Edmund F. Wehrle - Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseballs Campaign Against Its Biggest Star

IN 1959, THE eminent sports journalist Red Smith informed his readers how an entire class of young students rose up against a teacher who dared assert Babe Ruth had the mentality of an eight-year-old. To the youngsters, Ruth was an inspiration and an icon. The very notion that he was anything less outraged the class. The teacher may have been misinformed, though in that she isnt alone, explained Smith. Many, the columnist acknowledged, remember Ruth as something of a dolt off the baseball diamond. True, Ruth was unschooled, unpolished, profane, widely uninformed, rowdy... but he was in no sense stupid. Smith aimed to defend Ruth, but a reader could hardly be blamed for finding the column something less than a vigorous defense of Ruths intellect.

Even today, more than a century after his birth, impressions of Babe Ruth, baseballs greatest hitter and biggest personality, remain perplexingly bifurcated. None doubt his prowess as an athlete, in particular his amazing capacity to hit home runs. Mention of Ruth immediately conjures up jumpy black-and-white film footage of a pudgy powerhouse launching stratospheric home runs, then clicking around the bases on spindly legs. His warm smile and memorable moon face remain instilled in American iconography. Yet we also have inherited other, less flattering impressions. Most recall a player who challenged authority, defied Prohibition, reveled with abandon, and womanized recklessly. If Americans went on a postwar bender during the 1920s, Ruth, in popular memory, hosted the festivities. The gluttonous side of Ruth persists very much as part of our public memory. The Babe might not quite have possessed a dark side, but, as his nickname suggests, his maturity remains an open question.

This study seeks to place Ruths career in full context. It situates his story within the larger framework of baseball, sports, culture, and society during Ruths reign. Popular impressions of the baseball hero, I argue, hardly emerged organically. Rather, they were consciously constructed and manipulated by the baseball establishmentin particular, club owners, league officials, and sportswriterswho viewed Ruth simultaneously as a savior and an existential threat. The Babe excited and inspired fans as no other baseball figure had, yet his independent streak and outspokenness gravely troubled elites at the helm of professional baseball. It was essential that the peril Ruth posed be checked, while his potential be exploited. Hence the split image of Ruth has passed down to us even today. For baseball writers, club owners, and league officials, the retort to the Ruthian dilemma was to contain, to infantilize, and ultimately to break the superstar player.