Babe Ruth (Wikimedia)
The author, a former Detroit Free Press reporter, is a contributor to Deadline Detroit and a Detroit free lance writer.
By Michael Betzold
On Saturday, Feb. 2, about a thousand people will gather in Corktown to celebrate the birthday of a big guy from out of town who used to come around the neighborhood a century ago. Why?
Any excuse to party in the dead of a Michigan winter is a good one, but even so, it’s remarkable that this will be the 32nd annual bash for this non-Detroiter whose heyday preceded the birth of probably everyone who will be attending.
Tom Derry, the annual gathering’s amiable host, is obsessed with the Bambino, collecting every sort of memorabilia about him—most of which will be on display at Nemo’s on Michigan Avenue when the doors open at exactly 7:14 that evening (if you don’t why it starts at that precise time, just ask any baseball fan you know). But why do so many others share a little piece of that obsession? Why do we still care so much about Babe Ruth?
That seemingly never-ended infatuation spawned not one, but two, new books about the Bambino this past year. One of them, Jane Leavy’s The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, was on the New York Times best-seller list for a good stretch of time and is only the second sports book ever to be nominated for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award for biography (the other was David Remnick’s 1998 tome on Mohammad Ali).
Leavy’s book portrays Ruth as the first and never-surpassed incarnation of the American sports celebrity superstar, with an agent-handler who constantly kept him in the spotlight.
“There can’t ever be another Babe Ruth,” she explained in a phone interview. “Simply because no one else could ever be the first—even if someone else someday took the sport to a whole different level and revolutionized the art of hitting.”
Leavy uses the barnstorming tour Ruth and teammate Lou Gehrig took following the 1927 World Series, the year Babe hit 60 homers, as a way to tell the story, with plenty of myth-busting details. “This is a guy who invented himself,” she says. “Abandoned by his parents at age seven, he fashioned his own life and his own identity and did it with audacity, daring the game to tell him he couldn’t do what he did”—which was to end the Dead Ball Era single-handedly.
How to be famous
Leavy’s entertaining saga highlights Ruth’s even larger feat, what she terms “the development and amplification of fame” just at the moment when tabloid journalism, the advent of radio, and sports were transforming popular culture. Until the 1920s, she points out, “fame was a local thing” and in sports was largely confined to the neighborhoods adjacent to ballparks.
Ruth “created a template for how to be famous and to make money at it” by asserting his right to make a living by working with the first real sports agent, Christy Walsh, to promote himself away from the ballpark.
Nemo’s, of course, is just a Ruthian blast away from Michigan and Trumbull, where the Babe loved to play against the game’s other big star, Ty Cobb.
How did Navin Field change when the Yankees were in town?
On June 13, 1924, a crowd estimated at 18,000 on Baseball Reference.com watched as the two teams, only a game apart at the top of the American League standings, exchanged brushback pitches all afternoon.
Tensions mounted until, in the ninth inning, Ruth led off and the Tigers pitcher Bert Cole threw at him three times. Ruth gestured to Cobb, who was managing the Tigers from his station in center field. When Cole’s first pitch sent the next Yankee batter sprawling, the benches erupted in a brawl that was joined by many fans and eventually resulted in a Yankee forfeit.
The next day, a Saturday, attendance was 40,000, meaning 10,000 fans were placed on the field along the foul lines and in the outfield—because Navin Field at the time held less than 30,000. On Aug. 24 of that year, a Sunday game against the Yankees, attendance is pegged as 42,712, a mind-boggling figure. Probably a lot of fans were eager to see if another fight would erupt.
Ruth was wary of beanballs. He was in right field at the Polo Grounds in 1920 when Carl Mays’ pitch hit the head of Ray Chapman of the Indians, who died 12 hours later. Ruth, having been a great pitcher until 1920, knew both sides of the equation, and later said he tried never to hit a line drive up the middle for fear of seriously injuring the pitcher. Long before radar guns and exit velocity figures, you can imagine how fast a Ruth drive might have travelled.
“Babe Ruth remains the lodestar of American fame,” writes Leavy in The Big Fella. “And that fame has not diminished.”
Neither have the crowds at Tom Derry’s Babe Ruth Birthday Party at Nemo’s.
