Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth: The Man Who Rewrote Baseball's Arithmetic

Before he was the most famous hitter alive, Babe Ruth held one of the hardest pitching records in baseball: twenty-nine and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series, a mark that stood for more than forty years. He won 89 games for the Boston Red Sox in six seasons and led the American League with a 1.75 earned run average in 1916. Then he stopped pitching, started swinging as hard as a man can swing, and made the sport he had mastered obsolete.

Pigtown and St. Mary's

He was born on 6 February 1895 in the Pigtown district of Baltimore, to Katherine and George Herman Ruth Sr. Of their children, only Ruth and his younger sister Mamie survived infancy. On 13 June 1902, aged seven, he was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School, a Catholic reformatory and orphanage, and he stayed there twelve years. He learned shirtmaking and carpentry. He also met Brother Matthias Boutlier, the disciplinarian who became the closest thing he had to a father and who taught him to hit. Ruth's own verdict on it was unambiguous: "I think I was born as a hitter the first day I ever saw him hit a baseball."

The Best Left Arm in Boston

Jack Dunn, owner of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, signed him in early 1914 — the arrangement that produced the nickname, Dunn's new baby. He hit his first professional home run on 5 September that year, and made his major league debut for the Red Sox on 11 July.

For six seasons he was a pitcher first. In 1916 he went 23–12 with nine shutouts and the league's best ERA. Boston won the World Series in 1915, 1916 and 1918, and Ruth's scoreless streak across those Octobers became the record nobody expected to be a footnote. His final pitching line, spread across a career he mostly spent in the outfield, reads 94–46 with a 2.28 ERA.

The change came gradually and then all at once. In 1918 he hit eleven home runs while going 13–7 on the mound. In 1919, playing more and pitching less, he hit twenty-nine and broke the American League record.

The Hundred Thousand Dollars

On 26 December 1919, Harry Frazee sold him to the New York Yankees for $100,000, the largest sum ever paid for a ballplayer and still the most famous transaction in the sport's history. What followed was not an improvement on the existing game but a repudiation of it.

In 1920, his first season in New York, Ruth hit fifty-four home runs — more than most entire teams — and the Yankees became the first club to draw a million spectators in a season. In 1921 he hit fifty-nine, scored 177 runs and compiled 457 total bases; the last two figures remain modern-era records more than a century later. Baseball had been a game of bunts, singles and one-run innings. Ruth demonstrated, in public, that this was now a bad way to play.

The House That Ruth Built

When Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, he hit the first home run in it, and the sportswriters' phrase for the building stuck permanently. That season he was named the American League's Most Valuable Player; in 1924 he won the batting title outright. He led the league in home runs twelve times and in slugging percentage thirteen.

The peak was 1927, the year of the Murderers' Row lineup, when he hit sixty home runs — a single-season record that lasted thirty-four years. His career totals stand at 714 home runs, 2,873 hits, 2,214 runs batted in, a .342 average, a .474 on-base percentage and a .690 slugging percentage. No one has bettered the last figure.

Appetites

He drank, ate, spent and womanized on the same scale on which he hit, was suspended repeatedly for on-field misconduct, and negotiated in 1930 for a salary above $85,000 at a moment when the President of the United States earned $75,000. He remained a practising Catholic and gave steadily to orphanages, including the one that raised him.

The most argued-over moment of his career came in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, when he gestured toward center field and then hit a home run there. Whether he was calling the shot, pointing at the Chicago dugout, or doing something else entirely has never been settled and never will be. That the story is unfalsifiable is part of why it survives.

His body gave out before his fame did. Traded to the Boston Braves on 26 February 1935 with a promised role as vice president and assistant manager, he played his last major league game on 30 May that year. The front-office job never materialized.

Why Babe Is Called a Genius

The word has to be used carefully here, because the case does not rest on intellect. Ruth left a reform school at nineteen with a trade-school education and no discernible interest in abstraction. What he had was craft and a kind of strategic intuition that operated faster than argument.

The craft was a swing — full, violent, uppercut, taken left-handed with his weight fully committed — that produced distances nobody thought possible with a bat, and a batter's eye good enough to draw 2,062 walks and reach base in nearly half his plate appearances. Those two things are usually in tension. Swinging that hard should mean swinging at bad pitches; his .474 on-base percentage says he did not. Pitch recognition at that level is genuine cognitive work, performed in about four-tenths of a second.

The intuition was economic. Baseball in 1919 was organized around not making outs. Ruth grasped, before the managers did, that a livelier ball rewarded the extreme swing even at the cost of strikeouts — "fans would rather see me hit one homer to right than three doubles to left" — and he proved it by doing it rather than explaining it. That every team now plays his way is the evidence.

The counter-case is straightforward: his teammate Joe Dugan's "he wasn't human" is a remark about physical endowment, not mind. He did not manage, did not teach, and left no method behind — only a demonstration. Call it genius of the body and the instinct, and be precise about which.

Legacy

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in its inaugural class of 1936, one of the first five men chosen, on 95.1 percent of the ballots. He died of nasopharyngeal cancer in New York on 16 August 1948, aged fifty-three.

The sportswriter Red Smith said Ruth hit them "better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and flourish" than anyone. His colleague Tommy Holmes eventually gave up trying to describe him: "I stopped talking about the Babe — those who never saw him didn't believe me." A century on, the numbers are still doing the arguing on his behalf.

Achievements

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Award
• Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame