A Washington Nationals fan celebrates after a baseball game against the Miami Marlins on Sept. 28, 2014 at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. The Nationals won 1-0. Photo: Mitchell Layton/Getty Images WASHINGTON — “Daddy, can we go to the World Series?” begs the nine-year-old girl. For 81 years, here in the American capital, there has been no reason for a kid to even ask. (Even the blighted Chicago Cubs have reached the Series – three times! – since the Washington Senators lost in five games to the New York Giants in 1933.) But now, at long last, there isn’t a better baseball club this side of Baltimore, and the daughter’s plaint has got to be addressed.
We have just come home from Nationals Park, where we have watched the pennant-winning heroes effortlessly demolish the Miami Marlins to clinch home-field advantage throughout the National League playoffs. The passionate princess in Section 222, cheering and singing and screaming “Hit it, Bryce!” “Get it, Bryce!” “I love you, Bryce!” at B. Harper, the home team’s superlative young left fielder, is my Lizzie. She is her father’s girl, at least when she is at a ball game and not at the Bolshoi Ballet.
Peel back time’s curtains beyond the Senators’ loss in ’33, and it has been exactly 90 years since a Washington team earned baseball’s ultimate prize. Almost no one alive can touch this, but this week I have come close, in delightful conversation with the son of the Washington catcher (and future Supreme Court barrister) who scored the winning run in the 12th inning of the seventh game in 1924 — and who taught baseball’s eternal lessons of futility, valour, joy, grief, and the power of second chances to his children before his heart gave out in 1963.
The Dad was a backstop named Herold Dominic Ruel, nicknamed “Muddy” after some long-forgotten childhood misadventure. As an American Leaguer for 19 seasons – from before the U.S. entry into the First World War, through the Roaring Twenties, deep into the trough of the Great Depression – Muddy Ruel crouched at the nucleus of baseball’s epoch of heroes and horrors. One contemporary writer described him as “the closest student and most consecrated player in a ball game that I have ever known.”
Washington Nationals Herold Dominic (Muddy) Ruel, tags out Bing Miller of the Philadelphia Athletics during a 1925 game. Photo: David Shapinsky/ Files
Ruel was Babe Ruth’s teammate for one season in New York; played against the game-throwing Black Sox in 1919; coolly handled the supersonic fastballs of Washington’s demi-god Walter Johnson, and stared down the sharpened spikes of Ty Cobb at least 200 times.
He was behind the plate when a Cleveland Indian named Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch to the head in August of 1920, the only on-field fatality in a century and a half of major-league ball.
As a slugger, Herold Ruel was no George Ruth; he hit only four home runs in 4,514 times at bat. But as a competitor, leader, strategist and role model, he had few equals. He would earn a law degree during his off-seasons, be admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1929 while still an active player, work as an aide to the Commissioner of Baseball, and manage the St. Louis Browns to a last-place finish in 1947, 38 games behind the Yanks. Seven men with law degrees have managed in the major leagues since 1880. Five of them are, or soon will be in Tony La Russa’s case, members of the Hall of Fame. But Muddy, a .275 hitter, still ain’t.
“I said to him once, “Dad, you should write a story about how baseball is so much like life – there’s so much failure,” Dennis Ruel tells me now, on the phone from San Francisco. The son is a retired attorney working as a realtor in the home — since they moved from Manhattan in 1958 — of the Giants that his father and Walter Johnson beat in extra innings, back in 1924. (The pitcher hit more homers that season than did his catcher.) Fittingly, the Nationals are playing the Giants this weekend in the National League Division Series.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He just smiled.”
By then, Muddy Ruel was in his sixties and his son would play golf with him while, as Dennis remembers, “blocking out the death thoughts and turning away when his father occasionally stops and softly gasps for breath.”
Dennis Ruel has written this down in a poignant, private memoir that he passed among his family as proof that the man in the black-and-white photographs, squatting with his pillowy mitt, was real, human and loved.
“My Dad was not a great man in the numbers that measure greatness in this society, not even in baseball,” Dennis wrote. “Though he was one of the best ever, his greatest talent was demonstrated more in the accomplishments of his pitchers and his teams
“He missed baseball mightily when he finally retired, and there was some measure of sadness and loneliness in his later life when he clung to us under the weight of the loss of all his close friends and the constant threat of the failure of his heart. But his eyes never lost the twinkle . . . and the fouler our moods, the brighter was the light in his eyes.”
What happened here in Washington in the 12th inning of the seventh game of the 1924 World Series is almost beyond mortal understanding. With one out and the score tied, 3-3, Muddy Ruel hit a soft, foul pop fly behind home plate. But the Giants’ catcher tripped over his own mask – twice – as he gathered under it and the ball dropped free.
Granted another swing by a benevolent Heaven – atoning, perhaps, for placing him so near to the death of poor Ray Chapman — Ruel slammed a double. Walter Johnson, in his fourth inning of work on one day’s rest, hit a roller to shortstop that was booted for an error. Then a Senator named McNeely hit a ground ball that struck a pebble – deus ex machina, twice in one inning – and bounded over the head of the Giants’ 18-year-old third baseman, Fred Lindstrom, scoring Herold Dominic Ruel.
Fifty years later, I met Fred Lindstrom in Cooperstown and asked about that play.
He just smiled.
Now, nine full decades have come and gone since Muddy Ruel’s epiphany. Blessed with an outstanding lineup of sluggers and starting pitchers, Washington hungers again. So does a little girl with much to learn from baseball’s plangent history, manifold frustrations, and hard-won joys.
“Daddy, can we go to the World Series?” she asks again.
“Of course we can,” the father answers, with bright light in his eyes.
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