Don’t Blame Babe Ruth. Waite Hoyt Didn’t.

The pitcher who lost Game 7 of the 1926 World Series remembered it very differently.

By Tim Manners

October 10, 1926, may seem like only yesterday, but it was 100 years ago. As a relic of American popular culture, it may not snap, crackle, or pop like, say, October 30, 1938 (when Orson Welles radioed a Martian invasion).

These days, we would simply use AI to concoct such events.

A large language model would never imagine what happened on this date in 1926, though: the most exhilarating or soul-crushing moment in competitive sports, depending on where you sat.

Many recall it as the day Babe Ruth made the bone-headed, ninth-inning decision to steal second base in the seventh and deciding game of the 1926 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Babe was thrown out, and the Yankees lost.

Waite “Schoolboy” Hoyt remembered the date differently, as only he could.

Hoyt, the 27-year-old starting Yankees pitcher, watched events unfold, first from the pitcher’s mound and then from the bench. Recalling October 10th decades later, in 1980, he did not ascribe the loss to Ruth’s decision to run, but to other, more grievous, errors that day.

And to the almost spectral mastery of the Cardinals’ closing pitcher, Grover Cleveland “Old Pete” Alexander.

Hoyt wrote that the game was his “most severe heartbreak,” other than his 1-0 loss in the decisive game of the 1921 World Series against the Giants. He had pitched three complete games, 27 innings, without allowing an earned run. The Yankees lost because of fielding errors, not because of his pitching.

“That just carves you up, that’s all,” Hoyt wrote in Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero, his posthumous memoir, co-authored by me (University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

His emotions remained raw five years after the ‘21 debacle, on a day he described as “dark and damp.”

Hoyt remembered the moment so vividly that more than half a century later he corrected a contemporaneous New York Times account of the game, penned by sportswriter James R. Harrison and later reprinted in the 1979 baseball volume of The New York Times Encyclopedia of Sports.

Hoyt’s troubles began in a dreadful fourth inning. Jim Bottomley singled, and then Les Bell reached first base on a Mark Koenig error. Pretty bad, but Hoyt did not dispute this. His issues with Harrison’s account began as he faced St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Chick Hafey.

Harrison wrote: “With two strikes and no balls on Hafey, the left-fielder lifted a weak fly which fell in left between the scurrying figures of Koenig and Meusel.” The hit loaded the bases.

Hoyt countered: “Hafey’s fly ball was not fifty feet behind the shortstop. Either Meusel or Koenig could have, and should have, caught the ball. Neither did.”

Ouch. It gets worse.

Harrison wrote that a subsequent Bob O’Farrell fly ball had “bobbed” out of Meusel’s hands. Not so, recalled Hoyt. “The ball did not bob out of Meusel’s glove. It hit him on the point of the shoulder, and rolled away.”

With the bases loaded, Hoyt faced shortstop Tommy Thevenow. According to Harrison, Hoyt “laid two strikes on Thevenow, and was pitching stanchly, when the boy shortstop happened to tap the ball with the end of his bat and loop a safe hit to right center, which scored two more runs.”

Wrong again, Hoyt responded: “Thevenow’s looping single did not reach right center. The Yankee infield was playing in, and the ball settled in the muddy grass some five feet behind the infield between first and second base. Lazerri did not see the muddy ball – which never really reached the outfield.”

The Yankees rallied in the bottom of the sixth inning, cutting the Cardinals’ lead to 3-2. With two outs and a runner on second base, Yankees manager Miller Huggins brought in a career .309 slugger, Ben Paschal, to pinch-hit for Hoyt. Paschal grounded out.

Herb Pennock replaced Hoyt in the pitcher’s box and threw three scoreless innings. However, with the Yankees still trailing in the bottom of the seventh, the real drama unfolded, as Hoyt described it in Schoolboy:

“A figure more like that of the fanciful concept of the specter, gaunt and bony-shouldered, shuffled slowly forward at a knock-kneed gait. His cap was perched atop his head like a scarecrow’s.

“He was the approaching figure of doom. His identity through the drizzly mist was apparent only by his odd manner of walking. He emerged into focus. It was the great Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of baseball’s immortal pitchers, who had pitched a complete 10-2 victory only the day before. He had also won the second game, 6-2.”

The well-remembered legend of “Alexander the Great’s” seventh-inning entrance obscured the now largely forgotten reality of Koenig’s and Meusel’s mortal stumbles, which were overshadowed by Lazerri’s dramatic strikeout and ultimately Babe Ruth’s fateful decision to steal second base with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.

As Hoyt put it: “It was one of the two soul-ripping, heart-tearing, saddening experiences in my career as a pitcher. No one can know how utterly devastating that defeat was. It is a vignette of a baseball pitcher whose emotional structure was destroyed by forces he could not control. We do meet such episodes in life, do we not?”

Indeed. On this, Hoyt and Harrison agreed: “If the Cardinals had not scored three unearned runs on those two devastating errors, Waite Hoyt would not have been robbed for the second time in his career of the glory of a shutout in the final game of a World Series,” Harrison wrote.

And about Babe Ruth’s “bone-headed” attempt to steal second base: Hoyt defended it as essential to putting him in scoring position.

So did the Babe himself, who said: “I thought no one would expect it.”