By Jane Leavy
Babe Ruth was the Great Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, the Behemoth of Bash, and a myriad of lesser remembered monikers, but few describe his athletic prowess, impact on the game of baseball, and modern stardom as The Big Fella.
The Big Fella is Jane Leavy’s account of Ruth’s twenty-one-day barnstorm across America following his epic 1927 season. Though her focus is just one step in the trot around the bases of Ruth’s life, Leavy masterfully weaves past and present, separates fact from fiction, and explores the myth and legend of the athlete, the baseball phenom, the showman, the boy-man who is George Herman Ruth.
Leavy gives us baseball and the Babe, but she also gives us cultural commentary on public relations,
What was new in 1927 was the marriage between mass production and the mass distribution of goods and mass communication and mass psychology – a union employed on behalf of the Big Sell (193).
This sort of cultural collaboration was a boon to the Big Fella. “In 1927, Ruth earned $73,247 in by-product money, $3,247 more than his Yankee salary (a take-home pay of $26 million according to Michael Haupert, of the Economic History Association), making him undoubtedly the first professional athlete to earn as much or more off the field as on it” (218). And while such income pales in comparison to today’s top performers, the Babe and the times laid the foundation for his stardom successors.
How America changed during his life: He pitched his first major-league game seven years before baseball debuted on radio; he left the baseball diamond with TV cameras recording his final unsteady steps (456).
The Babe:
More than his monetary clout, the Babe was a baseball and cultural force, “‘He was the original natural,’ observed Mike Rizzo, general manager of the Washington Nationals” (xxiv). Leavy says, “the Babe is a boy lost in his own life story. Without that boy, it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of the man he became and the complex relationship between public and private, between the persona and the person, between ‘the Big Fella’ and Little George” (xxix). Leavy gives us this boy dressed up as towering baseball figure, “forever considered the best— and most complete—baseball player every; ‘Beethoven and Cezanne,’ as the baseball historian Daniel Okrent would say” (117).
Family: His mom died when he was 18. His dad was largely absent from his life, sending him to St. Mary’s Catholic School. “By 1908, there were 3,000 children being cared for at Catholic institutions in Baltimore by 500 members of various religious orders” (145).
Personality: “The Ruthian personality as much as the Ruthian wallop; is responsible for the Babe being the greatest figure baseball ever had” (100).
Hero: Ruth was the perfect hero for an unprecedented time because he, too, was unprecedented. He was unexplainable by any precedent other than himself” (101).
Man on the move: “There was no frame he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill. No pose he wouldn’t assume. No one he wouldn’t pose with. Posing was the only time he stood still” (111).
Pitcher of renown: He twice threw more than 320 innings in a 154-game season. Ruth had a lifetime 2.28 ERA and surrendered only 10 home runs in 1,221.1 innings pitched. His glittering pitching line over ten years: 94 wins, 46 losses, for a winning percentage of .671, higher than Christy Mathewson, Roger Clemens, and Sandy Koufax. Of his 23 wins in 1916, 9 were shutouts, all were complete-game victories. He threw 13 scoreless innings in the 1916 World Series, then added 16 2/3 more when he beat the Chicago Cubs twice in the World Series two years later (116).
Worth Pondering:
Legend: “Ruth may have reinvented the game, but attendance figures do not support his cherished belief that he brought fans back to the park after the scandal of the Black Sox. ‘Legend is not fact,’ said major league historian John Thorn” (375). “At some point in the trajectory of fame, real life becomes apocryphal” (367). “Babe Ruth remained faithful only to who he was” (375).
Focus: When it came to hitting, Ruth said, “I don’t worry about how I’m going to hit. I don’t bother trying to outguess the field. I think about the pork chops I had the night before and if there should have been more salt in the barbecue sauce. . . . The second the pitcher rears back everything goes out of my mind but the ball. What I see is the heart of it and that’s what I lean into.”
Spitting tobacco in 1927: Babe Ruth had a motion picture deal going in ‘27, some of the filming to include the Babe spitting tobacco: “‘Babe Ruth cannot spit tobacco juice on the screens in Highland Park theaters and get away with it,’ she declared in banning the film from her jurisdiction, thus causing the Babe to ‘lose a job,’ as the Associated Press put it. ‘We do not wish the children of Highland Park to believe that one must chew to achieve fame’” (34).
The growth of advertising: Advertising revenues in the US would climb from $682 million in 1914 to $3 billion in 1929. By the mid-1920s the number of advertising agencies had grown from 1,200 before World War I to 5,000 (68).
The growth of media: Between 1922 and 1927, the number of radio sets in American homes increased from one in every four hundred homes to a third of all American homes (108).
Baseball agents: There were no agents until 1965. Roger Maris wasn’t even allowed to bring his brother along with him to negotiate his 1962 contract with the Yankees, the year after he broke Ruth’s single-season record (135).
