Babe Ruth, the first modern celebrity

Baseball, the future commissioner A Bartlett Giamatti wrote in 1977, is designed to break your heart. “The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

The fall of 1927 threatened to be especially lonesome. It was only October 8 when the Yankees, led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, dispatched the Pirates in a World Series sweep. But the season didn’t end that day, at least not for Ruth and Gehrig. The Yankee stars — Ruth fresh off his 60-home-run campaign, Gehrig the league MVP — embarked on a three-week barnstorming tour that would take them from Trenton to Fresno. For fans in those cities, and many in between, the heartbreak of autumn would be staved off for a few more precious days.

Of course, this was baseball unsanctioned — and only grudgingly permitted — by Giamatti’s imposing predecessor Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Landis took a dim view of barnstorming, and you can’t entirely blame him. In each new city, Ruth and Gehrig would join opposing local teams, which were transformed for the day into the Bustin’ Babes and the Larrupin’ Lous. 

On October 13, in Asbury Park, the game was called in the sixth inning — Gehrig had hit the last of the 36 available baseballs into a lake. In the ninth inning of the Oct 26 game, in San Jose, the pitcher for the Lous politely asked Ruth where he’d like the ball, then grooved one into his wheelhouse. Ruth hit the fat pitch over the right-field fence and, according to some accounts, over a nearby cannery, too. He began his home run trot, but was thronged by young fans before he could make it to third. Of the 21 games the Babes and Lous played on the tour, 13 were broken up by overzealous spectators.

The Big Fella, Jane Leavy’s new biography of Babe Ruth, is set amid this rowdy roadshow. Leavy has a taste for unconventional approaches. Her acclaimed study of Sandy Koufax was punctuated by an inning-by-inning account of the perfect game he threw in 1965; “The Last Boy” was framed around 20 pivotal days in the life of Mickey Mantle. But why accompany Ruth to the hinterlands and not stick to the Polo Grounds, or the cathedral he built in the Bronx?

For one thing, some very good sportswriters have already done it the old-fashioned way. In 1974, the year Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s career home run record, Robert Creamer published a biography rich in earthy detail tilled from interviews with men who’d played with him. In 2006, Leigh Montville published The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, an engaging account of Ruth’s life. It was a natural moment to bring back the Babe: Steroid-era sluggers may have pushed him down the lifetime leader boards, but their excesses only burnished the legend of Ruth’s power hitting, fuelled as it was by little more than frankfurters and a belt of bicarbonate.

Leavy’s conceit allows her to stake out some untrod turf. But she also makes a compelling case that to appreciate the adulation Ruth soaked up in October 1927 is to understand his contribution to American life in full. He was not merely a hitter of towering home runs, but the progenitor of our contemporary conception of what it means to be a celebrity. “I wanted to be on the field when the stands emptied and marauding mobs waylaid him on the basepaths, tackling, besieging and occasionally holding him hostage to a new kind of love,” she writes.

Leavy covers her biographical bases: She revisits Ruth’s upbringing at a Catholic reformatory school in Baltimore, the hasty and unhappy marriage he made in Boston and his sullen retirement spent largely in exile from baseball. But it’s this “new kind of love” that illuminates her portrait of Ruth. Her aim is to prove “how thoroughly modern he was, not just in the way he attacked a baseball, but also in the creation, manipulation and exploitation of his public image”.

The barnstorming tour provides a colourful backdrop for this side of the Babe Ruth story. Ruth, however, can only properly be called its co-author. The barnstorming trip was the handiwork of Christy Walsh, Ruth’s agent avant la lettre, a kind of Scott Boras in spats. For long stretches of “The Big Fella,” Walsh takes centre stage. He was the impresario behind Ruth’s syndicated newspaper columns, which were ghostwritten by a cohort of sportswriters (several of whom also covered Ruth for their papers — a cosy arrangement for the Babe). He negotiated many of Ruth’s endorsement deals. And he closely guarded Ruth’s reputation — from those members of the press not in his pocket and from Ruth himself, whose insatiable appetites for food, drink and women caused Walsh fits.

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