Babe Ruth

The Full Biography

Babe Ruth. Ballplayer. The Baltimore kid who turned a pitcher’s game into a home-run country.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man in pinstripes, belly out, pointing or not pointing, then the ball gone. The year might be 1927, or 1932 at Wrigley, or 1948, leaning on a bat in a retired number, the body already leaving. What the still cannot show is St. Mary’s Industrial School, a left-handed pitcher the Red Sox used like a staff ace, and a later life spent waiting for a managing job that never came.

He was born George Herman Ruth Jr. on February 6, 1895, in Baltimore. For most of his life he thought the date was a year earlier. A passport finally told him the truth. The waterfront neighborhood was rough. At seven he was sent to St. Mary’s, a reform school and orphanage. Brother Matthias Boutlier put a bat in his hands and a catcher’s mitt behind him. Jack Dunn of the minor-league Orioles signed him in 1914. The older players called him Dunnie’s babe. The name stuck. The rest of the country never used George again.

Boston made him a pitcher first. From 1914 to 1919 he was one of the best left-handers in the American League: ninety-four wins, a 2.28 earned-run average, three World Series with the Red Sox. He also hit. In 1919 he hit twenty-nine home runs, a season record that already looked like a typing error. On December 26, 1919, Harry Frazee sold him to the New York Yankees. The sum was $100,000 and a loan against Fenway Park. Boston spent the next eighty-six years explaining it.

In 1920, in a Yankee uniform, he hit fifty-four. In 1921, fifty-nine. In 1927, sixty. The game that had been bunts and stolen bases became a spectacle of one man changing the scoreboard. Yankee Stadium opened in 1923. He hit a home run in the first game. People called it the House That Ruth Built. He was the American League MVP that year. He won four World Series in New York after three in Boston. Seven rings. A .342 lifetime average. 2,214 runs batted in. 714 home runs, a number that stood until Hank Aaron in 1974.

I had a better year than Hoover.Ruth, in 1930, asked how he could make more than the President

The called shot of 1932 — Game 3 of the World Series, Wrigley Field, a gesture toward center, then the ball — is still argued. What is not argued is the noise. He played his last season with the Boston Braves in 1935 and hit three home runs in one afternoon at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Then he was done as a player. In 1936 he went into the Hall of Fame with the first five: Cobb, Wagner, Mathewson, Johnson, Ruth. The order of the names is a kind of American sentence.

Boston made him a pitcher first, and the pitching is the chapter children are almost never told. In 1916 he went 23–12 with a 1.75 earned-run average and nine shutouts. In the 1916 World Series he beat Brooklyn in fourteen innings, 2–1. In 1917 he won twenty-four. He was a left-hander who could also hit, which the Red Sox treated as a useful accident until the accident became the product. In 1918, a war-shortened year, he started as a pitcher and finished as an outfielder who led the league in home runs with eleven. In 1919 he hit twenty-nine, a season record that already looked like a typing error, and still took the mound enough to win nine. Then Harry Frazee sold him. The Yankees stopped using the best left-hander in the league as a pitcher. Baseball became a different sport because one man was allowed to hit every day.

1920, fifty-four home runs. 1921, fifty-nine. The old dead-ball numbers — a league leader with ten or twelve — became folklore overnight. Yankee Stadium opened on April 18, 1923. He hit a home run in the first game. People called it the House That Ruth Built, which is advertising that happens to be true. He was the American League MVP that year. The Yankees won the Series. They won again in 1927, the Murderers’ Row club, with Lou Gehrig in the other half of the order and sixty home runs in Ruth’s column. 1928 was another title. The called shot of 1932 — Game 3 of the World Series, Wrigley Field, a gesture toward center, then the ball — is still argued in taverns. Charlie Root was the pitcher. What is not argued is the noise. He was already thirty-seven. The belly was already a national joke. The bat was still the country’s idea of a ballgame.

He was not only a slugger. He hit .342 for a career. He drove in 2,214 runs. He scored 2,174. The on-base percentage, .474, is a number modern children need explained because they have been taught that fat men only swing. He walked. He took pitches. He also ate too much, drank too much, and kept hours that would have ended a smaller talent. Miller Huggins fined him and suspended him and still wrote his name in the middle of the order. Joe McCarthy inherited him and got two more titles, 1932 and the last one in pinstripes. The Yankees released him after 1934. He had 708 home runs. He wanted a manager’s job. The club gave the job to other men.

The Boston Braves signed him for 1935 as a player, vice president, and promised advisor — titles that were, in practice, a gate attraction. On May 25, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, he hit three home runs in one afternoon, the last of them over the right-field roof. It was the 714th. A few days more and he was done as a player. In 1936 he went into the Hall of Fame with the first five: Cobb, Wagner, Mathewson, Johnson, Ruth. The order of the names is a kind of American sentence. The turn is not 1927. The turn is the sale, and then the long wait for a dugout that never hired him.

