Reading Baseball Babe Ruth: the legend and the man examined

Once Major League Baseball's spring training camps open, the publishing industry gets ready to launch dozens of new baseball books. As baseball fans shake off the winter blues, commercial and academic presses hope fans will want to warm themselves and get ready for a new season by reading about baseball's past seasons.

The most noteworthy baseball book published last year was Jane Leavy's "The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created," published by HarperCollins. A New York Times bestseller, it was named baseball's best history or biography for 2018 by the Society for American Baseball Research.

In "The Big Fella," Leavy, as she did in her biography of Sandy Koufax, takes a single event, in this case Ruth's barnstorming tour in 1927 with Lou Gehrig, as the centerpiece for her narrative of Ruth's life from his early days when he was sent by his father to a Baltimore orphanage to his extraordinary and tumultuous career with the New York Yankees - a career that, Leavy contends, changed America's culture. No one roared more during the Roaring Twenties than Babe Ruth.

The reason that Leavy selected the 1927 barnstorming tour was that Ruth was coming off the most monumental and memorable season of his career. In 1927, he hit 60 home runs, a record that would stand until the Yankees' Roger Maris broke it in 1961 with the help of a season expanded from 154 to 162 games. In the 1927 World Series, the Yankees, with Ruth hitting the only home runs, swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in four games.

Ruth's 1927 barnstorming tour lasted three weeks and took him cross-country from New Jersey to California. At every stop, Ruth was mobbed by fans, who often disrupted the game by storming the field. Leavy uses the fan frenzy to illustrate Ruth's hold, at the height of his career, on the imagination of Americans and the difficulty of finding the man behind the legend.

While Leavy's book claims it breaks through "the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man," "The Big Fella" spends most of its narrative recounting the gargantuan appetites and herculean feats that transformed Ruth into an American idol. There was, however, another Ruth biography published last year that does cut through the legend to get at the man.

Edmund Wehrle's "Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball's Campaign Against Its Biggest Star," published by the University of Missouri Press, unveils Ruth as more victim than hero. Fearing that Ruth was becoming bigger than the game, baseball owners and their commissioner, abetted by sportswriters who portrayed Ruth as a ignorant man-child, used threats, fines and suspensions to control Ruth, eventually forcing him into submission.

While Ruth was a free spirit and often defied baseball's establishment, the reserve clause gave the owners the weapon they needed to stifle Ruth. While he had a running battle with Yankee ownership over his salary, he had no option other than holding out or making an idle threat to leave the game.

Toward the end of his career, Ruth, struggling with injuries and illness, gave in to ownership demands because he wanted to become a major league manager after his playing career was over. But baseball's establishment, once the aging Ruth was no longer a threat, exploited the image of Ruth as a man-child incapable of managing himself and blackballed him.

When Ruth died of cancer on Aug. 16, 1948, at the age of 53, an estimated 82,000 mourners wound around Yankee Stadium, where Ruth's body lay in state. Over 6,000 surrounded St. Patrick's Cathedral for Ruth's funeral mass. While sportswriters lamented the loss of the Big Fella and celebrated his legendary exploits, the man who was finally laid to rest had his spirit broken before cancer eventually destroyed his body.

• Reading Baseball is a series of stories and commentaries by Richard "Pete" Peterson, co-author with his son Stephen of "The Slide: Leyland, Bonds and the Star-Crossed Pittsburgh Pirates" and the editor of The St Louis Baseball Reader.