Did You Know FDR Was Present For the Most Famous At-Bat in Baseball History?

Franklin Roosevelt and Anton Cermak had achieved a certain fusion in the public imagination four and a half months earlier, on October 1, 1932, when they sat together in a box at Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs were playing against the New York Yankees in Game Three of that year’s World Series. Standing with the aid of the heavy steel braces on his legs and of his son James, who held his left elbow, Roosevelt had thrown out the first ball. It was a good toss, too, caught in the air by the Cubs catcher, future Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett. What none of them, nor any of the nearly 50,000 fans packed into a stadium built to accommodate at most 35,000, could have anticipated was that they were about to witness one of the most legendary moments, perhaps the most legendary, in baseball history.

What all present did expect was a fierce contest. During the course of the series so far, the two best teams in baseball had become the bitterest of rivals, the animosity between them fueled by the Cubs’ treatment of their teammate Mark Koenig, a versatile infielder who’d been traded from the Yankees in mid-season.

Everything about baseball was focused on Ruth. He had been the biggest star not just in American sports but in America, period.

The Koenig trade was triggered by preposterously salacious events. Cubs starting shortstop Billy Jurges had been taken out of the lineup by a twenty-one-year-old woman named Violet Popovich, who did not go quietly when the twenty-four-year-old Jurges, by his recollection, announced at mid-season, “I’m not going out on any more dates. We’ve got a chance to win the pennant. I’ve got to get my rest.” On the morning of July 6, Jurges heard a knock at the door of his room at Chicago’s Hotel Carlos. When he opened the door, Popovich pulled a .25 caliber pistol from her purse and fired three shots. Fortunately for the Cubs’ shortstop, Popovich’s aim was as wild as her mane of chestnut hair; one bullet struck his right hand, another struck his left, and a third shot nicked him on the right side, but nowhere near a vital organ. In a search of her room afterward, police found empty gin bottles and a note in which Popovich had written, “To me life without Billy isn’t worth living, but why should I leave this earth alone? I’m going to take Billy with me.”

Jurges gallantly refused to press charges, and Popovich was released from custody. However, the shortstop’s injuries would cause him to miss three months of playing time. Desperate for a replacement, the Cubs traded for Koenig, who came through for them splendidly, batting .353 in thirty-three games that included a fourteen-game hitting streak he launched with a three-run walk-off homer, helping lead the Cubs to the National League pennant by four games over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Yet his Cubs teammates voted him only a half share of their World Series bonus. Koenig’s former Yankees teammates were contemptuous of that miserly decision. Babe Ruth was the most boisterously outspoken. During warm-ups for the first game of the series at Yankee Stadium, the Babe shouted to Koenig that his new teammates were “cheap bums,” sparking a shouting match between the two teams in which many profane personal insults were exchanged.

By the time the series moved to Chicago, the enmity between the New York and Chicago teams, and between the Yankees’ and the Cubs’ fans, was focused on Ruth. But then everything about baseball was focused on Ruth. He had been the biggest star not just in American sports but in America, period, for more than a decade. His towering home runs had remade the game, but it was his capacity for soaking up both adoration and antipathy, and using either to rise on the roars of the crowd to the biggest moments, that made him such a singular phenomenon. Even in the presence of the game’s best players, he was like a black hole of celebrity that absorbed lesser stars whole. As the great Lou Gehrig put it, “I know that, as long as I was following Ruth to the plate, I could have stood on my head and no one would have known the difference.” Ruth was the biggest draw at home and the biggest draw on the road, paid twice as much as the next-highest-salaried player but worth even more based on the tickets sold to spectators whose main purpose was not to see the game but to get a look at the Babe.

The Chicago fans, however, were determined to let Ruth know that on their turf he was despised. The Babe had continued to deride the Cubs all during the first two games of the series in New York, repeatedly calling them “penny-pinchers” and “nickel nurses” as the Yankees won both games. Five thousand Cubs fans who had read all about it in their city’s newspapers met him with jeers when his train arrived at Chicago’s Union Station. “I heard some words that even I had never heard before,” Ruth told reporters. At the hotel, a woman spat at Ruth and his wife, Claire. The Babe was unbowed when he arrived at Wrigley Field the next day to take batting practice, belting one pitch after another into the right field bleachers. “I’d play for half my salary if I could hit in this dump all my life,” he hollered loudly enough for many of the fans filtering into the stadium to hear.

