe Wilhoit’s Santa Barbara All-Stars against the Ventura Elks at Pershing Park at 3 o’clock this afternoon,” the article began.
“Ruth and Bob Meusel, another Yankee murderer, will arrive in Santa Barbara this morning with Christy Walsh, their manager, and will be the guest of the Morning Press during the day.”
The newspaper set them up at the Carrillo Hotel and treated them to lunch at the Montecito Country Club.
But the Sultan of Swat, a card-carrying member of the Catholic church’s Knights of Columbus, did make one stop before chowing down.
“The first wish expressed by Babe Ruth on his arrival in Santa Barbara was to visit the Old Santa Barbara Mission with Bob Meusel at noon,” the Morning News reported.
Santa Barbara’s schools were let out early that day so the kids could seek out the Yankee duo for autographs before the game.
Ruth wanted to make a game out of that by whacking the signed balls into centerfield for the kids to chase.
“There will be no rules of the game — just get out there and beat the other fellow to it,” he told reporters.
But those plans were scuttled by a steady rainfall that would’ve turned such an event into a mud-wrestling contest.
Barn-Stormed
The weather didn’t dampen Santa Barbara’s enthusiasm for the game.
Pershing Park’s baseball stadium — a clapboard structure that was torn down in the 1960s to make way for its current, multisport complex — filled up to its capacity of 1,500 in spite of the rain.
Those quick enough to shell out $1.50 for a ticket sat in the dry comfort of the covered grandstands that ran down the third-base line right next to Castillo Street.
Everyone else paid $1 to sit in the temporary, open-air bleachers that were erected alongside the first-base line.
A 10% tax was added to the price to help pay down the country’s debt from World War I.
The baseball diamond had been laid out at the turn of the century. The property was owned at the time by the United Electric Gas & Power Co., which purchased it to store its vehicles inside the city’s old trolley car barns.
The city named the stadium after Gen. John Pershing to honor his command of the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War.
It was developed adjacent to what was then known as Leadbetter Park, which it later absorbed.
The six-acre site included a horse-show rink and was fronted on Cabrillo Boulevard — then known as just “The Boulevard” — by the band shell and bathhouse that made up Plaza del Mar.
The area, by all accounts, was the best place to play in Santa Barbara.
Many baseball players felt that way. Although Major League Baseball didn’t expand west of the Mississippi River for another three decades, several of its stars who lived in the West used Pershing Park as their winter training grounds.
The Electric Gas & Power Co. even hired several of them to offseason jobs.
Supporting Casts
The lineups for both Ruth’s Santa Barbara All-Stars and the Ventura Elks featured some minor leaguers and even a few former major leaguers.
They included 40-year-old Fred Snodgrass, a retired outfielder who had led the New York Giants to three straight National League pennants, from 1911 to 1913.
He was known more infamously, however, for muffing a fly ball that led to the Giants’ loss to the Boston Rex Sox during the 1912 World Series.
Snodgrass, who lived most of his life in Ventura, curiously played for the Santa Barbara All-Stars instead of his hometown Ventura Elks.
Ruth, whose team won all 15 games on the tour, had first dibs on the talent. He made sure to recruit Nick Dumovich, who had pitched for the Chicago Cubs just one year prior, to start on the mound.
Ventura countered with “Foxy” Fred Fairbanks, a spitball artist and former minor leaguer who’d been a regular for the Elks team for several seasons.
Fairbanks promised reporters that he would strike out Ruth at least once in the game. He lived up to that boast in the first inning when the Babe was caught looking at strike three after fouling off six pitches.
The Babe redeemed himself, however, at the end of a long second inning.
Homer, Sweet Homer
“The crowd wailed for a homer and the Babe felt to obliging,” the Morning Press reported. “Catching one of Foxy Fred’s spitters on the nose, the fourth baseball of the game was propelled by the Bambino’s bat far over the right-centerfield wall and into a group of palm trees which so tastefully decorated the outskirts.
