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Home > People Index Page > Babe Ruth
The King of Swings
Babe Ruth Revolutionized Baseball While Indulging
a Passion for Wine, Women and Cigars
by Kenneth Shouler
While major league baseball ebbs and flows in
1995, losing fan appeal as it flounders on the shores of greed, a
century ago a saloon keeper's son who set the standards was
born. Though George Herman Ruth Jr. was born in 1895 and died in 1948,
his life passed into immortality long ago. The reason is simple: for
anyone who ever played the game, Babe Ruth remains the measuring
stick. Every debate that raises the question, Who is the greatest
ball-player? must soon switch to, Who is the second-greatest
ballplayer? There is really no doubting the first. In the
self-inflicted misfortune surrounding major-league baseball this year,
on the 100th anniversary of Ruth's birth, his legend continues to
grow.
Babe Ruth is unquantifiable. In mathematical terms, Ruth's exploits
are beyond measure, since no one has even approached them. When
starting out, Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly said, "I thought that
Babe Ruth was a cartoon character." And why not? His life seems too
large to be real. But Ruth defies the common wisdom that scrutiny
exposes the failings of even the greatest legends. The details of
Ruth's life--his kindness to children and good cheer, his excesses
with cigars and food and drink, his uncanny athletic gifts and
olympian power--make him even larger. And if he didn't carry a cigar
to the plate, a good smoke was an ever present talisman on his
infamous rounds of the bars and restaurants of every major-league town
he visited.
To anyone who cares to look, Ruth's numbers tell the tale. The first
record he established--and the one he later said he was most proud
of--is the 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless World Series innings in 1916,
established while he was still a Boston Red Sox hurler. Then he hit a
record 29 home runs in 1919. Then 54 in 1920, then 59 in 1921, then 60
in 1927. In his third full year as a hitter--1921--he had already
established a home-run record when he hit his 137th. When his slugging
percentage reached .847 in 1920, that too was a record. But his most
miraculous and rarely heard achievement is that during two seasons--in
1920 and 1927--Ruth hit more home runs than any entire team in the
American League. No one--in any time, in any place or in any
sport--has stood that far above his peers.
George Herman Ruth Jr. was born on February 6, 1895, at 216 Emory
Street in south Baltimore. The house was rented by his maternal
grandfather, Pius Schamberger, a German immigrant who eked out a
living as an upholsterer. Babe's mother and father, Kate and George
senior, lived above the saloon they owned and operated on Camden
Street. Kate made the two-and-a-half-block journey to her father's
home each time she gave birth--to Babe and seven other children. Six
of Babe's siblings died at birth or in infancy.
To say young George was mischievous would be an understatement. He was
always getting into trouble roughhousing and tossing tomatoes at
police officers in the hardscrabble neighborhood surrounding his
father's saloon. By age seven, he was impossible for his parents to
control or for his father, who put in long hours at the saloon, to
discipline. As Babe's daughter Dorothy recalls, his parents sent him
to St. Mary's Industrial School to ensure that he learned a
vocation. The strict institution--a combination orphanage and reform
school--was run by an order of Xavierian Brothers who taught Ruth how
to make shirts and roll cigars.
In time he met Brother Matthias, a soft-spoken giant whom the young
boys of St. Mary's respected. Matthias coached the baseball team. Ruth
caught for the team, pitched and spent hours taking batting
practice. Baltimore native and fan John Kremlisch recalls a game in
which Ruth pitched for St. Mary's against annual rival
Mt. St. Joseph's. "The game was so big that my father told me to take
off from school to see it," Kremlisch recalls. "Ruth struck out 14
boys that day, and St. Mary's won." Kremlisch still recalls the line
drives and "rainbows that defied gravity" that Ruth hit.
By 1914, Ruth had carved out a reputation for pitching and distance
hitting. Then Jack Dunn, owner of the International League Baltimore
Orioles, signed Ruth to his first professional contract. To sign Ruth,
Dunn had to assume Ruth's legal guardianship--Ruth was 19 at the
time--and Dunn kept a protective eye on the rambunctious youth. As a
result, Ruth's teammates called him Jack Dunn's "baby," which local
scribes recorded as "Babe."
