Ruth, Babe (1895-1948)

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Ruth, Babe (1895-1948)

By most estimates, George Herman (Babe) Ruth was the greatest baseball player in the history of the game, and he is easily the sport's most renowned and enduring symbol. Ruth's legendary power with a baseball bat—many announcers still describe long home runs as "Ruthian" blasts—and his extravagant life off the field contributed to Ruth's extraordinary fame during his lifetime and after his death. Not only did Ruth's prodigious slugging help change the way baseball is played, but his enormous visibility changed the public role and responsibilities of professional athletes. Through team success with the New York Yankees during the 1920s, Ruth helped establish baseball as the "national pastime" and himself as an international celebrity.

Though Ruth was the most famous person in the United States at the time of his death—more people could identify Babe Ruth than film stars or U.S. presidents—his more humble beginnings led Ruth to conclude that he had "gotten a rotten start in life." Born on February 6, 1895, the son of second-generation German saloon proprietors, Ruth grew up in the working-class harbor district of Baltimore. Unsupervised during most of his childhood years, Ruth spent his time "on the street" with the sons of the longshoremen employed at the docks. His refusal to attend school eventually led to his enrollment at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Roman Catholic protectory for orphans, delinquents, and poor children consigned there by the city. Later in life, Ruth always reminisced fondly on his days at St. Mary's. While Ruth was the most highly paid player in the Major Leagues, he often bragged that he could still make a tailored shirt (the trade he learned as a youth at St. Mary's) in under twenty minutes.

Brother Matthias became Ruth's surrogate father at St. Mary's, and it was the Xaverian priest who became the young man's first instructor in the game of baseball. Baseball was the sport of choice at the school, and Ruth exhibited both passion and talent from the very beginning. He proved an able understudy, and the lanky left-hander became one of the finest pitching prospects in the city of Baltimore by the age of fourteen. After several unsuccessful attempts, on February 27, 1914, Brother Matthias secured his progeny a tryout with the Baltimore Orioles of the International League, a very competitive minor league franchise. Ruth's first contract as a professional baseball player stipulated a salary of $600 a year.

Ruth got his odd nickname during his first month with the Orioles. While speaking to a reporter about the team's new recruits, one of the coaches suggested that Ruth "is the biggest and most promising babe in the lot." Mistakenly thinking that Ruth's former home of St. Mary's was a refuge for foundlings and "babe" a reference to that past, the reporter used the moniker and it stuck. Ruth's baseball acumen impressed big-league scouts enough that his contract was purchased by the Boston Red Sox in July of 1914. On the eleventh of that same month Ruth began his twenty-two-year major league career as a pitcher, starting and winning his first game.

In order to measure Ruth's importance to the game of baseball, it is necessary to understand his career within the history of the game at the professional level. At the organizational level, there were at least two significant challenges to the supremacy of the National and American Leagues (the two dominant, and still extant, professional associations in the United States): the creation of a rival organization, the Federal League, in 1914 and the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919. For a brief period, the Federal League posed a serious threat to the two more-established leagues. In fact, a well-supported Federal League team in Baltimore, the Terrapins, forced the owner of the struggling Orioles to sell his top prospects, including Babe Ruth. By competing for players, the Federal League also caused temporary inflation in the market value of athletes, a trend Ruth would continue single-handedly throughout the 1920s. The "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, however, posed a much different threat to the game: widespread corruption. In 1919, just before Ruth began his illustrious tenure with the New York Yankees, a group of players from the Chicago White Sox had accepted bribes in order to "throw" the World Series that year. Details of the incident leaked out during the 1920 season, causing the new commissioner of baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to ban eight players for life, including Ruth's idol, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson(see the film Eight Men Out for more). By that time, however, Ruth's home-run prowess was enough to ensure baseball's growing popularity.

On the field, baseball was played much differently before Ruth changed the game with his powerful batting style. During the era of Ty Cobb, from about 1900-1920, the league's best players specialized in hitting for a high average, bunting well, stealing bases, and cultivating defensive skills. It was also the "dead ball" era, in which pitchers dominated through the use of foreign substances and "lifeless" baseballs. Rule changes and the introduction of a livelier baseball made the 1920s more favorable to hitters. Before 1920, extra-base hits, much less home runs, were an oddity; after Ruth, power-hitters, though rarely as prolific as Ruth, became quite common.