The 1920s were not only home runs. He hit .393 in 1923. He hit .378 in 1924 and won a batting title, a fact the folklore misfiles. He led the league in walks as often as he led it in the long ball. He was thrown out of games and then written back into the next lineup because the gate required him. The 1925 season was a bellyache and a slump the papers treated as a national illness. He came back. 1927 was sixty. 1928 was another Series. He barnstormed in the winters, played against Negro league clubs, and took the money that exhibitions paid a man the owners would not let manage. The body was already a cartoon. The bat was still the country’s idea of a ballgame.

He barnstormed west after seasons, played in Japan on a 1934 tour that treated him as a visiting monarch, and hit exhibitions in towns that would never see a World Series. The Yankees of those years were a machine he had forced into existence by making one swing the country’s idea of a ballgame. Gehrig was the other half of the order and a different kind of iron. They were not close in the way anniversary films prefer. They were a lineup. When the club let Ruth go after 1934, it kept the house he had built and handed the lineup card to other men. He spent the rest of his life standing outside that house, famous everywhere, employed nowhere that counted.

The later years

Home, after the last uniform, was New York with Claire. He had married Helen Woodford in 1914, when he was a kid pitcher and she was a waitress. Their household included a daughter, Dorothy. Helen died in a house fire in Watertown, Massachusetts, in January 1929. He married Claire Hodgson that April. Julia, Claire’s daughter, came into the house. The public life was golf, hunting, bowling, personal appearances, and a hunger for a flannel that said Manager. In 1938 the Brooklyn Dodgers hired him as a first-base coach. It was not the job. He lasted a season. The Yankees would not give him the bench. Neither would anyone else who mattered. Owners wanted the name at a banquet and not the name writing a lineup. He took the banquets. He never stopped asking for the card.

Radio paid. Endorsements paid. He swung at exhibitions and hit fungoes for children who had not been born when he pitched for Boston. He played golf as if the course owed him a living. Friends from the 1920s describe a man who was still loud at a table and newly unsure in a lobby — famous everywhere and employed nowhere that counted. He kept a scrapbook of the managing rumors. They remained rumors. The Hall of Fame plaque was already on a wall in Cooperstown. The day job was being Babe Ruth, which is a job with no dugout and no day off.

In 1946 the voice went. Doctors at Memorial Hospital in New York found a tumor at the base of the skull, around the neck — nasopharyngeal cancer, in the language of the file. He took treatments that were, then, experimental. On April 27, 1947, the Yankees held Babe Ruth Day. He stood at a microphone in a camel-hair coat and thanked the crowd in a rasp. On June 13, 1948, the club retired his number 3. He wore the old wool, leaned on a bat, and the stadium made a sound that newsreels still carry. Nathaniel Fein’s photograph, Babe Ruth Bows Out, won the Pulitzer. He died on August 16, 1948, at Memorial, in New York. He was fifty-three. Tens of thousands walked past the casket at Yankee Stadium. The funeral Mass was at St. Patrick’s. Burial was at Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, Westchester County. Claire outlived him by decades. The uniform with Manager on it never arrived. The wait is the last chapter, and it does not resolve.

The 1938 Dodgers job is worth another sentence. He wore Brooklyn flannel, hit fungoes, and stood in a coach’s box that was not a manager’s. The writers asked, every week, whether the Yankees or someone else would finally hand him a club. The answer stayed no. He golfed at St. Albans and on Florida courses. He hunted. He posed with children and with politicians. He endorsed breakfast food and smoked more than a man with a neck tumor should have. Claire kept the household and the appointments. Dorothy and Julia were the daughters the public saw. The private file is messier than the newsreels, as private files are. What the public was allowed to have was the camel-hair coat, the rasp, and the last day in pinstripes.

Memorial Hospital in 1946–48 is the last workplace. He took radiation. He took early chemotherapy. He lost weight the country was not used to seeing on him. Photographers still wanted the belly and the grin. They got a man in a camel coat holding a cap. Babe Ruth Day in April 1947 is the last speech that matters: a thank-you in a ruined voice to a stadium that had already decided he was a civic property. The June 1948 number retirement is the last image that matters. Then August. Then St. Patrick’s. Then Hawthorne. The managing job remains the sentence that does not get a verb.

After he was gone

The record book moved. Maris, Aaron, Bonds. The house in the Bronx kept the name. Cooperstown kept the plaque. Every April someone still explains 1919 to a child. The called shot is still a tavern argument. The pitching line is the part most children are never told.

He did not invent power. He made it the country’s idea of a ballgame. That is the arc. That is the story. The pointing still will last. The left-hander from St. Mary’s, sold so a ballpark could be financed, is the part the still cannot show.

Portrait: Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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