The Babe century - Babe Ruth's 100th anniversary special section

It is too hard to resist. A chance to write about Babe Ruth. Between "Hank Ruszkowski" and "John William Rutherford" in THE SPORTING NEWS clip files are 22 big, yellowing envelopes, each as stout as the man they remember, a million words about two enduring syllables. They can never be enough, because anyone with a Ruth product around the house knows he is still and forever a mighty presence. He was a player who made a living out of big numbers -- 60, 714, $80,000 to name a few -- and so on February 6 we are more than happy to glorify the 100th birthday of an icon who died long ago and never held office nor drew huddled masses to a harbor.

The only question about whether to celebrate this centennial would be raised by Babe Ruth himself, who would have told Willard Scott to announce it last year. Ruth was born at 216 Emory Street in Baltimore, and for the first 40 of his 53 years he celebrated his birthdate as February 7, 1894. Proving that even he could not separate Ruth fact from Ruth fiction, he needed a birth certificate for a passport one day in 1934 and was surprised to find he was nearly one full year younger. Ruth generally ignored the new information, and whenever anyone asked about the discrepancy, he usually would say, "What the hell difference does it make?"

It makes a big difference to Eric Schmertz, a law professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. Over the past two decades that school has conducted 84 single-subject conferences that assessed such topics as Walt Whitman, Johann Bach, the French Revolution, George Orwell and U.S. presidents. Schmertz persuaded the university to break tradition and confront a sports figure just this once, and so he will direct a three-day conference in April called "Baseball and the Sultan of Swat." It will draw Ruth historians as well as survivors who played with or against him, and scholarly papers will discuss everything from theorems about his home-run measurements to the Faulkner buff who looks at "The Sound and the Fury" and tells "Why Jason Compson Hates Babe Ruth."

"We're going to learn a lot about Ruth, not the direct sports information that we know about, such as stats and records, but we're going to get some interesting, if not new, analyses of his impact sociologically," says Schmertz, who at the age of 6 saw one of Ruth's 714 homers. "Here it is, many decades after he last came to bat, and he still is the foremost sports figure of all time. Why is that so? Well, he must have had an impact on society generally, far beyond the playing field, that has survived and persisted and has grown. We're going to see much of that coming out of the papers of the scholars. The imagery, the development of an American hero, the dark side of Ruth, the impact of Ruth commercially. That's been a development over the years -- the endorsements, the use of his name, the use of Ruth in film and literature. The full picture of Babe Ruth will be much more sharply focused at the end of our three days."

Robert Creamer will be at that conference, but even he knows there never will be a perfect understanding of the life that Ruth built. In his exhaustive 1974 biography, "Babe: The Legend Comes To Life" (Simon & Schuster), Creamer attempted to find truth in all the lore. Creamer found many stories to be apocryphal, including the famous Herbert Hoover line. Someone supposedly asked the Sultan of Swat if he knew that his $80,000 salary in 1930 was more than the president's in that Depression time, and Ruth supposedly said, "I had a better year than he did." Creamer says he "never found a source" for that quote. (Red Smith also questioned it, writing that "the Babe was not that well informed on national affairs.")

Nor did Creamer find reason to believe that Ruth pointed to center field before hitting his "called" home run in the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field -- a mystery as rooted today as the sinking of the Maine and the assassination of John Kennedy. "There's no question he did not point to the center-field stands," Creamer says now. "I'll go to my grave arguing that. It was because of that stupid (1948) William Bendix movie that people thought otherwise.

"The one accepted fact that surprised me most was the one I heard growing up learning baseball, that Ed Barrow, his Red Sox manager at the time, supposedly said he changed Babe from a pitcher to a hitter. When I did my research, I found just the opposite. Barrow fought like hell to keep him from becoming a hitter. Ruth wanted to be a full-time outfielder, and Barrow was from the old school, so he thought pitchers were worth more than hitters. They worked out a deal where Ruth played left, and every fourth game he batted fourth and pitched. It's the most extraordinary thing anybody's ever done in baseball, when I think about it.

"You can go on forever looking for the truth in the Babe stories. The thing I still wish I could find out about is his early childhood. It's so veiled in conjecture. I wish you could open some window to the past, to find out how he behaved, what it was like his first years at St. Mary's. He came through it all and sort of blossomed."

Ruth was born to Kate and George Herman Ruth a century ago in that Emory Street row house, which today is a museum. "Little George" was a self-descrbed "bum" as a tot and was exiled to St. Mary's Industrial School, where his pitching and hitting talents were discovered amidst the other misfits by Orioles boss Jack Dunn. ("Look at Dunnie and his new babe," said one of the older players in Ruth's first pro season, at Fayetteville, N.C.) Most every American knows the rest of the story. Ruth was part of the first Hall of Fame induction class in 1936 and died of throat cancer a dozen years later.

In the ensuing half-century, we have learned just how special Ruth was in and outside of baseball, and we also have learned what an often drunken and ignorant oaf he was behind the hero's visage. "It's almost like playing a religious figure," John Goodman said of his 1992 portrayal of "The Babe," which was better than that of Bendix but further proof that movies cannot do justice to the Ruth legend.

