THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 6, 1995 TAG: 9502040010
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 198 lines
BABE RUTH WOULD have been 100 years old today.
Or 101, according to Ruth, who through most of his life ignored his own birth certificate, even though it made him a year younger.
``What the hell difference does it make?'' he once gruffed when asked about the mixup.
Baseball fans worship digits. They can debate a fraction of a decimal point for decades. And a year's discrepancy in the age of the man who defined the game is a significant discrepancy.
But not to Ruth. He knew that a ballplayer's age is measured in finer calibrations than a calendar: an extra ten-thousandths of a second in seeing the ball from the pitcher's hand; another millimeter's crack in the cartilage of his knees.
Students of baseball will forever debate who was its greatest player: Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Josh Gibson, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Ted Williams or any of a dozen not mentioned here.
There can be no debate, though, that Babe Ruth dominated the game in a way no man had before, or has since. One hundred years after his birth, nearly 50 years after he died, Ruth's name still pops up in daily conversation as the universal yardstick for excellence. An extraordinary achievement is ``Ruthian.'' A standout among peers in any field can be congratulated as ``the Babe Ruth of . . . .''
Though it's been 60 years since he played the game, major league baseball still rotates in the force fields of Babe Ruth. He tugs at baseball with the gravity of some unseen, orbiting planet. The strongest emotional argument against moving the New York Yankees in the 1990s is that they would abandon Yankee Stadium, ``The House That Ruth Built.'' It was built to make room for the legions who wanted to see him play.
Baseball fans like to compare eras and the attitudes and abilities of the men who inhabited them:
Could Cobb hit .400 against today's pitching?
What would Walter ``Big Train'' Johnson's fastball register on a radar gun?
Would any of the old-timers, Ruth among them, dared to have been as pampered and as petulant as today's ballplayers?
Would players of Ruth's era have endangered the game with a walkout over wages?
The only honest answer to those first two questions is, nobody knows.
The only honest answer to the last two is, yes, absolutely.
Babe Ruth was living proof.
Forget all that hokum about how yesterday's players were purer of spirit, nobler of intent, driven only by a love of the game.
Babe Ruth loved the game, enormously, but he wasn't giving it away to anybody. From his first season in the majors he had an innate sense of just how much he was worth, and he never let the owners forget it. He loved the fans, and they loved him.
He was a riotous good friend to his teammates, but he was rebellious and outspoken with management. His fights with managers and league officials were frequent and explosive. In 1922, he was suspended five times after clashes with baseball's powers.
Ruth was a holdout in contract negotiations long before the unions, the agents or the lawyers got involved. He once threatened to become a prize fighter rather than sign a lowball contract.
His sense of his own value, and his willingness to push owners to the wall to get it, would have made Ruth a role model among the players of the 1990s. He would be out there on strike, right now, with the rest of his team - no matter that he was earning far more than any of them and would have little to gain and a lot to lose.
With 70 years of inflation, and the escalation of ballplayers' salaries in relation to what the rest of us earn, it's hard to put Ruth's salary in 1995 terms. But it was huge, beyond the comprehension of the average working man of the time. Robert W. Creamer, who wrote the seminal Ruth biography, ``Babe: The Legend Comes to Life,'' drew these comparisons:
In 1922, when a family of four could live prosperously on $70 a week, Ruth negotiated a five-year contract at $52,000 a year. And he frequently doubled that through exhibitions and endorsements.
Ruth's salary with the mythical 1927 New York Yankees, when he hit his 60 home runs, was $70,000. The second-highest paycheck on the team went to pitcher Herb Pennock, at $17,500.
By 1935, with the Babe retired, the highest-paid player in major league baseball was Lou Gehrig. He made $30,000.
Under criticism for the size of his paycheck, Babe Ruth once delivered a clear and diamond-hard soliloquy on the economics of baseball that, 75 years later, could have come from the lips of a Bobby Bonds or an Orel Hershiser:
``It isn't right to call me or any ballplayer an ingrate because we ask for more money. Sure, I want more, all I'm entitled to. The time of a ballplayer is short. He must get his money in a few years or lose out.
``Listen, a man who works for another man is not going to be be paid any more than he's worth. You can bet on that. A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show.
``It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.''
There is a story told about John Kruk, the beefy enigma who plays first base for the Philadelphia Phillies, who was whiling away a moment of spring-training boredom on the bench, smoking a cigarette.
A middle-aged woman tsk-tsk'ed him. She couldn't believe, she said, that a professional athlete would embrace such an unsavory habit.
``Lady,'' said Kruk, squinting up from under the bill of his cap, ``I ain't no athlete, I'm a ballplayer.''