The color barrier: The Sporting News (December 6, 1923): “It matters not what branch of mankind the player spring from with the fan, if he can deliver the goods. The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap, the so-called Anglo-Saxon -– his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field. In organized baseball, there has been no distinction raised – except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent ineligible – the wisdom of which we will not discuss except to say, by such rule some of the greatest players the game has ever known, have been denied their opportunity” (170). “Kenesaw Mountain Landis, would break no chink in the color line that had banished African-American players from major-league baseball since 1887 and would remain in effect under his tenure until Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson ended it in 1947” (170).
Ruth on the color barrier: “The colorfulness of Negroes in baseball and their sparkling brilliancy on the field would have a tendency to increase attendance at games. The [All-Star] game in Chicago should bring out a lot of white people who are anxious to see the kind of ball that colored performers play” (176). See also 177, and 181 (for Hank Aaron’s misunderstanding about the troubles Ruth faced) and 183 for what Satchel Paige said about the abuse Ruth faced.
Leavy Commentary: “This was the Babe at his best, serving the two masters whose authority he never defied: the need to please and the need to be seen” (241).
On worry and effectiveness: “I don’t know what is responsible for a streak of home runs, but I know this, a man can’t worry and hit home runs” (296). Yogi Berra said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time” (309).
Ruth’s impact: Did he change the game because he could or because he wanted to? It’s a question Bill James, another baseball revolutionary has wrestled with for years. His conclusion: “I would argue that defiance of authority is THE central idea of Babe Ruth’s life, and the secret of his success. It was mostly a cheerful, agreeable defiance of authority . . .” (302).
Babe’s gold watch: Babe was dying of cancer when he returned to Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1946, the 25th anniversary of the stadium, to retire his number 3. “The Yankees gave him a gold pocket watch—an odd gift for a dying man” (454).
Baseball stuff:
Casey Stengel on Luckless junk-throwing lefty, Tom Zachary: “He hasn’t got a muscle in his arm. His pulse carries the ball to the plate” (2).
Ruth “had both a firm grip of his own worth and ownership’s unfair and unilateral control of the game” (209) and he was big enough to stand up to in some ways.
The year he was Most Valuable Player (EVER) (371).
His OPS+ was 195 for the later years of his career, “which is still 95% better than the average major leaguer” (408).
The Babe Bows Out: Iconic photo captured by Nat Fein, a 34-year-old human interest photographer for the Herald Tribune (453).
The Unlikely Duo:
Ruth and Walsh: “They were an unlikely pair. Ruth was all id; Walsh was superego. Everybody knew Ruth; Walsh made it his business to know everybody it was important to know. What they shared was a kinetic restlessness. Walsh traveled twenty-five thousand miles a year selling Ruth. Ruth traveled at least that much during the baseball season being himself” (62). Walsh “marketed” Ruth with abandonment (see 192-197, 201 et al). And Ruth cashed in (216). PSF: See also 389, 397, 389, 506f.
Ruth and Gehrig: “They played bridge together and fished together and spoke German together and brought out the best in each other. Their admiration and affection were reciprocal” (122). “Ruth was ‘all man’ from the waist up, but Gehrig was ‘all man’ from the feet up” (165 - See also 300). See 369-70 for what destroyed that friendship.
Books Leavy mentioned:
The Frenzy of Renown by Leo Braudy, the definitive study of fame in America. Braudy wrote: “From the beginning fame has required publicity” (108).
The Big Bam by Leigh Montville
The Pride of the Yankees by Richard Sandomir
The Luckiest Man by Jonathan Eig
Lessons Learned:
“The greatest man I ever knew” (148-152). Great mentors are often (usually?) quiet behind-the-scenes people. Click here for a podcast episode. See the sad ending on page 163.
What fear can do: Ed Barrow, manager of the Red Sox in 1918 on moving Ruth to the outfield: “I’d be the laughingstock of baseball if I changed the best left-hander in the game into an outfielder” (159).
Age catches up with all: Near his death, Seidenman, a photographer for the Baltimore News-American said, “There was no TV yet. The only picture I’d ever seen of him, he was Babe Ruth—a strapping guy. This guy, his fingers were like twigs. I felt like if I’d squeezed his hand I ‘d have broken all his fingers” (457). See Ecclesiastes 12.
So you want to write a biography: See Leavy’s “Author’s Note And Sources” (513fff) to appreciate the research and scholarship behind this biography.
None of us know any of us completely: Leavy writes, “What nobody seemed to know was who he was—how he was—when there was no frame to fill.” Waite Hoyt (Babe Ruth as I Knew Him) was a teammate as was Joe Dugan. Hoyt said, “I am almost convinced YOU WILL NEVER learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Dugan. . . . Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities, and so on. While I can easily recognize all this and admit it freely, and yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief—and intelligence he was never given credit for . . . and yet a need for intimate affection and respect . . . . The truth about him was unknown, and may be unknowable. The guy was an enigma even to those who knew him and played with him” (369-70). See Psalm 139.
Recommendation:
Leavy does a spectacular service in helping to see how culture shaped Ruth and Ruth shaped culture. This was a case of a big man coming to prominence at a big time in the life of our country even as big media and big advertising were also on the rise. “Ruth was famous in a way that no one had ever been famous before” (217). Jane Leavy helps us see his fame even as she shows us his times.
I highly recommend The Big Fella. It is baseball and a player and the times.