Ruth's importance in baseball hasn't diminished. It was he who rescued baseball from the days of the Black Sox Scandal, and in these tenuous times his legacy is posthumous pressure for labor negotiators to keep the continuum alive (unfortunately he could not save his showcase, the World Series). It is Ruth's spirit at Yankee Stadium that makes it so hard for George Steinbrenner to find another setting for his club. It was Ruth who put "swing-hitting" on the map (triples were headier stuff before his day), and although his single-season and career home-run records were broken in pain-staking chases by Roger Maris and Hank Aaron, respectively, the Bambino remains the longball standard.

Perhaps it is fitting that Ruth was the subject when THE SPORTING NEWS made its first foray into the electronic world, asking cyberfans to E-mail us their stories about the Ruth legend for this section. We celebrate our 109th birthday March 17, and we covered no player in this time more extensively than Ruth. And yes, as Beckett Baseball Card Monthly so astutely observes in its February issue, we took this slightly underestimated view of Ruth after his subpar 1922 season: "The baseball public is on to his real worth as a batsman and in the future, let us hope, he will attract just ordinary attention."

Ruth attracted slightly more, especially from the children. He dedicated much of his life to them, routinely visiting the disadvantaged, "to help kids who now stand where I stood as a boy." How moved he would be today to see that Babe Ruth Baseball, the youth-league start for people such as Don Mattingly, numbers some 760,000 players and 1.5 million volunteers.

You needn't be in baseball to feel Ruth's presence today. The Babe is a brand name unto himself, a metaphor, like calling any tissue a Kleenex or any soft drink a Coke. John Connor, a reporter for the Dow Jones News Wire, sounded this cautionary note after hearing promises of fiscal responsibility from newly enboldened Congressional Republicans: "In the end, President Reagan came to be known as the Babe Ruth of Deficit Spending." Barry Farley, writing in the Orlando Sentinel about the return of pro-bowling great Don Carter for a PBA Senior Classic, said it was "like getting a chance to watch Babe Ruth hit another home run." Dolphins running back Keith Byars, so moved by watching teammate Dan Marino make good on his guarantee that a pass play would win the game in the quarterback's big 1994 debut against New England, gushed, "it was like Babe Ruth calling his shot."

And then there is the political perpetuation: Ruth the lobbying tool. The Associated Press reported in November that Maryland officials were considering buying the 3,240-acre Woodmont Rod and Gun Club on the Potomac River, "a secluded gunners' paradise where several famous guests, including Babe Ruth and six U.S. presidents, have hunted and relaxed." Or consider John Hazel, one of North Virginia's most influential developers, who was so worried about skepticism toward a proposed Disney theme park on a Civil War battleground that he told the Washington Post: "Once Babe Ruth pointed to the wall and said, 'I'm going to hit the next pitch over the right-field wall.' If he had not hit the ball, it could be a bad scene." Alas, Disney's efforts were as fruitless as Hazel's description.

Willie Mays, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb notwithstanding, Babe Ruth is by far the person mentioned most when people are asked to name the greatest player ever. A Gallup poll asked the question in 1949 of "those who follow Major League Baseball," and Ruth received 30 percent of responses, followed by Cobb at 6 and Lou Gehrig at 5. Gallup conducted the same poll in 1990, to see if the times had changed, and Ruth received 31 percent, followed by Aaron, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle at 7 each.

That's why they're throwing a 100th-birthday party February 6 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

"The Babe's birthdate is a national holiday around this house," says Tim Sullivan, a Cincinnati Enquirer columnist and longtime baseball scribe. He proposed to his wife, Lisa, on that date, and there was a postersized likeness of Ruth at the head table for their wedding reception. When son Michael was born, Tim was pleasantly shocked to find that this babe tipped the scales at ... 7 pounds, 14 ounces. Why the infatuation? "I just think that the more you follow baseball, Ruth takes on kind of a mythic proportion," Sullivan says. "I think he's a really endearing character in a lot of ways. He was a very simple guy, raw and uneducated, but he did have a really wonderful touch with people. He just seemed so much larger than life.

"He really seems like a god."

It doesn't take much imagination to conjure up what would have become of Ruth had he lived into his dotage, or miraculously, survived to the century mark but remained, say, 45 years old in body and spirit. He would have been painted by Andy Warhol, photographed by Richard Avendon and interviewed by Charlie Rose. He would have dined at the White House, ridden in the Tournament of Roses parade and been seen in the audience as the Three Tenors crooned their salute to the World Cup. He would have played the Pro-Am at Pebble Beach, sipped Perrier at the National Tennis Center and gone to Disneyland whenever he felt like it.

"I honestly don't know anybody who wants to live more than I do," Ruth said at the end of "The Babe Ruth Story," a little 1948 autobiography as told to Bob Considine. "It's more than a wish in my case. I've got to stick around a long, long time."

Wishes do come true.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group