By midseason, Babe went to the Boston Red Sox in a cash transaction
that enabled the Orioles to stay competitive with the Baltimore
Terrapins of the upstart Federal League, baseball's self-dubbed "third
major league," which was siphoning talent from the National and
American leagues.
Hurling for the Red Sox, Ruth soon became the league's best lefthanded
pitcher. In his first three full seasons with the team he won 65 games
and led it to a World Championship in 1916. While Ruth earned a 94-46
career win-loss record, pitching was discovered to be the lesser
weapon in his arsenal. His arm was golden, but his bat was too
thunderous to see action only every four days. So the Red Sox made him
an outfielder. Before 1919 the modern record for homers in a season
belonged to Gabby Cravath of the Philadelphia Phillies, who had
clouted 24 in 1915. But Ruth disposed of that in 1919--his first full
season as a hitter--by belting 29.
Evidently it wasn't enough. While Ruth was changing the way baseball
was played, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, who loved the theatrical stage
more than the baseball diamond, was looking for a way to finance his
Broadway plays. On December 26, 1919, he signed a contract with Yankee
owners Jacob Ruppert and Colonel Huston to sell the phenom to the New
York Yankees for $125,000 plus a personal loan of $300,000. The
$125,000 was more than double the price that had ever paid for a
ballplayer.
Despite Frazee's plaintive efforts to explain his decision in the
Boston press, there was no disguising his idiotic and short-sighted
decision. He had traded the most promising player in the major
leagues, the man who would revolutionize the game. The Red Sox won
five of the first 15 World Series, but the team hasn't won since 1918,
when Ruth pitched them to two victories. The loss of Ruth would be so
crushing to the team that it would be 15 years before it achieved even
.500 mediocrity again. More than 75 years later, die-hard Boston fans
speak of a curse on their Sox. The team does seem to be cursed:
Frazee's stupidity in trading Ruth may have offended the baseball gods
forever.
In 1920, Ruth would not only eclipse his mark of 29 homers, he would
blow it into outer space. He slugged a miraculous .847, a mark not
since approached by anyone. The entire Red Sox team hit only 22
homers, while Ruth hit 54--about 15 percent of the American League
home runs--that year. To compare, consider that Barry Bonds' 46 homers
in 1993 equaled 2 percent of the National League's home runs. Ken
Griffey Jr.'s 45 homers that year for the American League also equaled
2 percent.
Ruth's timing could not have been better. Coming on the heels of the
1919 "Black Sox Scandal," in which eight Chicago White Sox players
"threw" the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, Ruth made the fans
fall in love with the game again. He single-handedly moved it from the
"dead ball era," a time when runs were scored with a walk, a stolen
base, a single and a cloud of dust. He jazzed up the national pastime,
in which the trajectory of the home run was baseball's supreme
art. Ruth strode and spun into a pitch with abandon. "Some folks say I
was responsible for the development of 'swing hitting,' " he later
observed. "Maybe they're right. Other fellows, particularly the big,
burly, powerful chaps, began taking their bat at the end and 'swinging
from the heels,' as the boys say. And 'swing hitting' came into
prominence."
The period of Ruth's ascendancy and his impact on the game
corresponded with the close of the great Ty Cobb's career. A maniacal,
give-no-quarter competitor, Cobb despised Ruth. The rivalry is
understandable. Cobb was the game's greatest player from the early
1900s. But Cobb saw in Ruth a man who put an end to his spikes-first,
90-feet-at-a-time brand of baseball. Cobb took every opportunity to
disparage the Babe, calling him "nigger" because of his broad
nose. When teams would gather around the cage before a game, Cobb
would ask, "What smells?" "Things like that didn't seem to bother
Ruth," says his biographer Robert Creamer. "He just didn't worry; he
was much more adjusted to life than Cobb was. Ruth had a lot more fun
playing ball than Cobb."
When the titans Cobb and Ruth finally met head to head on June 11-14,
1921, in a series billed as a grudge match, Ruth got the better of the
competition. In the four-game series with Detroit, Ruth pitched and
won and had six home runs. The Cobb-managed Tigers lost all four games
(and went on to lose five more in a streak that sent them into sixth
place).
