Visiting his home turf of Yankee Stadium for what proved his last time, on Opening Day 1947, a cancer-stricken Babe Ruth rasped out what seems in retrospect a bittersweet epitaph on his singular life:
“The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball.”
By then, Ruth’s life had become a shell of what it was, both from the disease slowly killing him and his exile from the game that gave his life its meaning, purpose, and glory. Robert Creamer’s 1974 biography puts in all in perspective. Or as Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins once put it, as he beheld the grave of another idol, “too much bleedin’ perspective.”
We learn about how Babe’s abandoned first wife died alone in a fire, how Babe was preyed upon by shyster agents and greedy owners, and how his life off the diamond was defined by an appetite for food and sex.
Babe’s second wife took firmer hold of him after his retirement, as much as any golf widow could. But his feelings for her seem to Creamer at bottom shallow: “I don’t think the Babe really loved Claire,” [friend Paul] Carey said. “I don’t think he really loved anybody.”
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| Babe Ruth in classic pose, after taking a cut in a game sometime during his long Yankee prime. The postures of umpire and catcher suggest this one could be heading for the bleachers. Image from https://calltothepen.com/2018/11/11/715-uncovering-babe-ruth-lost-home-run/2/ |
Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes To Life was a markedly different take on Ruth from what people were accustomed to back in 1974, when the Sultan of Swat was still very much a part of our national living memory, with Hank Aaron having just eclipsed his career home run record. It emphasized a darker side to Babe’s story, while still making room to celebrate his incredible accomplishments in the game:
He hit his 700th home run in 1934. When he hit it, only two others had hit more than 300. When he retired with 714, he had more than twice as many as the second man on the list. The home run was his.
Creamer’s objective, stated in his opening chapter, was to write an adult biography of Ruth, including vivid details of his wild living and his physical decline. It makes for a memorable reading experience, if not as amiable or as engaging as one would wish.
Babe Ruth is one legend not served best in the cold light of day. Reality tends to have a flattening effect; so it proves for him.
Growing up in my house, Babe Ruth was a legend, someone my grandfather covered as a newspaperman and my father and uncles grew up knowing. Dad was proud of the mention the Slocums got in Creamer’s book; though not to the point of encouraging his own son to read it.
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| My father, Frank Slocum, poses with Babe Ruth during a visit to Yankee Stadium. This must have been 1933, Babe's last good season, when Dad was eight. My grandfather ghostwrote many columns under Babe's byline; later my uncle helped Babe's widow write a memoir. |
“Maybe when you’re older,” he suggested, which along with the book’s significant bulk and small type, kept me from missing some choice passages on who the Babe was:
Women often phoned him in the Yankee clubhouse and asked him to come see them. He would not agree to dates until they made it clear that they were willing to go to bed with him. He did not want to waste his time. Sex was a constant part of his life.
Or the time he confronted the New York Giants for employing racist epithets when they jockeyed him from their dugout during a World Series game, telling them:
“I don’t mind being called a prick or a cocksucker or things like that. I expect that. But lay off the personal stuff.”
Babe Ruth’s German parents were non-factors in his upbringing, much of it lived in a Catholic vocational school. While Babe shrugged off its disciplined approach to life, he did find salvation in the baseball played there, which suited his tremendous strength and surprising finesse.
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| Babe in 1910, at the very left of the top row, with other members of the St. Mary's Industrial School team. Creamer notes he holds a catcher glove and mask, as he played many positions. His first game with the Baltimore Orioles in 1914 saw him playing shortstop. Image from https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/07/11/rare-photos-babe-ruth#gid=ci0255c4e390012781&pid=00-babe-ruth-babyjpg |
He found success not a batter, but as a pitcher.
A hard thrower with good control, he was first signed to professional baseball in 1914 as a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, then a minor-league team. Within a few months, his contract was bought by the Boston Red Sox, for whom Babe quickly blossomed into a tough starter.
Creamer argues he was the top left-hander in the game, a pitcher who won consistently even when set against one of the greatest hurlers ever, Walter “Big Train” Johnson. With Babe pitching, the Red Sox won two World Championships in three years. They had only one problem: what to do about Babe’s rare talent for hitting home runs?
“I’d be the laughingstock of baseball if I changed the best lefthander in the game into an outfielder,” Red Sox manager Ed Barrow scoffed.
Babe saw the truth: “I’ll win more games playing every day in the outfield than I will pitching every fourth day.”
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| Babe Ruth warms up as a pitcher for the Red Sox. He had a 3-0 record for Boston in World Series games (0.87 ERA), and his record of 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless World Series innings stood for over 40 years. Image from https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-babe-ruth-debut-20140713-column.html |
For a time, Barrow and Ruth butted heads. Then in 1919 Ruth got his way. Still a part-time pitcher for the Red Sox, with a record of nine wins and five losses, he spent most of the season playing in the outfield and broke the single-season record by hitting 29 home runs.
