George Herman Ruth was an American baseball player. He began his MLB career as a stellar left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but achieved his greatest fame as a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees.
Background
George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore, Md. , the son of George Herman Ruth and Katherine (Shamborg or Schamberger) Ruth, who were both of German ancestry. He was the oldest of their eight children, but only he and a sister survived infancy. Ruth's father worked unsuccessfully at various jobs including bartending and slaughter-house work, and young George had a deprived childhood. A swearing, stealing, tobacco-chewing boy, he ran wild in the city streets, frequenting saloons and pool halls.
Education
At the age of seven his parents had him legally committed to the St. Mary's Industrial Home for Boys in Baltimore, a Roman Catholic institution run by the Xaverian Brothers. The home became his training ground and, when the ne'er-do-well father found that he could escape tuition payments, it became his legal guardian as well. Ruth's mother died when he was seventeen, and his father four years later. As surrogate parents, the Xaverian Brothers exerted a powerful influence on Ruth. He was taught shirtmaking, cabinetmaking, and cigarrolling, tasks that he handled capably. Placed under a rigid regimen of shopwork and skimpy meals, he learned to finish his work quotas quickly to gain time for sports. Baseball was then the favorite at St. Mary's, and Ruth quickly became the school's star player, satiating his appetite by playing as many as two hundred games a year. At the age of twelve he was, in the opinion of one of the brothers, "a natural born to the game. " He developed a strong admiration for Brother Matthias, one of his teachers, and adopted his habit of walking with toes pointed inward, a characteristic stride that later delighted Ruth's fans.
Career
When Ruth was nineteen, word of his prowess as a left-handed pitcher reached Jack Dunn, the highly successful owner-operator of the Baltimore club of the International League. After scouting Ruth in 1914, Dunn agreed to become his legal guardian in order to acquire his pitching services. It was one of Dunn's coaches who dubbed the young protege with his lifelong nickname of "Babe. "
A financial squeeze, however, forced Dunn to sell Ruth the same year to the major-league Boston Red Sox for $2, 900. In the remaining weeks of play in 1914, Ruth won two games for Boston and was sent for further seasoning to the Providence (R. I. ) team of the International League. With a brilliant overall record for 1914, his major-league career was launched.
Over the next four years, as a regular Red Sox pitcher, Ruth helped Boston win three American League pennants and three World Series titles. A strong left-hander, he had speed and a good curve ball. In the World Series of 1918 he pitched a shutout; he later extended a string of scoreless pitching in World Series play into a record that held for almost fifty years. Overall, his six years as a Boston pitcher showed eighty-nine victories and forty-six losses, a pace which, if continued, would surely have ranked him as one of baseball's greatest pitchers. But Ruth's versatility ended his pitching.
His exceptional abilities as a hitter prompted Boston manager Ed Barrow in 1918 to place him full-time in the outfield, where he played thereafter. By then Ruth stood six feet two inches tall and weighed 185 pounds. He was brawny in the chest and inclined toward fatness, but he was muscular and, notwithstanding a pair of incongruously slim legs, a fast runner. Unlike Ty Cobb, who employed the "scientific" choke-hitting style, Ruth was a free swinger who gripped a heavy bat at the end and used body weight and wrist leverage to power the ball. When he connected, the ball flew far, and, even when he missed, his swing was an electrifying sight.
In 1918 he batted 300 and hit eleven homers; a year later he astounded the baseball world by clubbing a record twenty-nine homers on a . 322 batting average. Such feats made him a superstar. When in 1919 Boston owner Harry Frazee, needing money to promote a musical play, sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125, 000 and a loan, Boston fans were enraged. Ruth soon won the adulation of New York fans and the powerful New York press. During the 1920 season he hit fifty-four homers and quickly overshadowed the great Ty Cobb as the hero of baseball. In so doing he revolutionized the style of baseball play, popularizing the explosive, decisive, high-scoring game of the home run. With Ruth as the unparalleled exponent, the "big bang" style came to dominate baseball strategy.
Since his rise to fame occurred soon after the "Black Sox" scandal, with its revelations of bribery and corruption, some historians give Ruth credit for reviving a flagging public interest in baseball; but attendance figures in the years 1919 and 1920 show that he merely escalated an already rising tide.