That same summer, Ruth hit 59 homers. The second-place finisher in
homers was Ken Williams, who hit 24. "He was like an Everest in
Kansas," says ABC commentator and columnist George Will. "In just the
third year in the league he already held the career record in home
runs (137) and went on to break his own record 577 more times." The
gap between Ruth and the second-place finisher was even wider than the
year before, when Ruth hit 54 homers to George Sisler's 35.
The Yankees ran into trouble with their pitching in the June 13 game
in their 1921 series with Detroit. Miller Huggins called a clubhouse
meeting and asked, "Who can pitch today? There isn't anyone left."
"I'll pitch, Hug," Ruth volunteered. Huggins gave Babe the ball, even
though he hadn't pitched a single inning in more than a year. Ruth
went five innings against a potent Detroit lineup, striking out one
man, Cobb. The Yankees won. Ruth's record that year as a pitcher was
2-0.
Ruth was invited to Columbia University for a battery of tests. The
findings of doctors Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes were
illuminating. They discovered that the pitch he could hit hardest was
just above the knees, on the outside corner of the plate. And when he
hit perfectly, in still air, with the bat moving at 110 feet per
second, the ball would carry 450 to 500 feet. In a clinical test of
steadiness, by inserting a charged rod successively into small holes
of different sizes, Ruth was proved to be the best of 500
volunteers. Ruth's eyes responded to flashing electric bulbs in a
darkened chamber 2/100 of a second quicker than did the average
person's--very valuable for picking up a moving ball as it left a
pitcher's hand. Medical science corroborated what the fans already
knew: Babe Ruth possessed preternatural eyesight and equally
impressive hand-eye coordination. Perhaps his teammate Jumping Joe
Dugan was right: "Born? Hell, Babe Ruth wasn't born! The son of a
bitch fell from a tree!"
Crowds were streaming through the turnstiles to see Ruth. His teammate
Waite Hoyt recalled that in the Yankee clubhouse the telephone was
always busy, and so Ruth had requested that a pay telephone be
installed. Near his locker sat a basket for the thousands of letters
that arrived at the stadium. And while he had complained that the
$10,000 salary he received in Boston wouldn't go far in New York, he
began with the Yankees at $20,000 a year. Then, because he drew such
large crowds at the Polo Grounds in 1920 and 1921, the Yankees
rewarded him with a $10,000 bonus. In addition, in a series of
"barnstorming" exhibition games, Ruth received an additional $17,000.
In 1920, Ruth made the Yankees the first team to draw 1 million paying
customers in the season. The team's new stadium was called the House
That Ruth Built. That was also the year that the Yankees paid back the
New York Giants for inflicting consecutive World Series defeats in
1921 and 1922. Giants Manager John McGraw had instructed his pitchers
to feed Ruth a steady diet of slow stuff and brushback pitches in
those series. It worked, for Ruth hit just .118 in the 1922
Series. But in 1923, Ruth struck with a vengeance, belting three
homers and knocking in eight runs, leading the Yankees to the team's
first world championship.
Babe Ruth was now a bonafide hero of the "Roaring Twenties," easily
eclipsing Jack Dempsey and Red Grange, Knute Rockne and Bill
Tilden. In New York City he would wheel his 12-cylinder Packard up
Riverside Drive to the stadium and wheel back, carouse through town
before an adoring public later that night and end up in the wee hours
at his usual home during the season, the legendary Ansonia Hotel. On
the road, Ruth roomed with a lineup of rookies and lesser players. The
reasoning was that if he was going to keep someone awake all night, it
shouldn't be a star. Ping Bodie, when asked what it was like to bunk
with the Babe shrugged and said, "I don't know. I only roomed with his
suitcase."
Ruth was growing abundantly fond of the good life, of food and drink
and cigars. During his stay in Boston, he had put some of his money
into a small local cigar factory that manufactured a Babe Ruth nickel
number with his picture on every wrapper. "I smoked them until I was
blue in the face," he once complained. Still, one of the reasons he
was reluctant to leave Beantown was because of those cigars. But his
real taste was for larger cigars.
"Twice he went to Cuba to bring back Havanas," notes Baseball Hall of
Fame researcher Bill Jenkinson. Countless pictures show Ruth smoking
in black tie, smoking in his car, even smoking while hitting a
ball. The cigars could have different shapes and sizes, but the player
who could swing a 54-ounce bat (easily the biggest in the major
leagues) also preferred the biggest cigars.
