It didn’t take a genius to see the Babe
would be more valuable playing every day
rather than pitching every fourth day,
but it did take all my skill at persuasion
to convince Ed Barrow to give it a try;
he would get the blame if it didn’t work,
so I was happy to let him have
the public credit when it did.
I didn’t have as much success
trying to persuade a drunken Ban Johnson
about the unfairness of giving away
part of our World Series shares in ’18,
and we backed down on our strike threat
without getting his promise of no retaliation in writing,
so we never got our World Series emblems.
Lesson learned.