Ruth was the dominant figure in American baseball from 1920 to 1935, leading the New York Yankees to seven league pennants and five World Series championships. His salary rose from $20, 000 in 1920 to a peak of $80, 000 in 1930-1931. Altogether he earned $1 million in salary in twenty-two seasons, a sum that he doubled by endorsements and public appearances. He had become a national celebrity. In the fall of 1927, after hitting his all-time seasonal high of sixty homers, Ruth toured the Far West and attracted adoring crowds and banner headlines. Returning home, he signed a $100, 000 vaudeville contract. As an American folk hero, Ruth found that his private life attracted attention, and his misdeeds became public knowledge.
During World War I he was widely censured as a draft dodger. Later, sharp criticism focused on his high salary and his gambling, drinking, and wenching, and he was obliged to adjust his behavior somewhat to fit his public image. A lavish spender, Ruth learned to depend on financial advisors to curb his prodigality. Though unschooled and unmannered in middle-class etiquette, Ruth was no boorish lout. An idol of American boys, he was frequently photographed in their company, and often appeared at the bedsides of hospitalized youths, gestures that enriched his appeal and atoned for his crudities. By 1930 Ruth was said to be the most photographed hero of the day, eclipsing presidents, royalty, dictators, and prizefighters. As a player Ruth was hard to manage, often brawling with fellow players and contending with managers and baseball officials. When he defied the ruling of Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis against postseason barnstorming, Ruth was fined and barred from playing a third of the 1922 season, an action that cost him the home-run title that year.
In 1925, stricken with what newspapers at first called a "big belly ache, " he was hospitalized and underwent surgery for an intestinal abscess. Incapacitated for much of that season, he returned in a garrulous mood, quarreled with his manager, Miller Huggins, and was fined $5, 000--the heaviest fine in baseball history. Sobered at last, Ruth submitted to discipline. He engaged a trainer to help him lose weight and effected a comeback that added to his luster.
Over the seasons of 1926-1928 he led the Yankees to three straight pennants. Ruth inevitably left many legends, none more famous than his "called-shot" home run in the 1932 World Series, when, after being heckled by the Chicago Cubs, he gestured toward the fence and on the next pitch hit a home run. Despite his tremendous popularity among fans, Ruth found no secure place in major-league baseball in his later years. When his physical prowess waned, the Yankee management offered him a chance to manage in the minor leagues. Ruth spurned the offer, and the Yankees in 1935 released him to the Boston Braves. The Boston opportunity turned out to be a crude publicity stunt aimed at exploiting his drawing power; disillusioned, Ruth quit in midseason.
In 1938 he accepted a coaching offer from the Brooklyn Dodgers, but resigned before the end of the season for the same reason that had made him leave the Boston Braves. His last years became increasingly embittered as he awaited the managerial offer that never came. Still in the public eye, he appeared in movies, sold bonds during World War II, and became director of the Ford Motor Company's junior baseball program. In 1948, shortly before his death, he saw himself portrayed in a Hollywood film, The Babe Ruth Story.
Ruth had invested in annuities and remained well-off financially; he continued to be the favorite of baseball fans, who roared affectionate greetings at his public appearances. In 1946 Ruth developed cancer of the throat. Despite surgical and X-ray treatment, he died two years later in New York City's Memorial Hospital at the age of fifty-three. American baseball officials gave him the equivalent of a state funeral, placing his casket in the rotunda of Yankee Stadium where a hundred thousand people passed by his bier. After services in St. Patrick's Cathedral, he was buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County, N. Y.
Achievements
Ruth is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time. In 1936, Ruth was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of its "first five" inaugural members. In a fifteen-year career as a Yankee, Ruth set many records. As of 1973, his lifetime slugging average of . 690 still led all others, as did his lifetime total of 714 home runs, his 2, 216 runs batted in, and the 2, 056 bases on balls that cautious pitchers awarded him. His overall performance was the more remarkable since he had spent a quarter of his big-league career as a pitcher. His . 342 lifetime batting average ranks ninth best in baseball history. But he also struck out often, and his 1, 330 strikeouts put him in third place in that category.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Writer Paul Gallico said about him: "The door opened and it was God himself who walked into the room. God dressed in a camel's hair polo coat and flat, camel's hair cap, God with a flat nose and little piggy eyes, a big grin, and a fat black cigar sticking out of the side of it. "
Connections
On October 17, 1914 Ruth married Helen Woodford, a Boston waitress. They had no children, but in 1920 they adopted a baby, Dorothy, from an orphanage. In 1928 Ruth and his wife were separated, and in early 1929 she died in a fire at Waterloo, Massachussets.
On April 17, 1929, Ruth married Mrs. Claire Merritt Hodgson, a widow who had been an actress and professional model, and whose daughter, Julia, he adopted.
