A Babe Retrospective

By Marshall Adesman

I'm sure you all saw those Pepsi commercials last summer, the one with the Sherpa guide measuring to see whether Sammy Sosa or Jason Giambi hit a ball further up Mount Everest. Sosa is declared the winner but then the guide finds a ball that had been hit even farther and asks "Who Babe Ruth?"

Also part of the Summer of '03, Barry Bonds, with his sights firmly on 700 career home runs, talked about the possibility of breaking more of Ruth's records and finally burying him: "...the only number I care about is Babe Ruth's. Because as a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out. That's it. And in the baseball world, Babe Ruth's everything, right? I got his slugging percentage and I'll take his home runs and that's it. Don't talk about him no more."

While visiting my old friend Dave Denny in West Virginia and western Maryland, he reminded me that on that particular day in history - August 16, 1948 - Mr. Ruth breathed his last. And my thought was that, after 55 years, they might have buried the body but not the man and certainly not the legend. For make no mistake, in the glorious history of a game that is now over 130 years old, there have been hundreds of personalities and dozens of legends, but only one Babe Ruth. Even though it's been almost 70 years since he played his last game and 55 years since his early death, his name still has numerous connotations.

George Herman Ruth was born in 1895 and raised on the streets of Baltimore. He was a wild boy, which led his parents to put him in a Catholic reformatory, St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys. There he came under the wing of the school's chief disciplinarian, Brother Matthias. Ruth never became a model of decorum, but he did learn to play baseball from Brother Matthias, an aficionado of the game who was able to channel all that youthful energy onto the diamond. Ruth showed great skills as a pitcher and at age 19 was signed by Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles of the International League. Dunn was one of the legendary minor league impresarios, famous for finding and developing players and then selling them to a major league team. The older Orioles quickly dubbed the young Ruth "Jack's newest babe," and a nickname was born.

Dunn sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox in 1914, and the youngster split his time between Boston and its Providence farm club. The following season, however, he proved that he belonged in the majors, winning 18 games for the pennant-winning Red Sox. This was the first of a five-year stretch that saw Ruth win 87 games, including back-to-back 20-win, 300-inning seasons. In 1916 he won 23, nine of them shutouts, and fashioned a 1.75 ERA. He also won Game Two of the World Series, giving up a run in the first inning and then reeling off thirteen scoreless innings, as the Red Sox won their second consecutive World Championship. Two years later Ruth led the team to another World Series win; after shutting out the Cubs in the opener, he held them scoreless in Game Four until the 7th inning, which gave him 29 consecutive scoreless World Series innings, a record that would stand until Whitey Ford eclipsed it in 1960-1961. It remains, by the way, the last time the Red Sox reigned as baseball's champions.

The Red Sox were well aware of Ruth's abilities with the bat, and they gave him some at-bats and played him a bit in the outfield until 1918. In that season, however, he played 95 games in the field and batted exactly .300, with eleven home runs and a .555 slugging percentage, both of which led the league. He also worked 166 innings and won 13 games, but his days as a full-time hurler were over. The next year he set a new major league mark with 29 home runs, personally out-homering four American and six National League teams! His dominance was most clearly demonstrated on his own team, as all the other Red Sox players managed just four home runs.

Harry Frazee was the Boston owner as well as a Broadway producer, and he was always strapped for cash. Proving that fire sales are not just a product of the modern era, Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees for more than $100,000, a small fortune for that time.

In 1920 the big story in baseball was the 1919 World Series. Even before the Fall Classic began there were whispers that gamblers had gotten to some members of the Chicago White Sox, and when the overwhelming favorites were defeated by Cincinnati, the whispers got louder. A cloud hung over the game all year, culminating in a September criminal indictment of eight players, an October indictment of three outsiders, and a November re-structuring of baseball's top leadership, with federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis becoming the game's first Commissioner. The public's perception of baseball plummeted, and many wondered if the game could survive.

More than any other individual, Babe Ruth served as baseball's unofficial ambassador. Much the way Cal Ripken's consecutive-game streak served as a positive factor after the disastrous labor stoppage of 1994, Ruth's slugging helped to take the public's mind off the "Black Sox" scandal. In 1920 he bashed an incredible 54 home runs and compiled a slugging percentage of .847, then he followed that with 59 home runs (among 119 extra- base hits), 171 RBI, 177 runs scored, and an .846 slugging percentage, which led the Yankees to their first-ever pennant. Let's put those numbers into perspective: those 54 homers in 1920 were more than every other TEAM in the majors except for his Yankees and the Phillies in the NL. Those slugging percentage numbers were more than 200 points ahead of the previous best, and remained the standard until Barry Bonds' incredible 2001 season, when he hit 73 round-trippers and had a slugging percentage of .863. Oh, and those 177 runs scored and 119 extra-base hits are still major league records for a single season.