Ruth's transition from pitcher to hitter was gradual, only completed during his final year in Boston. Though he was a fine pitcher (he won 95 games as a hurler and still holds World Series pitching records from his time with the Red Sox), Ruth became a full-time outfielder for the Red Sox in 1919. Though it was still part of the "dead ball" era, Ruth hit twenty-nine home runs in only 130 games, easily shattering the previous single-season record. From 1900-1920 the home run leader in the American League had averaged only ten home runs per year; Ruth's twenty-nine were more than most teams' seasonal output. During the winter of 1919, Ruth was sold to the Yankees for a record $125,000.

Ruth's statistical feats with the Yankees have been well chronicled, but it is worthwhile to note how drastically his performances affected the way baseball is played and watched. Though no player in the American League had topped sixteen home runs during the previous twenty years, Ruth hit twenty-five or more in fifteen consecutive years from 1919-1934, bettering fifty on four separate occasions. At the time, he set modern records for home runs, extra-base hits, runs batted in, runs scored, walks, and strikeouts. The Yankees continually set attendance records both at home and on the road, making the American League club easily the most famous sports franchise in the United States. At its opening in 1923, Yankee Stadium set an attendance mark of 74,000 paying customers, an astounding number in an age before radio broadcasts had widened the sport's fan base. The Stadium later became known as "The House That Ruth Built" (coincidentally, its outfield wall was tailored to Ruth's home run swing). In 1927, he hit sixty home runs, and that Yankee club, after winning 110 games and the World Series, became commonly known as the greatest baseball team of all time.

Ruth's most famous hit came during the 1932 World Series; the story behind it is typical of the mythology surrounding Ruth. During game three of the Series, Ruth allegedly "called" his home run against Charley Root of the Chicago Cubs. With two strikes against him, Ruth pointed in the direction of the centerfield wall, signaling his intent to hit a home run. As the story goes, Ruth hit one over the fence just where he had pointed. Often repeated by reporters but rarely con-firmed by Ruth, the tale, widely circulated after his retirement and death, only augments his mythical status. Ruth finished his playing days with more World Series appearances than any other player, and his 714 career home runs were almost three times that of the next highest total. Ruth was honored in retirement by becoming one of the five original inductees to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Ruth's flamboyance off the field of play only added to his enormous fame. Newspapers carried daily reports of his legendary gluttony (it was rumored that he could consume up to eighteen hot dogs and a dozen bottles of soda at one sitting) and nightly debauchery (he rarely returned to the hotel before five in the morning when the team traveled), and towards the end of his career his expanding waistline became a common concern of the press. His stomach problem during the 1925 season was called "The Bellyache Heard 'round the World," while stories about his numerous love affairs caused trouble in both his marriages. Perpetually unsatisfied with his contract, Ruth frequently threatened to quit baseball in favor of boxing (one fight with Jack Dempsey had actually been arranged), Hollywood (he appeared in several films during his baseball days), or professional golf. A great lover of children, Ruth visited hospitals and orphanages with astounding regularity and contributed both time and money to any number of charity organizations during his playing days.

After retirement, Ruth remained a very public figure. He continued to champion a series of philanthropic causes through campaigns all over the country. Acting as an ambassador for baseball, he also traveled the globe, including very successful tours of England, France, and Japan, where Ruth helped establish baseball's popularity. Only thirteen years after his retirement from professional baseball, Ruth developed throat cancer, a result of years of incessant cigar smoking. His number, 3, was "retired" by the Yankees at the Stadium, in front of 70,000 fans, in 1948 before his passing on August 16 of that year. Throngs of supporters crowded New York's Fifth Avenue to catch a glimpse of Ruth's funeral cortege, and thousands later visited Yankee Stadium where his body was displayed before burial. Given the unrivaled popularity of baseball during his playing days and his undisputed dominance of the game, it is unlikely that any single sports figure could captivate the American public in quite the same way.

—Peter Kalliney