Why the Babe Was Beloved

A new biography examines a great ballplayer.

Long before Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in a season, and before Mark McGwire hit 71, baseball’s first home-run derby was in 1927, when a shy wunderkind named Lou Gehrig was racking up four-baggers for the New York Yankees and his numbers came perilously close to those of the reigning titan, Babe Ruth. Gehrig led in August, but Ruth emerged triumphant with 60. Those two rivals are still among baseball’s greatest heroes.

McGwire and Bonds may always be shadowed by questions of steroid use; Babe Ruth, as Leigh Montville explains in his lively new biography, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (Doubleday, $26.95), fueled his performance with only beer, hot dogs, steaks, and sweets. Montville, a celebrated sportswriter and author of a best-selling biography of Ted Williams, writes that he wanted “to tell the story again for the SportsCenter generation, to bring back the supposed-to-be-uncomplicated in the time of the complicated. The approach is not so much to tear down the myths that grew around George Herman Ruth as to explain how and why they developed in the time in which he lived. Why did an entire country fall in love, go gaga over him?” Montville’s expressive writing and expansive knowledge of baseball and culture are more than up to the task.

“I had a rotten start,” the Bambino said in his ghostwritten autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story. He was born to working-class parents in Baltimore in 1895 and raised in an orphanage, St. Mary’s Industrial School. There Brother Matthias Boutleir, a giant of a man, entertained the boys on Saturday nights by hitting baseballs seemingly impossible distances. Because he tossed the ball himself, Brother Matthias used an upward swing. Most batters, facing a pitcher, used a downward chop, so the hit ball would bounce hard and get them on base.

Ruth’s swing, based on Brother Matthias’s fungo, took him to the majors, where he led the American League in home runs 12 times and led his team to win seven World Series. He started with the Boston Red Sox, and crowds flocked to Fenway Park to see the phenom hit, but as a 20-year-old he was a handful. His game was wild and prone to errors. He had money for the first time and spent it like a man just out of prison. There was the eating—piles of sandwiches, nearly a dozen hot dogs at a time, peanuts by the pound, enormous steaks. There were the women—he had just married a 16-year-old waitress, but on the road he consistently broke curfew and brought prostitutes back to the hotel. There was beer, hard liquor, cigars.

He was loud and profane. He nailed his teammates’ shoes to the floor, slipped cardboard in their sandwiches, harassed their wives, argued with the umps, and bickered with management. And he consistently batted over .300 at a time when the league average was .254, helping the Red Sox get to the World Series three times. But by 1920 the Sox were losing money, and the owner had had it with the kid. He was sold to the Yankees, and the “curse of the Bambino” settled over Boston. They didn’t win another World Series until 2004.

Meanwhile the Yankees were developing into a dynastic team, and Ruth was leading the way. In his first season in New York he had a record 54 home runs, batted .376, and led the team in RBIs, runs, and bases on balls. The best advice the outfielder Sam Vick could offer a pitcher was, “Throw the ball and duck.” Ruth’s hitting would change the sport into the long-ball game we know today. In the 1920s the number of home runs quadrupled as hitters tried to imitate the Babe’s free, full swing. As the sport’s first superstar he helped make the game the national pastime, and as he shattered home-run records, the Yankees did the same with attendance. One sportswriter remarked that even if you didn’t know what first base was you knew Babe Ruth.

He was far from a perfect man or a perfect ballplayer. His constant infidelity preyed on his wife, and she eventually left him. His daughter, who may have been adopted, never saw him and was shunned by his second wife, Claire Merritt. The 1926 World Series ended when he was easily thrown out unwisely trying to steal second.

After the 1925 season, during which he weighed more than 250 pounds and played abysmally, he hired a trainer and for the first time started to watch what he ate and drank. In 1927, the year of the home-run race with Gehrig, he had an almost magical season. Since 1921 he had chased his own record of 59 home runs but never come even close. On September 30, 1927, he hit homer number 60. He played baseball for another eight years but declined steeply after his mythic “called shot” in the 1932 World Series. By the time he retired he had hit 714 home runs in all, a record that would stand for nearly 40 years. He died of cancer in 1948 and is still considered by many to be the greatest ballplayer of all time.

“Sometimes I still can't believe what I saw,” said Harry Hooper, a Boston teammate of Ruth’s, years later. “This 19-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over—a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since.”

Barry Bonds is swinging away to surpass Ruth’s career record, but Ruth’s grandson just announced that he won’t be on hand to congratulate Bonds, because of the question of steroid use. At any rate it seems no ballplayer—no matter how many home runs he hits—will soon take the place of the Sultan of Swat in the American imagination.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.