Babe Ruth would have split a seam at that line, and he would have loved Kruk and he would have melted beautifully into baseball in the 1990s - assuming, of course, that baseball ever returns in the 1990s.
An era that embraces a John Kruk would have sanctified a Babe Ruth, as did America in the 1920s.
Babe Ruth was not baseball's first star, but he was its brightest, its biggest, its most outsized, outlandish and outrageous. He was an incurable ham, an egoist who had to be the center of every moment, the life of every party, the focal point of every photo, the hero of every shaggy kid who could scrape up a quarter for a pine-splintered seat out in the farthest reaches of the bleachers.
He was a drinker, a smoker, a shameless and indefatigable womanizer, an occasional brawler and a pretty fair weekend golfer. Much has been made of his wild and unbridled appetites, and the image most people carry is of a beyond-beefy Ruth pigeon-toeing his way around the bases late in his career.
His weight did vary wildly - from 215 upwards of 260 at times - but he also worked out in a prizefighters' gym in the winter and usually arrived at spring training relatively fit. Though he was something of a hypochondriac, Ruth was frequently injured and battled a series of ailments that would knock him out of the lineup for weeks on end.
But he carried his weight well, used it to his advantage in the batter's box, and was deceptively fast until age brought him down. In speed statistics, Ruth had 136 lifetime triples and 123 stolen bases. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, combined, stole 54 bases in their careers.
Ruth earned the right to his persona - and he did earn it - by doing things on a baseball diamond that nobody had ever done. His feats were magnified because they did not have to compete for the nation's attention the way they would today. Television did not exist. Football season was short and widely ignored. The movie industry was an infant.
Baseball was it.
Taught the game by a priest in the Baltimore orphanage-cum-reformatory where he grew up, Ruth hit the majors at a time when the game was played in a technical, chess-on-the-basepaths style.
In 1914, Ruth's first year in the major leagues, Frank ``Home Run'' Baker won the American League home run title. He hit nine. Home runs were not considered important, were not reported in box scores as a separate statistic, and were reviled by purists as a gauche display that detracted from the science of the game.
Ruth entered pro ball as a pitcher - a fact often glossed over in his power-hitting legend - and was one of the very best in the game. In 1916, his third season, he won 23 games. His 1.75 earned-run average led the league. His record for pitching 29 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play stood for 40 years.
What price would a baseball club in the 1990s pay for a left-handed starter who could put up those numbers?
Though he was crude, poorly schooled and seldom bothered to read anything but his contracts, Ruth had a brilliant sense of human nature, an understanding of how people connected emotionally to the game.
He sensed something in the drama of the towering shot over the right-field wall, the suspense that each appearance at the plate would create, the explosive release of his pioneering swing-from-the-heels style.
The big hit, he knew, would make him a far greater hero than would a lifetime of nibbling the corners of the plate as a pitcher, fussing out another dull, though technically brilliant victory.
Ruth knew that people will quietly ponder the clouds, but it's the thunder and lightning that snaps their heads around, rivets their attention, fires their imaginations. So he gave them thunder and lightning.
Ruth put on a power hitting demonstration through his 22 years that has never been equaled. Roger Maris eventually hit 61 homers to top Ruth's single-season total, and Hank Aaron, through longevity, discipline and talent, managed to beat Ruth's 714 career total, running up 755.
But nobody has ever topped Ruth's .690 slugging average or the frequency with which he put ball over the fence: 8.5 percent of the Babe's total trips to the plate, he hit it out of the park. He retired with a .342 lifetime batting average. The highest ever recorded was Ty Cobb's .367.
And no player ever came close to matching Ruth in bombast, grandeur, outrage, and pure, unadulterated love for life and for the game.
Perhaps the best thumbnail appraisal of the life of Babe Ruth was ferreted out by Robert Creamer while researching Ruth's biography. It came from Waite Hoyt, a thoughtful Hall of Fame player and longtime Ruth teammate.
``I am almost convinced,'' Hoyt told the writer, ``that you will never learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Joe Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe's. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan's own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruths crudities, and so on.
``While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, yet there was buried in Ruth a humanitarianism beyond belief, an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given his home-run power - and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn't and couldn't take time to understand.''
Would Babe Ruth have been a player for the 1990s?
Yes, absolutely.
And there has never been a time when baseball needed a Babe Ruth more than it does right now. MEMO: Sources: ``Babe: The Legend Comes to Life,'' Robert W. Creamer; ``The
Baseball Encyclopedia''; and ``Baseball,'' by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken
Burns.
ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOS
Ruth on his 50th, at right.
by CNB