Babe Ruth

George Herman Ruth Jr. was born on February 6, 1895, in a rowhouse neighborhood near the Baltimore waterfront, the son of George Herman Ruth Sr., a saloon keeper, and Katherine Schamberger Ruth ^[1]. The family lived above and around the bars his father ran, and most of the couple's children died in infancy. Only George and a younger sister, Mamie, survived to adulthood ^[2].

By his own later account the boy was unruly, skipping school and roaming the streets while his parents worked long hours. In 1902, when he was seven, his father signed him over to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic reformatory and orphanage on the outskirts of Baltimore run by the Xaverian Brothers ^[1]. He spent most of the next twelve years there, learning shirt-making as a trade and, far more consequentially, learning baseball.

The central figure of those years was Brother Matthias Boutlier, the school's towering prefect of discipline, who coached the boys and hit long fly balls for them to chase. Ruth later credited Matthias with teaching him to hit and to carry himself, calling him the greatest man he ever knew ^[2]. At St. Mary's the left-handed youngster played every position, including catcher with a right-handed mitt, and by his late teens he was the best player the school had ever produced.

In February 1914, Jack Dunn, owner of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, signed the nineteen-year-old out of St. Mary's and became his legal guardian so the teenager could leave the school ^[1]. Veteran players called Dunn's young charges his "babes," and the nickname attached itself to Ruth permanently. He was a pitcher then, a hard-throwing left-hander, and he was good enough that Dunn, squeezed financially by competition from the upstart Federal League, sold him to the Boston Red Sox that July ^[3].

Ruth debuted in the major leagues on July 11, 1914, and after a brief seasoning stint with Providence he joined Boston's rotation for good in 1915. The results were remarkable. He won 18 games in 1915 and 23 in 1916, when he led the American League with a 1.75 earned run average ^[3]. In the 1916 World Series he pitched a fourteen-inning complete game victory, and across the 1916 and 1918 Series he threw 29 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings, a record that lasted until 1961 ^[4]. The Red Sox won three championships with him on the staff.

What set Ruth apart, though, was his bat. Pitchers hit rarely, yet his long drives kept forcing the issue, and by 1918 Boston was playing him in the outfield between starts. In 1919, used mostly as an everyday player, he hit 29 home runs, breaking a major league record that dated to 1884 ^[3]. Then, in January 1920, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, short of cash, sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 plus a loan secured by Fenway Park ^[4]. Boston fans came to speak of the deal as a curse; for New York it was the founding transaction of a dynasty.

Anyone asking who was Babe Ruth usually gets the answer in numbers, and the numbers from his first Yankee seasons still startle. In 1920 he hit 54 home runs, more than any other entire team in the American League managed that year, and in 1921 he hit 59 while batting .378 ^[3]. Baseball before Ruth had been a game of bunts, steals, and low scores. He demonstrated that a full swing aimed at the fences could win games and sell tickets, and the rest of the sport gradually rebuilt itself around his example ^[5].

The peak came in 1927, when Ruth hit 60 home runs for a Yankees club, often called Murderers' Row, that won 110 games and swept the World Series ^[4]. That single-season mark stood until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. Ruth's career totals were just as durable: 714 home runs, a record until Hank Aaron passed it in 1974, a .342 lifetime batting average, and a .690 slugging percentage that remains the highest in major league history ^[3]. He led the American League in home runs twelve times and drew more than 2,000 walks as pitchers grew reluctant to challenge him.

He played on seven pennant winners and four World Series champions with New York, and Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923, was nicknamed "the House That Ruth Built" because his drawing power financed and filled it ^[4]. His flair for the dramatic peaked in the 1932 Series against Chicago, when, after gesturing toward the Wrigley Field outfield, he homered off Charlie Root. Whether he truly "called" that shot has been argued ever since, and Ruth himself gave differing accounts, but the legend became inseparable from the man ^[5]. In 1936 he was one of the first five players elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, alongside Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson ^[6].

