The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created

by Jane Leavy

Everyone agreed he never grew up. Never provided “a noble example for the youth of the nation,” Bill Veeck observed, “which is undoubtedly why the youth of the nation loved him.”

If Mickey Mantle was the last boy to function under a set of rules that Babe Ruth created for athletic celebrities, then the Babe is a boy lost in his own life story.

“The second the pitcher rears back everything goes out of my mind but the ball,” he told Jhan. “What I see is the heart of it and that’s what I lean into.”

Jean Bedini, a vaudeville star known in the trades as “the Turnip Catcher” for his ability to apprehend root vegetables dropped from skyscrapers with a fork clenched between his teeth, met Babe Ruth at home plate at Kinsley Park in Providence at 2:30 P.M.

Circling the bases on the afternoon of September 30, doffing his cap, bowing, grinning, winking, Ruth crowed: “Sixty! Count ’em, sixty. Let’s see some other sonofabitch do that!”

He was a one-man antidote to the grimness of Prohibition.

he imbibed whatever life had to offer. He indulged in excess, guzzling it down with a chaser of more.

Christy Walsh, sometimes known in the sports pages as the Impresario of Swat, and other times as “the man who relieves Babe of his burden of thinking,” functioned not only as Ruth’s agent, but as his manager, promoter, factotum, amanuensis, conscience, and mythmaker.

Ruth was the first athlete to be as famous for what he did off the field (or what people thought he did) as he was for what he did on it. And in 1927, with Walsh’s help, he would become the first ballplayer to be paid as much for what he did off the field as what he did on it.

Ruth signed on to tour Cuba with the John McGraw All-Stars in October 1920. Everyone knew how that turned out: with Ruth locked in a train toilet with Giants’ pitcher Rosy Ryan and a gallon of rum on their way back to Havana, where the Babe got stranded, having been swindled out of everything he’d bankrolled by gamblers and con men.

Yes, it could be frustrating “handling these children dressed as adults,” he would confide to his son in future correspondence. “But as long as they need you, you’re safe. You make them believe they can’t go on without you.”

The birth of tabloid journalism marked the beginning of an inexorable shift from word to image and from information to entertainment.

“Ruth without temptations might be a pretty ordinary fellow. Part of his charm lies in the manner with which he succumbs to every temptation that comes his way.

Giasco would talk to Cannonball before the game about ensuring a good show: “Now look, you know why all these people are here. You know what they came to see. They’re out here to see Ruth hit home runs, right?” “Right.” “Now, when the Babe comes to bat, no funny business.” “Got ya. Right down the pike.”

But the really extraordinary thing in Ruth’s case, Holmes realized, was his élan in the face of the onslaught. In fact, he appeared to welcome the claustrophobia of his particular fame.

At St. Mary’s he had never gone to the bathroom without company, never slept in a room by himself. Being public was all he knew. It was his norm. And as a result, his daughter Julia would say decades later, he could not stand to be alone.

Among the casualties of the Great War were old money and the old aristocracy; out of the ashes rose consumerism and marketing and a new, more equitable American star system featuring rags-to-riches heroes: Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Clara Bow, and Rudolph Valentino. Their ascendance from lower stations, palpable need for public approbation, personal tragedies, and failings—and, critically, their triumphs over those tragedies and failings—affirmed the animating principle of the American dream.

He posed in camel hair, coonskin, camouflage, raccoon coats, and two-piece bathing suits sunbathing on the beach at the Hotel del Coronado, taking his ease before the 1927 season;

Truby was a local wheeler-dealer, manager of the Bradley Beach semi-pro baseball team, secretary of the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, and former secretary (and only named official) of the short-lived American Party, a party of America-Firsters that served mostly to get Truby’s name in the papers.

It makes me very happy indeed to enclose herewith check for Thirty-Three Thousand ($33,000) dollars as the first step toward a trust fund for Mr. Ge. H. (“Babe”) Ruth. This is in accordance with our several past conversations and my wire from here February 6. And it concludes a campaign of nearly three years in which I have pleaded with my good friend Babe to do this important thing for his own future happiness. The difficulty has been to get him in an agreeable mood—and with the necessary cash on hand—both at the same time. I was able to engineer this by getting him to leave all receipts from his earnings this winter in my name. Exhibition baseball games, vaudeville and a motion picture have given him his most profitable winter season and the best part of the entire experience to me is that he has not spent a cent of it. I know many, many people who would not believe this!

“Jack Dunn’s Baby”—a moniker acquired early in spring training in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and soon shortened to Babe!—attracted

The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap, the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field. In organized baseball there had been no distinction raised—except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible—the wisdom of which we will not discuss except to say by such rule some of the greatest players the game has ever known have been denied their opportunity.”

The time of a ballplayer is short. He must get his money in a few years or lose out. Listen, a man who works for another man is not going to be paid any more than he’s worth. You can bet on that. A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he’s making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don’t make any difference if it’s baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It’s a business, I tell you.

Far be it from Otto Floto to commit journalism on the day Ruth and Gehrig came to town.

The Babe cleaned up his act. He learned, as Paul Gallico wrote in Farewell to Sport, what “every celebrity in the United States must learn—to perform his peccadillos in strict privacy if possible. Formerly Ruth had perpetrated his right out in public.”

According to economics professor Michael Haupert, a person was more likely to know one of the 177 American survivors of the sinking of the Titanic than to see a home run hit in 1918.

Ruth’s power was the consequence of reflex and eyesight, coordination and strength, but also personality. Each of his 714 career home runs was the act of a man who defied expectation and authority at every turn.

There is irony and truth buried in the statistic known as OPS+, the modern metric that combines on-base percentage plus slugging—power and discipline—and adjusts the numbers according to ballpark and league allowing for a comparison of players from different eras. Ruth is the all-time major-league leader with a rating of 206, ahead of Ted Williams who is second with 190. Isn’t it ironic that a man known for succumbing to so many temptations did not yield to those afforded by infinite space?

Batting coaches with Chris Davis’s previous team, the Texas Rangers, told him he’d never be able to hit that way. Then he led the major leagues with fifty home runs for the Baltimore Orioles.

Babe also found time on his wedding day to autograph a photograph of himself for a former mistress—“Lest you forget Many happy evenings we have spent together.” The new, reformed Babe was a gentleman.

Her wardrobe was the putative cause of the falling-out between Ruth and Gehrig. When Dorothy arrived at Mom Gehrig’s house looking particularly shabby one day, Christina Gehrig complained to someone who told someone who told Claire that it was shameful the way she dressed Dorothy. Claire complained about Christina to Babe, who told Lou, who said you can’t talk about my mother that way. That was the end of the friendship.

“Ruppert bought Ruth for $100,000, a total of $108,750 with interest paid over three years. But Frazee sent Ruppert a check for $21,000 in interest that first year on a $300,000 loan that was not repaid in full for thirteen years. After six years he had paid over $100,000 in interest alone, more than Ruth had cost the Yankees. And Ruppert had the deed for Fenway! In the end, it didn’t cost him anything to buy Babe Ruth. He was a genius and Frazee was desperate. So the Red Sox actually paid the Yankees to take Babe Ruth.”

of the $3.4 million in profits the Yankees earned during Ruth’s tenure, 37 percent can be directly attributed to the Babe.

It figures he would reveal himself most fully to a fourteen-year-old boy reporter trying to play the role of an adult, but ironic, too, that he was pleading with a child to be seen as an adult.

as a teenager he pitched his first major-league game seven years before baseball debuted on radio; he left the baseball diamond with TV cameras recording his final unsteady steps.