🇺🇸Babe
Ruth

In 1919, the Boston Red Sox made the most consequential decision in the history of American sport. They sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for the then-enormous sum of $100,000. Ruth had been the best pitcher in the American League and was also, in his limited at-bats, the most prodigious power hitter anyone had ever seen. The Red Sox, in financial difficulty, took the money. What happened next defined baseball for the next century. Ruth stopped pitching and became a full-time outfielder for the Yankees, hitting 54 home runs in 1920 — a season in which no other team in baseball hit 54 home runs collectively. He hit 59 in 1921. He hit 60 in 1927, a single-season record that would stand for thirty-four years. He transformed the sport from a game of small ball, stolen bases and manufactured runs into the power-hitting spectacle that it remains today. The Yankees, meanwhile, won seven World Series while the Red Sox did not win another for eighty-six years. The sale became known as the Curse of the Bambino.

George Herman Ruth Jr. was born on February 6, 1895, in Baltimore, Maryland, to a working-class family. His childhood was difficult and disorderly. His parents, overwhelmed by his behaviour, placed him at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore at the age of seven — an institution run by the Xaverian Brothers that was part orphanage, part reform school. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence there. Brother Matthias Boutlier, a large, physically imposing man who ran the school's athletic programs, took an interest in the young Ruth and taught him to play baseball. Ruth, who hero-worshipped Brother Matthias, absorbed every lesson with intense attention. By the time he was a teenager it was clear that he was a baseball player of extraordinary natural talent, with a hitting ability that the school's instructors had never seen in any young player they had coached.

He signed with the Baltimore Orioles of the International League in 1914 and was sold to the Red Sox the same year, making his Major League debut in July 1914 at the age of nineteen. As a pitcher, he was immediately one of the best in the American League — powerful, with a good fastball and a deceptive delivery. He helped the Red Sox to World Series victories in 1916 and 1918 with both his pitching and his increasingly compelling hitting. But it was as a batter that his true historical significance would be felt, and the Red Sox's decision to play him in the outfield alongside his pitching duties in 1918 gave the baseball world its first extended look at what Ruth could do with a bat in his hands and an unlimited number of at-bats every season.

The numbers he produced in New York remain almost incomprehensible in their context. In a sport where a slugging percentage above .500 marks an excellent season, Ruth's career slugging percentage was .690. His 60 home runs in 1927 came in a season where the American League average for home runs per team was around 55. He led the American League in home runs twelve times. He won the American League batting title once. His on-base percentage of .484 is the highest in the history of Major League Baseball. These are not merely records — they are statistical anomalies that suggest a player operating in a category separate from his peers in a way that has no equivalent in the sport's subsequent history.

The Yankees of the 1920s — built around Ruth and later Lou Gehrig — became the first dynasty of the professional era and, arguably, the model for every successful sports franchise that followed. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was dubbed "The House That Ruth Built." Ruth became the first athlete in American history to earn a salary higher than the President of the United States, a distinction he accepted with characteristic directness: "I had a better year than he did." He was not merely a great player — he was a cultural force, the first celebrity athlete in the modern sense, recognisable across the country and eventually around the world in a way that no sportsman had been before.

His personal life was chaotic and indulgent by the standards of any era. He ate prodigiously, drank heavily during Prohibition, and pursued relationships with women with the same lack of restraint he applied to everything else. He was fined and suspended on multiple occasions. He was beloved by teammates who found his enthusiasm and generosity infectious, and exasperated by the same people when his personal conduct created problems for management. None of it seemed to affect his performance on the field, where he appeared at his best when the moment was largest. His "called shot" in the 1932 World Series — allegedly pointing to centre field before hitting a home run there — remains one of the most debated and most celebrated moments in baseball history.

He retired in 1935 after a brief stint with the Boston Braves and died of cancer in 1948 at the age of fifty-three. He was among the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. His 714 career home runs stood as the all-time record until Hank Aaron surpassed it in 1974. The record may have fallen, but the legend has not. Ruth remains, by almost any measure, the most important player in the history of American baseball — the man who invented the modern game.