The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, by Jane Leavy is a big book - 600 pages - that is as outsized as its subject. We all understand that Babe Ruth was a big deal, but I had no idea what that really meant until I read this. Two quotations from the author say a lot:
“He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines.”
“Subtlety was banished. Clout was all.”
He was thoroughly modern, in the way he attacked a baseball, “but also in the creation, manipulation, and exploitation of his public image at the precise moment in history when mass media was redefining what it meant to be public.”
Terrible childhood George Herman Ruth, Jr. (later “Babe”) never caught a break at home. His mother was troubled and had an affair with the bartender at her husband’s bar, never a good thing for domestic tranquility. George, Sr, beat his wife and his namesake. Six of the family’s eight kids died early. Theirs was not a Leave It to Beaver home.
His parents sent him to an orphanage at age 7, although he wasn’t an orphan. He was sent off for stealing a dollar from his dad’s bar to buy ice cream for his buddies, filching vegetables from street vendors and throwing them through windows, and chewing and smoking tobacco.
He went to St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore, a stark place with beds two feet apart. Sports were a bedrock of the curriculum. The school fielded 24 baseball teams, and some of the games drew 3,000 fans. Babe recalled playing 200 games some years. Brother Matthias was his mentor there, and he taught George Jr. how to hit. The brother was a stable presence in Babe’s life.
Playing baseball In 1914, Babe got noticed for his outstanding play at St. Mary’s. He was signed by Baltimore and quickly sold to the Red Sox. In1919 Sox owner Harold Frazee sold him to the New York Yankees. Actually, the author points out that the Sox essentially gave the Babe to the Yanks for nothing. At the time of the sale, the Sox owner was in financial trouble and had to borrow $350,000 (with Fenway Park as collateral!) from Jake Ruppert, the Yankees owner, to keep the Sox going. The interest from those loans totaled more than the $100,000 Ruppert paid for the Babe. No wonder the Red Sox were cursed.
The sale changed the game and business of baseball forever. Babe would not have been larger than life in Boston, a relatively small city that wasn't a big deal back then. When the Babe went to the Yankees, a whole new world of fanatical fan interest and thousands of promotional opportunities opened up to him.
Branding The Babe, along with his agent, Christy Walsh, invented sports branding: “He developed a new kind of business: the management, marketing, and promotion of athletic heroism.” Walsh understood that the public wanted to know all about the person behind the celebrity/athlete, and signing Ruth to endorsement contracts with dozens of businesses and products was a good way to give the public what it wanted. It also earned Ruth and Walsh a lot of money. Babe Ruth was the first player to make more money off-field than on-field. During one trip to Boston to play, he made 8 endorsement appearances before the game.
One thing he never made any money on was the Baby Ruth bar. Curtiss Candy marketed the bar aggressively, dropping samples from planes, hot air balloons, and horseback riders, and sold billions. Ruth and his agent ignored that for a few years, and by the time Babe brought a suit against Curtiss for using Ruth’s brand, the courts ruled that they had waited too long to take action.
The rise of magazines and tabloid journalism that used a lot of photos coincided with Babe’s increased visibility with the public. By 1914 there were 249 baseball publications nationwide and 12 newspapers in New York City. Sports reporters came onto the scene for the Golden Age of Newspapers. In the 1920s photography was evolving, with photographers finally able to take pictures at night. Around that time, the small 35mm camera, a natural for capturing action, was the cutting edge in sports photography.
Babe’s country was changing post-WW1, with the emergence of electric lights, telephones, radio, and airplanes. Between 1921 and 1927, we went from having carrier pigeons carry important messages to having radio broadcasts of everything. By 1927, 60% of America listened to sports on the radio, up from a few hundred thousand radio owners in 1922. Newsreels hit the movies, and they often featured Ruth. Magazines exploded with the Babe on the cover of almost all of them at some point.
Ruth, thanks to his agent, merged sports and entertainment by shrewdly utilizing the new media, which just happened to be exploding during the peak years of his career.
Barnstorming The book is organized in an interesting way. Each chapter leads with a description of one of the 21 games of the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig Barnstorming Tour which took place between October 10 to October 30, 1927. Besides exploring details of each game, the author goes back and forth in time to talk about various aspects of the Babe’s life. It’s a bit confusing, but it is a novel approach to writing, even though this is not a novel.