“The hit, it was recalled by Hippo Espinosa, was the longest ever made at Pershing Park, which is not at all hard to believe.”
It was the 17th and final homer that Ruth hit during his barn-storming tour of 1924.
The Morning Press reporter added that, “Not content with crashing a homer outside the lot after the field has purposely been arranged to make it more difficult, the Bambino rattled the boards of the centerfield fence in the seventh inning with a smashing hit that carried him to second base on the throw-in.”
Ruth also scored shortstop Jimmy “Ike” McAuley with a single later in the game.
McAuley, who’d previously split four MLB seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals, went 4-for-5 with a double.
The Cubs must’ve noticed. They revived his MLB career the next summer by calling him up from the Los Angeles Angels, their minor-league affiliate at the time.
Dumovich pitched a four-hitter for Ruth’s Santa Barbara team. One of those knocks, however, was a prodigious blow by the other Yankee.
The Morning News described it this way:
“Long Bob Meusel, teammate of the Bambino on the New York Yank squad, swung low (Sweet Chariot, how he did swing) and lifted one of Nick Dumovich’s slants from around his ankles that cleared the car barns in left centerfield by a mile. It went so far that even small boys, hunting for souvenirs, failed to locate it.”
But Wilhoit countered by hitting a three-run homer that caromed off the façade of the car barns. It completed the scoring of Santa Barbara’s 10-3 rout.
The Morning News noted that, “Joe finished off an excellent afternoon by robbing Long Bob Meusel of a sure double by racing far back into right field and taking his fly with one mitt.”
Ruth had planned to spend the evening in Santa Barbara so he could attend a Knights of Columbus dance.
The forecast of more stormy weather, however, convinced the barn-storming troupe to leave that night for San Diego.
Missing that shindig, he said, was “the greatest disappointment of my western trip.”
“I’ll not forget Santa Barbara, nor my visit here,” Ruth added. “It was too bad that it had to rain the only day I was here, but I enjoyed it just the same.
“You have a beautiful city and I’ll boost for it every chance I get.”
Field of Dreams
Ruth did give the city some “build-it-and-they-will-come” advice before he left.
“Build a good athletic field and Major League Baseball teams will be clamoring for a chance to train in Santa Barbara,” he told a local gathering before his departure from the Carrillo Hotel. “Santa Barbara is the logical place for baseball teams to train.
“You have the best climate I ever saw, where players can get into condition quickly. You have every accommodation for baseball teams but one — an athletic field.”
He acknowledged that Santa Barbara was known more as a football town.
“But when the Morning Press can stage a baseball game with a few big leaguers in the lineup in the middle of the football season and pack in a crowd on a rainy day, I think that interest in baseball would soon outstrip football if a team of 25 or 30 big league players trained here,” he said.
Ruth repeated that advice when he returned to Santa Barbara — this time with Lou Gehrig — for another exhibition game in 1927.
An even worse October rainstorm flooded Pershing Park, however. It forced that contest to be played at Peabody Stadium, the football facility that Santa Barbara High School had built just three years earlier.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, who played an exhibition series at Pershing Park in 1933, said they would consider Santa Barbara as their spring training site if it built a bigger stadium.
That was the nudge that got the ball rolling. The Junior Chamber of Commerce spearheaded a drive to transform a two-block, city site bounded by Ortega, Cota, Garden and Olive streets into a ballpark.
The Works Progress Administration allocated $15,000 to the project. City funds and another federal grant covered the rest of the $35,000 price tag to build Laguna Park.
The 2,500-seat stadium was completed in 1938 and dedicated in April 1939.
Laguna Park housed its first minor league team — the Santa Barbara Saints — in 1941. The Brooklyn Dodgers took over the stadium lease the following year for their own farm club.
The City of Santa Barbara tore down Laguna Park in 1970, however, to make room for a maintenance and storage yard for municipal vehicles.
It did pledge to build another baseball stadium at another location.
And what politician ever dared lie to his constituents, right?
More than a half-century later, that promise remains a more massive longshot than the one Babe Ruth launched here 100 years ago.
