Babe Ruth

George Herman Ruth was born on February 6, 1895, in Baltimore. His father ran a saloon and his mother was often ill, and by the age of six “Little George” was roaming the waterfront unsupervised, stealing, vandalizing, and drinking the dregs from beer glasses in his father’s bar. Shortly after he turned seven, his parents had a court declare him “incorrigible” and sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School, a reform school on the city’s edge, where he lived for most of his youth. There Brother Matthias, “the father I needed and the greatest man I’ve ever known,” taught him to read and write — and to hit, by swatting fly balls the boy watched open-mouthed. Ruth copied his swing and even his quick, tiny running steps. In 1914 the owner of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, Jack Dunn, signed him, and within five months sold him to the Boston Red Sox.

Ruth was first a superb left-handed pitcher. He won 23 games in 1916 with a league-leading 1.75 earned run average, pitched all fourteen innings of a World Series victory, and helped Boston win three championships. But his hitting was too good to waste on the bench between starts, and in 1918 the Red Sox began playing him in the field; in 1919 he set a new record with 29 home runs. After that season the owner, Harry Frazee, sold him to the Yankees for $100,000 — probably the most famous transaction in baseball history.

In New York Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920, more than fourteen of the other fifteen major league teams; no one else in the American League hit more than 19. In 1921 he hit 59, with 177 runs scored and 457 total bases, records that still stand for the modern era. Huge crowds followed him everywhere, and when the Yankees opened their own ballpark in the Bronx in 1923, Yankee Stadium was called “the House that Ruth Built.” In 1927, with Lou Gehrig beside him in the lineup, he hit 60 home runs. In the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field he hit his legendary “called shot”: whether he really pointed to the center-field bleachers before homering there will never be known, and when asked, Ruth only smiled and said, “It’s in the papers, isn’t it?” He led the league in home runs twelve times and won seven World Series in all.

Ruth played for the crowd. “The fans would rather see me hit one homer to right than three doubles to left,” he said. He never forgot his own childhood: in Boston he invited busloads of orphans to his farm for picnics and ball games, sending each child home with a glove and an autographed ball.

Ruth’s appetites were as famous as his home runs. He broke curfews, earned repeated suspensions, and in 1917 punched an umpire after a disputed walk. After the 1921 World Series the commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, suspended him for the first six weeks of the next season for an illegal barnstorming tour. In 1925 he reported to spring training at 256 pounds, needed surgery in April for what a sportswriter called “the bellyache heard ’round the world,” and had the worst season of his career — after which he began working out seriously. His first marriage fell apart; his estranged wife, Helen, died in a house fire in 1929, and he soon married Claire Hodgson.

Ruth retired in 1935 after a partial season with the Boston Braves. In 1936 he was one of the first five players elected to the new Hall of Fame. In 1946 he was found to have cancer, though the newspapers never printed the word. On June 13, 1948, frail and shrunken, he returned to Yankee Stadium for its 25th anniversary as his number 3 was retired; he died on August 16, 1948, at fifty-three. His name became a byword for the best in any field, and “Ruthian” entered the language to mean colossal and prodigious. As one sportswriter put it, “It wasn’t that he hit more home runs than anybody else — he hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and a more flamboyant flourish.”