Barnstorming involved playing against local teams or against travelling teams. Gehrig and Ruth each had their own travel team, the <em>Larrupin’ Lous </em>and the <em>Bustin’ Babes</em> that played against each other. Before each game they visited orphanages, Elks clubs, Knight of Columbus halls, schools, business lunches, business promotions, whatever. They got most of the gate receipts plus add-on fees. Often a third of the town’s population would show up for the game, and sometimes schools were closed to let younger fans see the Babe. For the Los Angeles game, 25,000 people showed up.
The Babe would often pitch as well as hit. Gehrig just hit. Ruth made about half his salary in the 20-day 1927 barnstorming tour, and Lou Gehrig, who was paid much less, made more than his season’s salary.
During the tour, Ruth and Gehrig played 21 games in 20 cities and towns, with 13 of the games broken up by enthusiastic fans rushing the field. Now that’s entertainment!
(FYI: Earlier, in 1922, Babe got fined his world series share and was suspended without pay for one-quarter of the season for defying the baseball commissioner's ban on barnstorming. Babe, being Babe, continued to barnstorm and eventually wore the commissioner down.)
Race There was a fair amount of racism around the Babe although he was German. Some people - Ty Cobb and his ilk - thought that Babe’s lips and visage made him look Negroid, the term they used back then when they were being polite. He did like Black players and recognized how great some were, something that would irritate a lot of people back then.
Extracurricular activities Although he got married young, Babe was a womanizer. No one knew who was the mother of his daughter, Dorothy. It wasn’t his wife. His second wife’s kid (Julia) never knew who her dad was. Babe adopted them. His first wife, Helen, died at age 32 in a Watertown fire at her boyfriend’s house two years after her separation from Babe. Various women alleged affairs; some got paid off and some didn’t.
Babe often got into trouble with women, gambling, alcohol, speeding, and such. The Yankees inserted morals clauses into his contracts, perhaps one of the first instances of virtue signaling since they couldn’t be enforced.
Babe was not a health specimen. He often was hospitalized for diet-related issues. In 1925, he took ill and was hospitalized on his way to the first game of the season in Washington. “He was said to be suffering from boils, flu, and indigestion brought on by the ingestion of hot dogs (supposedly 12).”
Retirement Babe retired in June of 1935. He was worn out. He did some work here and there - helping out with the 1939 World’s Fair and doing lots of lucrative promotions, including one at New York’s Jones Beach where he hit phosphorescent balls at night while 60,000 fans cheered him on. He couldn’t get what he really wanted, a job in baseball. His reputation had preceded him, and no one wanted to take a chance on giving Babe a real job. He golfed and bowled a lot.
In 1945 he started having headaches, which ended up being nasopharyngeal cancer. He still did things. He was a consultant to a movie, <em>The Babe Ruth Story</em>. On June 13, 1948 he was back at Yankee Stadium for an Old Timers game and a tribute. He spoke briefly and received a tremendous ovation. He was dead two months later at age 53.
He rested in state at Yankee Stadium for two days, with over 75,000 paying their respects and another 75,000 lining up along the route to the cemetery. The headline about his death in the Daily Mirror was 172-point type, about 2 ½ inches high. That is big, like a headline for the end of a world war.
Bob’s Take
Babe Ruth was probably the best baseball player ever. According to OPS+, a modern metric that factors in variables related to performance, he was the best ever, with Ted Williams second. His mechanics were just about perfect; Brother Matthias taught him well at St. Mary’s. The Babe had a very high kinesthetic IQ, which made him a superb baseball player. But he had more going for him than sheer talent. Bill James, a renowned baseball writer, summed up Babe’s career by saying that his success could be attributed to “a cheerful, agreeable defiance of authority.” Ruth’s elite skill set and his roguish personality made him a great baseball player who made the game America’s Pastime.
The Babe was known as “The Kid Who Never Grew Up”, much as Mickey Mantle was known as “The Last Boy” in Jane Leavy’s biography of him. Both were great players.
This book was long and detailed and fascinating. I’ve read a couple other Babe bios, but this one had a lot of new information in it, and Jane Leavy is a superb writer. I read her Mickey Mantle book, which was good, but this one was more interesting because Babe Ruth was The Babe.
Alert readers - both of you - will remember that my car in college and beyond shared a name with The Babe - Big Fella. The two are not the same.
