The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, The Chicago Cubs, & The Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932
Thomas Wolf
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright 2020 by the author

It’s one of the most iconic moments in baseball, if not all of sports. In the top of the fifth inning in Game 3 of the World Series, Babe Ruth is at the plate with two strikes on him. He faces / looks at / glares into the Cubs dugout, waves / motions / points emphatically at / towards / in the direction of the pitcher’s mound / outfield / the centerfield bleachers, possibly says / yells something, and then slams the next pitch soaring into the Chicago afternoon for a home run.

Wolf decides not to spend a lot of time and ink going over that moment; instead, he looks at the season that led up to it.

One would think that, given it’s about a Cubs-Yankees World Series, the two teams would get equal time in the coverage of the season. Wolf almost exclusively deals with the Chicago Cubs. Maybe it’s just because Chicago was more interesting in 1932, but surely there had to have been some things of interest happening in New York City. The Cubs did have more going on; the most significant of which was that shortstop Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Viola Popovich after an ill-advised affair (the incident would inspire Bernard Malamud to write The Natural), and there was a possible gambling scandal centered around former Cubs’ manager Rogers Hornsby.

Wolf also tries to weave the presidential campaign into the story; both parties had their national conventions in Chicago that year. But other than mentioning the occasional appearance of a political figure at a game (or Chicago’s mayor Anton Cermak being an appropriately avid Cubs booster), there’s little about politics. There’s quite a bit about the “Bonus Army” of Great War veterans marching on and camping out in Washington DC in an attempt to persuade Congress to grant them an advance on their retirement bonuses – but little detail, analysis, or its effect on America at large. The Great Depression gets mention in passing quite a bit, but that’s it.

He likes to “name drop”, too. He notes that Johnny Stevens, a bellhop at the hotel owned by his father and bearing the family name, was a rabid Cubs fan. The future Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was in the stands for Game 3…. For the game in Pittsburgh that saw Ruth’s last home run, a kid named Paul Warhola was there to see it (his younger brother Andy wasn’t a baseball fan).

There are a lot of threads here; each of which is it’s own interesting tale. Wolf just can’t seem to weave them all together to make a complete story. Part of the problem, I think, is that while it was an important year for the country as a whole, it really wasn’t much of a big deal for Baseball.

Oh, and “calling his shot”? Thanks to two fans who brought their 16mm movie cameras to the game (figuring quite rightly, as it turned out, that it would be Ruth’s last World Series), we’ve got two video recordings of the incident. Both of which are inconclusive.