All this would be preamble for a deal the following year that sent him to the New York Yankees, and the beginning of a legend.
In 1920, he not only broke his single-season home run record but nearly doubled it, with 54 clouts. Fans crowded the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees then played, to see what amazing feat the Babe would pull off. They weren’t disappointed much in 1920, and Creamer notes, they weren’t disappointed in 1921 either:
He hit his 59th before the year ended to complete a batting record that was even more remarkable than 1920. He improved in everything…He had 204 hits and 144 walks, and it was a better than even money bet he would reach base each time he came to bat.
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| Ruth battled a weight problem throughout his career, sometimes sweating off dozens of pounds in spring training. Creamer notes he was usually in fine fettle, as seen here, a heavyweight but not at all an ungainly one. Image from https://www.quora.com/Was-Babe-Ruth-one-of-the-greatest-athletes-that-didnt-train-that-much |
Creamer identifies two distinct career bouncebacks during his time with the Yankees. After a significant falloff in the 1922 season which included no less than five suspensions and only 35 homers, Ruth stormed back in 1923 to win his first and only Most Valuable Player award and then, in 1924, his only batting title.
His second bounceback was even more remarkable: It was capped by 1927, his most amazing season, when at 33 he hit 60 home runs and led his team, dubbed “Murderers Row,” to their greatest dominance. Creamer details Ruth’s autumnal prime:
From 1926 through 1931, as he aged from thirty-two to thirty-seven, Ruth put on the finest sustained display of hitting that baseball has ever seen. During those six seasons, he averaged 50 home runs a year, 155 runs batted in and 147 runs scored; he batted .354.
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| Ruth, at far right, with other members of the Yankees' potent Murderers' Row lineup; from left, Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri. Gehrig was Ruth's biggest rival putting up home runs; off the field, Creamer reports they became estranged when Lou's mother made a comment about Babe's wife. Image from https://1927-the-diary-of-myles-thomas.espn.com/the-greatest-team-6369d39e876b |
Ruth made for great copy on the field and off it. A terrible driver, he was frequently stopped for speeding, and only sometimes got let off with a warning when recognized. Once, after spending a day in jail, he had to race to the ballpark to make the start of a game. “Keeping you late like this makes you into a speeder,” he told the press.
Ruth’s candor sometimes got him in trouble with ownership. But Creamer notes that never held him back:
He was relaxed with reporters, and would go out of his way to be cooperative with them, although he was often subjected to bizarre questions. “What do you think of the Chinese situation,” he was asked. “The hell with it,” he replied.
Creamer notes with amusement another reporter’s attempt to quiz Ruth about the “psychology of the home run.” Yet he can get Freudian, too, noting how crowds cheered the “erectile power” of his hard swings.
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| Babe Ruth enjoying a hot dog. He ate them before games he played in, downing them with bicarbonate of soda. "It made him feel good and he decided that it was the ideal diet before a game: a couple of hot dogs and a glass of bicarb," Creamer wrote. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/465278205251918001/ |
To Creamer, much of Ruth’s significance was unique to the time and place of his achievements:
Many of those riding the subways and elevated trains and streetcars up to the thin northern neck of Manhattan where the Polo Grounds was, or who talked about Ruth on street corners and in the neighborhood stores, were Italian. The rhythm and alliteration and connotative impact of the Italian word for babe, bambino, made the nickname a natural. In time, headlines would say simply, “BAM HITS ONE.”
Yet Ruth’s fame would extend beyond his own time. People today may not recognize the names of other baseball greats, but the Babe endures. Creamer notes how the qualifying phrase “with an asterisk” came into currency when Roger Maris in 1961 broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Similarly, “calling your shot” references a famous moment in the 1932 World Series when Ruth supposedly did just that.
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| Footage of Babe at his called-shot game at Chicago's Wrigley Field, October 1, 1932. The image of him seen pointing is key here. Was he pointing at the pitcher, the home team's dugout (which was ragging on him for being over the hill), or the centerfield fence? Image from https://wifflegif.com/tags/358285-babe-ruth-gifs |
Creamer spends a goodly number of pages analyzing this episode, deciding that while Ruth may not have pointed at the exact section of Wrigley Field’s centerfield wall where he proceeded to deposit his monster shot, he definitely said something about hitting one out.
He concludes: It is an argument over nothing… He did challenge the Cubs before 50,000 people, did indicate he was going to hit a home run and did hit a home run. What more can you ask?
I
would have enjoyed Creamer’s book more if he took that attitude a tad more
often, but Babe is an excellent sports biography in its loose, candid
way. A more in-depth approach would have been welcome, too, but would I have
had the stomach for even more depressing details about the Babe’s bitter finale?
Sometimes the legend is better.
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