Anecdotes about his smoking abound, but one randy tale is especially
characteristic. One night on the road, Ruth smuggled a woman into the
room; his teammate Ernie Shore tried to sleep, but the moans, groans
and squeaking springs were impossible to ignore. Finally, with the sun
nearly up, Shore dozed off. When he awoke, he recalls that Ruth was
sleeping peacefully and the woman was gone. Shore noticed four or five
cigar butts next to the bed. When he inquired later, the Babe smiled,
saying, "oh, that! I like a cigar every time I'm finished."
After a while, Yankee officials gave Ruth a "sumptuous suite" on the
road, recalled his teammate, pitcher Waite Hoyt. After games, Ruth
would retire to his suite and change into a red moiré dressing
gown and red Moroccan slippers. "A long 60-cent cigar protruded from
his lips," said Hoyt, "[and Ruth looked] for all the world like the
Admiration Cigar trademark." The king on his throne would receive as
many as 250 visitors in a single night.
He also smoked pipes, cigarettes occasionally, and used enough snuff
for any other two players. "He had the constant need to placate his
mouth with food, drink, a cigar, chewing gum, anything," writes Robert
Creamer.
If winning a world championship was his goal, then his appetites were
constant obstacles. Ruth had a habit of eating before games and even
between doubleheaders. It was not unusual for him to "inhale" six hot
dogs and wash them down with three bottles of pop. He would then say
to the clubhouse manager, "can you get me some bi?" (bicarbonate of
soda, to relieve the gas). It became a ritual with Ruth--bouts of
overeating followed by bicarbonate of soda. Teammate Jimmie Reese
recalled that it was nothing for Ruth to eat doubles at every
meal. "He'd eat two ham steaks at breakfast, have a snack before the
game and then ask for the 'bi.' If he struck out three times he'd say,
'I'll get even tomorrow; don't worry about that.' "
In 1922, after a less-than-spectacular season, New York City Mayor
Jimmy Walker said that Ruth had let down the "dirty-faced kids." Their
hero cried. He worked out all winter in 1923 and promised to return
stronger than ever. It was the remark about the kids that really got
him. Perhaps because of his own tough childhood, Babe always had time
for children. He frequently returned to St. Mary's to play ball, and
even the tuba, for fund-raisers. Jimmie Reese recalled how the slugger
would stop his car near Central Park and tell Reese to wait while he
got out and signed autographs. Two hours passed on one occasion: Ruth
had to make sure that each and every kid got an autograph.
Despite indulging night and day, Ruth usually prevailed at the
plate. But he couldn't overcome what was described as "the bellyache
heard round the world," in 1925. When he finally collapsed with
stomach problems, he was advised to hang it up and rest in the
hospital. He missed 56 games that year, and the Yankees plunged to
seventh place. Some people were saying he was washed up.
Yet Ruth proceeded to have his most productive years as a hitter from
1926 through 1931: he hit 302 home runs, for an average of 50.3 a
year. The averages haven't been approached since. The addition to the
Yankees of Lou Gehrig helped them win the World Series in 1927, 1928
and 1932. Ruth and Gehrig formed the greatest one-two punch in the
history of the game. The pair spearheaded the 1927 lineup known as
"Murderers' Row," still regarded as the greatest team in baseball
history. Their team won 110 games and lost only 44, finishing 19 games
ahead of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. While Ruth led the
league in home runs 12 separate years, Gehrig was building his own
legend as baseball's "Iron Horse." Between 1925 and 1938, Gehrig
played in 2,130 consecutive games. And his lesser-known distinction is
knocking in 100 or more runs in 13 consecutive seasons.
Babe Ruth was 37 years old in 1932, but he still had time for one more
heroic moment on baseball's greatest stage, the World Series. Before
game three, anti-Yankee feeling was high in Chicago, at Wrigley Field
in particular. Mark Koenig, White Sox shortstop and former Yankee, had
been brought up from the minors to help Chicago win the National
League pennant. But when the Cubs met before the series to decide how
they would divide the World Series money, they decided to cut Koenig
only a half share. The Yankees and Ruth got wind of the half share and
used it to rally their spirit against the Cubs. "Hey, Mark," Ruth
shouted before game three. "Who are those cheapskates you're with?"