Ruth's popularity proved costly to the New York Giants. The Yankees were using the Polo Grounds as their home park and were paying rent to the Giants. As the fans came streaming through the turnstiles to see Ruth, the Yankees were able to afford to build their own ballpark, which is why Yankee Stadium, now eighty years old, is often called "The House That Ruth Built."

Ruth's importance, however, transcended raw numbers. In the booming economy that followed the conclusion of World War I, "living large" was the name of the game and Ruth lived the largest. His picture could frequently be found in the newspapers, wearing a camelhair coat and sporting one or more attractive young ladies on his arm(s). He earned the highest salary in professional sports, peaking at $80,000 in both 1930 and 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression. (When asked how he could justify receiving more money than the President of the United States, Ruth said simply "I had a better year than he did.") Red Grange, Jack Dempsey and Bill Tilden emerged from football, boxing and tennis (respectively) to become national celebrities, but Ruth was the most famous of them all and the general public could not get enough of him. And there was certainly plenty to go around: Ruth's appetite for food and drink took on near-mythological proportions, and his after-hours carousing became widely known though only hinted at by journalists in that far more circumspect era. Yet he had a notorious soft spot for children - perhaps an outgrowth of his own difficult upbringing - frequently visiting hospitals and orphanages, and showing himself to be, at heart, nothing more than a large child.

Ruth was also the unquestioned leader of the Yankee players. Despite the presence of future Hall of Famers Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt, Ruth was the original pinstriped "straw that stirs the drink." When his excessive lifestyle forced him to have surgery to correct massive stomach problems and to miss the first two months of the 1925 season, the Yanks plummeted to seventh place, their poorest finish in a dozen years. Healthy again the next year, and now joined in the lineup by a quiet young first baseman named Lou Gehrig and a talented second baseman named Tony Lazzeri, the New Yorkers rebounded to win the AL pennant.

The Yankee team that took the field in 1927 was certainly one of the greatest lineups in baseball history. They won 110 games to finish 19 games ahead of a very good Philadelphia A's squad. Ruth became the first player in major league history to bash 60 home runs in a single season, which was nearly fourteen percent of the round-trippers hit in the American League that year. He personally out-homered every other team in the league, and another five in the National League!

And his legend continued to grow. Having hit three home runs in Game Four of the 1926 World Series, he repeated the feat in Game Four of the 1928 World Series, which makes him to this day the only player to have a pair of three-homer days in the Fall Classic. And talk of post-season play would not be complete without mentioning his "called shot" in the 1932 World Series. More than seven decades later it is still a matter of debate whether Ruth's bat-waving in Game Three meant that he was predicting a home run against the Cubs' Charlie Root. Whatever was in his head, the fact remains that he deposited Root's next pitch into the bleachers, leading New York to yet another four-game sweep.

Time, however, catches up to all of us. In 1934, at age 39, Ruth failed to hit at least 30 homers or drive in 100 runs for the first time since his injury-plagued 1925 season, and the Yankees released him in the off-season. Hoping to become a big-league manager, Ruth signed with the Boston Braves, and on May 25 he smashed three home runs in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, a spacious park not conducive to the long ball. The last drive, in fact, was the first to clear the right field grandstand, and was estimated at some 600 feet. But Ruth finally bowed to the inevitable and retired just a week later, and though he later coached in the majors, he never did get to manage a ballclub on any level.

As the 20th Century was coming to a close, we were bombarded with all sorts of lists - greatest books, greatest films, etc. The Sporting News, for many years "the Bible of baseball," chose what amounted to a century-wide all-star team, and Babe Ruth was their selection as the Greatest Player of All Time. Meanwhile, the Associated Press looked at all sports, not just baseball, but still came to the same conclusion, naming Ruth as the Athlete of the Century.

No one has ever had a bigger impact on his sport. No one has ever put his sport on his back and carried it to such unimagined heights. And no athlete has ever remained such an absolute symbol of his sport more than half a century after his death.

Barry Bonds has eclipsed the Babe's single-season slugging mark, and may very well exceed his 714 career home runs (of course, Hank Aaron already did that, in 1974). But Babe Ruth will never be relegated to history's dustbin. That moon face, round body and spindly legs will always speak to the game; more than anyone else he will always represent baseball.