The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created

by Jane Leavy

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.

He was the Babe, the Bam, the Big Bam, the Great

Bambino (or Slambino). The Bazoo of Bang and Bash. Behemoth of Biff, Bust, and Bangs. Blunderbuss. The Bulky Monarch and the Monarch of Swatdom. Caliph of Clout, Colossus of Club (and vice versa). The Circuit Smasher. Demon Swatter. Diamond-Studded Ball-Buster. His Eminence, the Priest of Swat. G. Herman Hercules and Pan Hercules. The Goliath of Grand Slam and Great Keagle of Klout. Hedjaz of Hit, Herman the Great, and Homeric Herman. Infant of Swategy. Kid of Crash, King of Clout, King of Swing. The Home Run King. The Maharajah and Mauler of Mash. The Mauling Menace, Monarch, and Mastodon. Also, the Mandarin of Maul and Mastodonic Mauler. The Modern Beowulf. Paladin of Punch. Prince of Ash and Potentate of Pounders. Rajah of Rap.

Sheik of Slam, Sachem of Slug, the Sampson and Sultan of Swat. The Swattingest Swatter of Swatdom. The Terrible Titan and the Titan of Thump. Whazir of Wham, Wali of Wallop and Wiza...

And all the names put together were still not enough to encomp...

The oaths and imprecations were not audible to the 35 million Americans listening to the first national broadcast of the World Series, which was carried on fifty-seven stations by the new networks of CBS and NBC.

He endorsed cars as quickly as he wrecked them, promoting Cadillacs in New York, Packards in Boston, and Reos in St. Louis. Elsewhere he preferred Auburns, Studebakers, Chevrolets, and Chryslers. It depended on which dealership was providing a car for his use. (He endorsed Nash cars after he retired.)

“Walsh was a visionary, ahead of his time,” declared Leigh Steinberg, the Christy Walsh of the eighties. “He understood branding and product categories. This sort of thing hadn’t been done since P. T. Barnum.”

Sportswriters in the golden era committed as many sins against language as they did against journalistic propriety. Contrary to the received wisdom, purple prose wasn’t invented in the press box at Yankee Stadium. “Weighty openings and grand declarations often / Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam / Far and wide,” the Roman poet Horace wrote in Ars Poetica in give or take 19 BC.

Perhaps the best illustration of the “Ruth Effect” is provided by looking at 1925, when he played in only ninety-eight games, his fewest as a Yankee. Attendance plummeted 34 percent and revenues dropped 22.5 percent. In 1926, when a reformed and resurgent Ruth led the major leagues in home runs (47), runs scored (139), RBI (153), walks (144), on-base percentage (.516), and slugging (.737), the Yankees drew 1,027,675 spectators and their revenue jumped 72 percent to $1.6 million.

And in 1927, powered by Ruth’s sixty home runs, attendance increased another 13 percent, all of which Haupert attributes to Ruth’s drawing power. By the end of the year, the initial $100,000 investment in Ruth had already returned $779,075.51. He would continue to generate showy profits for another seven years, a reality Ruppert acknowledged with the two-year, $80,000 contract for 1930–1931, which also included a clause awarding him 25 percent of the net receipts of exhibition games played during the regular season (as long as he played in at least five innings). That would remain true for as long as he remained a Yankee. Ruppert could well afford this gesture of largesse. According to Haupert’s analysis, of the $3.4 million in profits the Yankees earned during Ruth’s tenure, 37 percent can be directly attributed to the Babe. By

“For each dollar they spent on Ruth, they made back twenty.” IV

Asked to evaluate how well Christy Walsh had looked after Babe Ruth and his money, Zaft’s reply is unequivocal: “On a scale of one to ten—eleven.” Kind of like the home run the Babe hit during the pregame exhibition in San Diego, a clout so frightful, the San Diego Tribune said, “it almost paralyzed a cuckoo bird in a sentinel tree” beyond the left field fence.

In baseball, the saying goes, the older you get, the better you used to be. That’s true of virtually everyone who ever played the game, with the possible exception of Babe Ruth.

Ruth became a constant in a time of national upheaval, a last repository of American bravado. No one begrudged him his eighty thou a year for 1931–32. Or minded one little bit his braggadocio when asked about making more than the president of the United States: “I had a better year.”

It was June 1902 all over again. It wouldn’t have been so painful if he hadn’t made the mistake of conflating fans and family. “As much as he surrounded himself with people, I think he was alone,” said his granddaughter Donna Analovitch. “He couldn’t get enough of people, but I don’t know if he was ever attached to anything other than his fans and the game. And I don’t think he had to have it because he was an egomaniac. I think he had to have it . . . for that sense of family. “I think Babe was a window-wisher. You look at other people’s lives and you wish. You’re in a car, you drive by a house, the windows are open, they’re all sitting down to dinner, and you wish some more. But you don’t really connect with it. And you don’t ever feel like you can have it.

In April, he had signed a contract with the Ford Motor Company as an evangelist for American Legion Junior Baseball. In exchange, Ford, the only company that saw fit to employ him, gave him the Lincoln and $500 for each city he visited. He would travel fifty thousand miles for them during the last two years of his life. Why did he go? Because he felt better. Because they paid him. Because he didn’t know how to stop being Babe Ruth.

While dying of cancer

the extraordinary span of his baseball life went unnoticed, or at least unspoken: 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. In

The autopsy results, reported two days later in the New York Times, sounded anything but beautiful, revealing that the cause of death was not, as previously supposed, cancer of the larynx, but a very rare and aggressive form of nasopharyngeal cancer that had spread to his neck, his lungs, and his liver.

His granddaughter Linda offered a different opinion. “I think baseball killed him; not cancer. He had no more worth in his head.”

FULL NAME: George Herman Ruth BORN: February 6, 1895, Baltimore, Maryland DIED: August 16, 1948, New York, New York Buried at Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven, Hawthorne, New York (Section 25, Lot 1115, Center of Graves 3 and 4) FIRST GAME: July 11, 1914 FINAL GAME: May 30, 1935 BAT: Left THROW: Left HEIGHT: 6' 2" WEIGHT: 215 SELECTED TO THE HALL OF FAME: 1936 (95.1%) AWARDS: 1916 AL pitching title; 1923 AL MVP; 1924 AL Batting Title; Named outfielder on the Sporting News Major League All-Star Team (1926 to 1931) EJECTIONS: 11 TRANSACTIONS: Sold by Baltimore (International) to Boston Red Sox with Ernie Shore and Ben Egan for more than $25,000 on July 9, 1914. Sold by Boston Red Sox to New York Yankees for $100,000 on December 26, 1919. Released by New York Yankees on February 26, 1935. Signed by Boston Braves February 26, 1935.