The Cubs shot back with the usual insults at Ruth: that he was fat,
old and finished.
Ruth hit a three-run homer in the first inning. Gehrig led off the
third inning with another home run. But the Cubs had rallied to tie
the score 4-4 when Ruth came to bat in the fifth. Charlie Root, the
Chicago pitcher, got two strikes on Ruth, and now the Cubs bench and
the crowd jeered him mercilessly. Ruth then held up his arm and
signaled two with his fingers. Gehrig would later say that Ruth
shouted at Charlie Root, "I'm going to knock the next pitch down your
goddamned throat." When Root came in with a slow curve on the outside
corner, Ruth belted it high and far to center field, and it landed
deep in the center-field bleachers, nearly 500 feet from home
plate. It was the longest home run ever hit in Wrigley Field.
Writer Roger Kahn recalls that several Yankees claimed that Ruth did
call his shot: "Wally Pipp said he did do it." Says Creamer: "My
feeling is that he never actually pointed, but he did gesture and said
he would hit one, and he did. It's really not important whether he
pointed or not." And Yankee Waite Hoyt said that Ruth had made this
sort of prediction several times. Before the end of that game, Gehrig
hit a second home run, and the Yankees won 7-5 and swept the Cubs four
straight. The story is exemplary, for Gehrig's great feats were always
overshadowed by those of Ruth. When Ruth was the highest paid player
in baseball, making $80,000 per year in 1931 and 1932, Gehrig made
only $25,000. Rogers Hornsby, the second-highest paid, received
$40,000 a year.
When Ruth retired with the Boston Braves in 1935 he had hit 714 home
runs, with Gehrig in second place, having not yet reached 400. Ruth
spent his retirement with his second wife, Claire, in a more placid
manner than he had spent the 1920s. But he wanted to manage a baseball
team. "He waited by the phone for a call that never came," recalled
Claire. "I was as big as any of them," Ruth complained. "Did Frisch
manage in the minors before he managed the Cards? Or Hornsby? Or
Terry? Or Ott? Or Traynor? What a line." Instead he was hired by the
Brooklyn Dodgers to coach first base and take batting practice to draw
fans. But he grew disgusted of being used and ended up quitting.
Ruth began to decline in 1946 after it was discovered that he had a
malignant growth in the left side of his neck. Most of the cancerous
growth was removed, but some remained. It affected the left side of
his head and his larynx. He would make several more appearances at
Yankee Stadium, his voice pained and hoarse. He died on August 16,
1948. The next day some 50,000 people filed past the Babe's bier in
the Yankee Stadium rotunda. Said one man who brought his
three-year-old son, "I just wanted to say to my child that he had seen
Babe Ruth."
"Ruth was Rabelais," says Roger Kahn, smiling. "Somebody who wanted to
drink up all the ale in New York and not let a cocktail waitress pass
by untouched. He was a huge, excessive, barely believable
fellow. That's the first thing. And then there were the home runs. Not
just the numbers of them, but the distance. When he was with the Red
Sox he hit one in spring training in an exhibition game at the Tampa
fairgrounds. He hit it out of the racetrack, into a farmer's field,
and it stopped in a furrow. Several New York writers got a surveyor's
glass and said it had traveled 630 feet. While that distance taxes
credulity, writer Bill McGeehan said he didn't know how far it
traveled, but when it came down it was covered in ice."
"There were so many numbers," says Barry Halper, drawing on a
Churchill Natural. Halper owns one of the largest baseball memorabilia
collections in the world, and it's full of Babe Ruth artifacts. "The
most incredible thing is that he won a batting title, homer titles and
an earned run average title!"
There is not now, never was and never will be another ballplayer like
Babe Ruth.
"I never heard anyone say he was a son of a bitch or anything bad
about him," says Ralph Kiner. "And Hank Greenberg [Kiner's teammate
with the Pittsburgh Pirates] used to say that Ruth was head and
shoulders above anyone else. He was, in my opinion, the greatest
ballplayer that ever lived."
And anyone in doubt can look it up.
Kenneth Shouler, a freelance writer based in White Plains, New
York, is a frequent contributor to Cigar Aficionado.
Special thanks to Tim Wiles, Tom Craig and Patrick Donnelly at the
National Baseball Hall of Fame for research assistance.
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