Ruth married Helen Woodford, a Boston waitress, in October 1914, when he was nineteen ^[2]. They adopted a daughter, Dorothy, in 1921, but the marriage frayed under the weight of his fame and his appetites, and the couple separated in the mid 1920s. As Catholics they did not divorce. Helen died in a house fire in Watertown, Massachusetts, in January 1929, and three months later Ruth married Claire Merritt Hodgson, a widowed actress and model who brought a daughter, Julia, into the household ^[2]. Claire imposed a measure of order on his finances and habits that friends said lengthened his career.

Off the field Ruth lived as loudly as he hit. He earned salaries no athlete had approached, topping out at $80,000 a year in 1930 and 1931, and when a reporter noted that this exceeded President Hoover's pay, Ruth is widely reported to have replied that he had a better year than Hoover, a line that may be polished legend ^[5]. He spent freely on cars, clothes, and nightlife, and his suspensions for barnstorming and for clashes with managers made headlines. Yet he was also famously generous, especially with children, visiting hospitals and orphanages constantly, a habit rooted, biographers suggest, in his own institutional childhood ^[1].

His excesses caught up with him in the spring of 1925, when a collapse and abdominal surgery, dubbed by the press "the bellyache heard round the world," cost him much of the season ^[5]. Chastened, he rebuilt his conditioning with the trainer Artie McGovern and returned to form for the great Yankee teams of the late 1920s.

Ruth's skills declined in the early 1930s, and what he wanted most, a chance to manage the Yankees, never came. Club officials doubted that a man so famously undisciplined could discipline others ^[2]. Released by New York after the 1934 season, he signed with the Boston Braves in 1935 under the vague promise of a future in management that proved empty. He retired that June at age 40, though not before one last flourish: on May 25, 1935, in Pittsburgh, he hit three home runs in a single game, the final one reportedly the first ball ever driven over the roof at Forbes Field ^[3].

Retirement frustrated him. Apart from a brief stint as a Brooklyn Dodgers coach in 1938, organized baseball offered him no meaningful role, and he filled his days with golf, bowling, hunting, and public appearances ^[2]. During the Second World War he raised money for war bonds and the Red Cross, and his name alone could still draw a crowd anywhere in the country.

In late 1946 Ruth began suffering severe pain, and doctors found a malignant tumor at the base of his skull, nasopharyngeal cancer that had wrapped around an artery ^[6]. He became one of the first patients treated with an experimental combination of chemotherapy and radiation. On April 27, 1947, baseball staged Babe Ruth Day in every park, and a gaunt Ruth spoke in a rasping voice to a packed Yankee Stadium. He appeared there once more on June 13, 1948, leaning on a bat as a cane while the club retired his number 3. He died in New York on August 16, 1948, at age 53; his body lay in state at Yankee Stadium, where tens of thousands filed past ^[6].

No American athlete before Ruth had occupied so large a place in national life, and few since have matched it. Coming immediately after the Black Sox gambling scandal of 1919, his home runs restored public enthusiasm for baseball and pushed the game into its so-called live-ball era, in which power hitting became the sport's central act ^[5]. Attendance records, newsreel coverage, radio broadcasts, and tabloid celebrity all grew up around him in the 1920s, an age often bracketed with his name.

The statistical monuments endured for generations. Among the most cited Babe Ruth facts: his 60 home runs in 1927 lasted 34 years as the single-season record, his 714 career home runs lasted 39 years, and his career slugging percentage has never been surpassed ^[3]. Modern analysts who combine his pitching and hitting value generally rank him the most productive player in major league history, a judgment reflected in his standing atop most all-time lists ^[6].

Babe Ruth achievements outlived the record book. His name entered the language: "Ruthian" still describes anything of outsized scale, and youth leagues, candy legend, and the phrase "the Sultan of Swat" keep him in circulation among people who never saw him play. The Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum operates in the Baltimore rowhouse where he was born, and his plaque anchors Monument Park at Yankee Stadium ^[1]. Robert Creamer, his most respected biographer, wrote that Ruth remained the standard against which every slugger is measured, and decades of home run chases, each reported in his shadow, have proved the point ^[2].