Franklin Roosevelt, approaching the last month of his campaign as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the U.S. presidency but still the sitting governor of New York, did not want to make a display of his support for the Yankees before a crowd of Chicago voters. As he and Cermak chatted, focused as much on each other as on the game, it was easy to imagine that the subject might be something other than baseball, might be, in fact, all that the new administration could do for Chicago if, as looked increasingly likely, Roosevelt bested incumbent Herbert Hoover in the November 8 election.

Roosevelt barely reacted when, on the first play of the game, Billy Jurges, back at shortstop after Mark Koenig injured his shoulder in New York, made an error that put a Yankee runner on first base. FDR did not conceal his delight, though, when, two batters later, Babe Ruth lifted a deep fly over the right field wall, staking the Yankees to a 3-0 lead.

The Cubs players continued to taunt Ruth at every opportunity, and a big one came their way in the bottom of the fourth inning when Jurges slashed a sinking liner into right field and the lumbering, top-heavy Babe muffed a shoestring catch. As the base runners scampered home, tying the game, Chicago players and fans alike shrieked with glee. The hail of insults pouring from the Cubs dugout grew louder and nastier. The Babe’s advancing age and bulging midsection were the easy targets. At thirty-seven, he was still fearsome at the plate and had batted .341, with 41 home runs and 137 RBIs for the 1932 season. His range in right field, though, had been shrinking rapidly in recent years, and he was looking more and more like a caricature of his fabulous self out there, the forty-four-inch waist and still-skinny calves inviting comparisons to a beer barrel propped up by toothpicks. The next day’s Chicago Tribune would describe the Babe’s miss of a ball at his shoe tops this way: “[Ruth] half trapped the ball and then rolled about on his ample stomach, making grotesque paddlings in an effort to get his hands on the ball.”

The demands of the Cubs players that “Big Belly” prove he could still touch his toes yielded gradually to more vicious jibes, many of which boiled down to the suggestion that his white mama had given birth to him by a black man.

As was ever the case, the Babe returned fire, answering the heckles by mocking the Cubs players and disdaining their fans. When he came up for his next at bat against Chicago pitcher Charlie Root in the fifth inning, “the Cubs bench jockeys came out of the dugout to shout at Ruth,” as the Tribune’s Edward Burns described it. “And Ruth shouted right back. Root got a strike past Babe, and did those Cub bench jockeys holler and hiss! After a couple of wide ones, Root whizzed another strike past the great man. More hollering and hissing and no small amount of personal abuse [followed].”

FDR stood at the precipice of becoming the one man in the country no less lionized than Babe Ruth.

The Babe held up two fingers, “umpire fashion,” as Burns had it, reminding the Cubs that he still had one strike remaining, then pointed with his right index finger. Whether Ruth was pointing at Charlie Root or at the Cubs dugout or at the center field wall has been the subject of more contention and investigation than any other single moment in baseball history, but what is certain is that when Root followed with another fastball, the Babe caught it sweet with that singular upstroke of his big bat. As Ruth recounted later for a newsreel: “I swung from the ground with everything I had and as I hit the ball every muscle in my system, every sense I had, told me that I had never hit a better one, that as long as I lived nothing would ever feel as good as this.”

Edward Burns described it this way: “Mr. Ruth smacked the ball right on the nose and it traveled ever so fast. You know that big flag pole just to the right of the scoreboard beyond center field? Well that’s 436 feet from the home plate. Ruth’s drive went past that flag pole and hit the box office at Waveband and Sheffield avenues.”

The crowd went silent, but “Ruth resumed his oratory the minute he threw down his bat,” Burns wrote. “He bellowed every foot of the way around the bases, accompanying derisive roarings with wild and elegant gesticulations.”

Mayor Cermak dutifully frowned, but next to him Governor Roosevelt threw his head back and laughed, grinning as he watched the Babe circle the bases with that mincing trot of his, like a man who’d had a few drinks trying to tiptoe a line. What Ruth had just done was cemented in the American mind when the sports editor for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, Joe Williams, wrote a headline that invoked billiards terminology: “RUTH CALLS SHOT AS HE PUTS HOME RUN NO. 2 IN SIDE POCKET.” With that, Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” would become the most celebrated single swing of a bat in baseball history.

By the following afternoon, when the Yankees completed their four-game sweep of the Cubs, Roosevelt had already moved on to Detroit, where he decried his opponent’s “trickle down” theory of prosperity and the “philosophy of ‘letting things go’ [that] has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest.” He instead advocated “social justice through social action,” Roosevelt shouted to a cheering crowd, a philosophy that “calls definitely, plainly, for the reduction of poverty.”

America was more than ready to hear it, and FDR stood at the precipice of becoming the one man in the country no less lionized than Babe Ruth.

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From The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads by Randall Sullivan. Copyright © 2026. Available from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.