Whereinhell would the Yankees be?

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In the fall of 1934, as the Deans were putting themselves cheap fifa 15 coins on display both outdoors and indoors in this country, on the other side of the world other baseball travelers were exhibiting their skills in Japan and later in Shanghai and Manila. Led by seventy-one-year-old Connie Mack, the party consisted entirely of American Leaguers, including Ruth, Gehrig, Gomez, Gehringer, Foxx, Whitehill, Averill, seven other players, an umpire, a trainer, and a number of players’ wives. On hearing of the trip, Ed Barrow fretted over what might happen to Gehrig and Gomez (but not Ruth): “Suppose the ship sinks? Suppose there is a wreck, an accident or some- thing. Whereinhell would the Yankees be?”

If Barrow no longer cared what happened to Ruth, many millions still cared about him deeply—not only in his own country but over much of the world. More than anything else, the trip to the Orient (as it was still called in those days) was a triumph for the Babe. After a stopover in Hawaii (where Ruth insisted on spreading cheer among the residents of the leper colony on Molokai), the party sailed for Japan. In Tokyo, Ruth was prac- tically mobbed by worshipful throngs shouting “Banzai Babe Ruth!” Edi- torialized Baseball Magazine, “No foreign potentate could have evoked a more royal welcome.”

Japan’s outpouring of affection for the American ballplayers, added the baseball monthly, ought to receive more publicity in the United States than “scareheads of Japan’s increasing navy and supposed militaristic aims.”31 In fact, Japan was a country in political turmoil; two months after the Amer- icans departed, Matsutara Shoriki, the Tokyo publisher who’d sponsored the visit of the big leaguers, would be stabbed almost to death by militant young nationalists.

As in 1932, enormous crowds turned out in Tokyo and other cities to watch top-flight American ballplayers in action against teams of Japanese collegians and ex-collegians. Moe Berg, a Princeton University and Colum- bia Law School graduate, a multilinguist, and a journeyman catcher brought along because he knew Japanese, spent much of his time wandering around Tokyo with a camera. (The eccentric Berg would later promote the myth that photos he took from a hospital roof were of vital use in the targeting of the United States’ carrier-based bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942.)

Some Japanese observers contrasted the dignified and respectful be- havior of the Philadelphia Royal Giants, a group of black professionals who’d visited the country in 1927 and 1931, with the way the Americans burlesqued the one-sided games. But on the whole, the trip seemed a resounding success—especially for Ruth, who hit thirteen homers in sev- enteen games.