RUTH, GEORGE HERMAN "BABE" 1894-1948
Home-run king
Greatest Hitter in Baseball History
Babe Ruth single-handedly changed the character of baseball through his home run prowess, altering the game from an exercise in base-hitting, bunting, and base-stealing to a drama of long-ball hitting. For thirty-nine years he held the record for career home runs—714—which stood until 8 April 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run in Atlanta for the Atlanta Braves. At Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, an entire room is devoted to Ruth's accomplishments and memorabilia. Ruth was also the first player to earn huge sums of money from baseball, an estimated $1 million in salaries and bonuses and at least another $1 million from endorsements and other enterprises.
Early Life
The legend surrounding Ruth's life and career has its origins in his troubled upbringing. When he was eight years old he was sent for a few weeks to Baltimore's Saint Mary's Industrial School for boys, a home for "incorrigibles." At the age of ten he was returned to the reformatory and from age ten to twenty, he spent at least seven years there. While at Saint Mary's, Ruth came under the influence of Brother Mathias, who in 1914 asked Jack Dunn, a scout for the Baltimore Orioles, then in the Federal League, to watch the nineteen-year-old left-hander pitch. Dunn signed Ruth on 14 February 1914 to a $600 contract with the Orioles.
Early Career
The Federal League collapsed, and Ruth was sold to the Boston Red Sox on 10 July 1914. Ruth won eighteen and lost six in his first season under Bill Carrigan, Ruth's favorite manager among the seven he played for in the course of his career. With the Red Sox be became an all-around player. During the 1917 season Ruth won twenty-four and lost thirteen, with a 2.02 earned run average; in 1918 he hit eleven home runs and set a World Series record by extending his scoreless inning streak to twenty-nine and two-thirds, a record that held until Whitey Ford broke it in 1961. He also began playing in the outfield on the days he did not pitch.
A Crowed Pleaser
Ruth's home run capabilities increasingly drew large crowds wherever he played. Partly because of his ability to attract paying customers and partly because of his continual run-ins with managers and owners about curfews, fines, and suspensions, the Red
Sox sold him to the Yankees, a deal that was finalized on 3 January 1920. The New York Yankees owners, "Col." Jacob Ruppert and Colonel Tillinghast Huston, paid Boston owner Harry Frazee, who was in desperate need of funds because of other business ventures, $125,000 cash and granted him a loan of $300,000. Ruth's salary, with bonuses and gate percentages, came to about $41,000 per season for 1920 and 1921.
In Pinstripes
Once in the Yankees organization, Ruth truly began building his legend. In 1920 he batted .376, hit fifty-four home runs, nine triples, and thirty-six doubles; scored 158 runs; batted in 137 runs; and stole fourteen bases. His "slugging average" was .847, still the major-league record. His biographer Robert W. Creamer maintains that 1921, his second season with the Yankees, was a better hitting year for him than 1927, when he hit his record sixty home runs. In 1921 he played in 152 games, hit 59 home runs, had 177 runs batted in, 204 singles, forty-four doubles, sixteen triples, and a batting average of .378. In 1927 he played in 151 games, hit sixty home runs, had 164 runs batted in, 192 singles, twenty-nine doubles, eight triples, and a batting average of .356. In 1923 he was the unanimous choice for Most Valuable Player in the American League, batted. 393 (the highest average of his career, though it was second in the league to Harry Heilmann's .403), and led the league in home runs at forty-one. He negotiated his salary to $52,000 that year. When asked why he insisted on this figure, Ruth replied that he had always wanted to say he made $1,000 a week.
The House that Ruth Built
In 1923 Yankee Stadium, built at a cost of $2.5 million, opened. The new stadium stood on a plot of land bought from the Astor estate and located in the Bronx across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, the stadium that had been shared by the Yankees and the New York Giants. Yankee stadium had sixty-two thousand seats, and all were filled on opening day in 1923 when Ruth hit a home run, the first in his new locale, later to be dubbed "The House that Ruth Built."
The Great Years
In 1926 the Yankees won the American League pennant and met the Saint Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Ruth hit three home runs in one game, the first time that feat had been accomplished in Series play. However, the Yankees lost the series four games to three, when Ruth attempted to steal second in the seventh game with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Yankees behind in the score, three to two. His being called out ended a Yankees rally that might have changed the outcome of the game and the series. For this play Ruth came under a barrage of criticism.
Winners
During the next two years the Yankees gained dramatic revenge against the entire National League by sweeping the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1927 World Series and the Saint Louis Cardinals in the 1928 World Series, From 1926 to 1931 Ruth led the American League in home runs. The 1927 Yankees are considered by many to be the greatest team ever assembled. As a team they batted .307 and won 110 games and lost 44, a winning percentage of .714. Their famous "Murderer's Row" label predates Ruth, but once he and his teammate Lou Gehrig began their home-run rivalry in 1927, the name seemed especially applicable. In the four-game 1928 Series, Ruth had ten hits in sixteen at bats for a .625 batting average, still a World Series record. His salary was now raised to $70,000 a year for the next three years.
The Glory Years
The 1920s with the Yankees were Ruth's glory years. He led the American League in home runs from 1926 to 1931. A bearlike, fun-loving, and much-loved figure, Ruth was legendary for his public rowdiness and his eating, drinking, and womanizing. He missed the first two months of the 1925 season with a "stomach-ache heard round the world," the result of his eating dozens of hot dogs washed down with beer. He remained a boisterous child-man throughout the decade, and his prodigious appetites soon exaggerated his famous physique—a bulging belly atop spindly legs.
More than the President was Paid
In 1930 Ruth's salary was raised to $80,000, a salary even higher than President Herbert Hoover's ("I had a better year than the President," he said, and was no doubt correct as the Great Depression had begun). Ruth's abilities began to wane in 1932, though the most famous of his legends occurred that year when in the third game of the World Series against the Chicago Cubs, with the scored tied 4—4, Ruth allegedly pointed his bat toward center field and hit the next pitch—low and away—deep into the center-field bleachers. Whether he had "called" this home run or not is still much discussed, though he clearly had called home runs before, once in 1927 and again in 1931. Whether or not the 1932 "call" actually occurred, it quickly became part of baseball lore.
The Declining Years
Ruth had always expected to manage the Yankees when his playing days were over, but his history of carousing and rebellion against management defeated his ambition. Instead, he signed with the Boston Braves as a player-assistant manager for the 1935 season; on 25 May 1935 he hit three home runs for his new National League team, but the Braves were losing money, and Ruth quarreled with the team owner. In June 1935 Ruth was given his unconditional release. He coached for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938, but his brief nonplaying baseball career was drawing to a close.
Death
In 1946 Ruth developed a cancerous growth on the left side of his face; the following year he under-went radiation treatment, which caused him to lose nearly eighty pounds. On Sunday, 13 June 1948, in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Yankee Stadium, Ruth and other Yankee veterans of the 1923 season were invited to attend a special ceremony. Ruth, the last former player to walk out onto the field, was greeted with
tumultuous applause. When he died on 16 August 1948, thousands of fans filed past his bier at Yankee Stadium.
Source:
Robert W. Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974).
