Have you ever wondered what goes through the mind of a legendary player in that final second when the whole stadium holds its breath? Like the crowd has gone completely silent. 60,000 people packed into a stadium that smells like hot dogs and cigarette smoke and something almost electric and it’s just you, the bat, and a ball coming at you at 90 mph.
What do you think about in that moment? What do you feel? I’ve been sitting with that question for most of my life. I’m a guy from the Bronx. the real Bronx, not the brunch spot version you see now. And I grew up in a household where baseball wasn’t just a sport. It was a language. My uncle had this battered box of VHS tapes and he’d pull them out on rainy Saturdays like they were sacred objects.
Old game footage, grainy black and white film, and one tape in particular changed everything for me. My uncle pops it in and there on the screen is this enormous man in Yankees pinstripes. And before the pitch comes in, he points. He actually raises his bat and points to center field and then he hits it right where he pointed.
My uncle turns to me and says, “That’s Babe Ruth.” He called his shot. Nobody does that. Nobody is that confident. Nobody is that human and superhuman at the same time. That’s what this video is really about. Because the more I dug into the real story, the actual life behind that legendary jersey, the more I realized that what made this man extraordinary wasn’t that he was superhuman.
It was that he was deeply, painfully, beautifully human. And somehow he did superhuman things. Anyway, George Herman Ruth, that’s his real name, not Babe. George Herman Ruth. And I want you to hold that name for a second because the distance between George Herman Ruth, abandoned kid from Baltimore, and Babe Ruth, the most famous athlete in American history, that distance is the whole story.
He was born on February 6th, 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland. His father ran a saloon on a street called Pig Town, and that is not a metaphor. That was the actual name of the neighborhood. And by most accounts, the household was chaotic, financially unstable, and not particularly focused on the needs of a small child. His mother was chronically ill.
By the time young George was 7 years old, his parents had placed him in saint. Mary’s industrial school for boys. That’s an orphanage and reform school combined. The official reason given was that George was encouraable, unmanageable, a handful. He was 7 years old. He spent the next 12 years, 12 years inside those walls.
Most of his childhood, most of his adolescence while other kids were running in backyards, getting into normal kid trouble with their families close by. George Ruth was institutionalized. He ate institutional food. He slept in institutional dormitories. He wore institutional clothes inside Saint Mary’s. There was a man named Brother Mattheus Bootlier, one of the most important figures in the history of American sports.
and almost nobody outside serious baseball historians has heard of him. Brother Matias was 6’6, over 200 lb, and one of those rare people who have a genuine gift for seeing potential in kids that everyone else has written off. He took an interest in young George. He taught him baseball. But more importantly, Brother Mus gave George Ruth something the kid had almost certainly never reliably had before.
Sustained, patient attention from an adult who believed in him. They put George on the mound at some point and what they discovered was that this rough kid from Pigtown could throw a baseball in ways that made experienced observers stop and stare. Brother Matias contacted Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and Dunn came, watched, and signed Ruth immediately.
Because Ruth was still a ward of the school and needed a legal guardian to sign, Jack Dunn became that guardian. George Ruth arrived at his first professional spring training in 1914. The other players started calling him Jack’s newest babe. The nickname stuck. He was Babe Ruth for the rest of his life.
Here’s a fact that genuinely stops people cold. When Ruth came up with the Boston Red Sox, he was a pitcher. And not just a solid rotation guy. He was arguably one of the best left-handed pitchers in the entire American League. His erra in 1916 was 2.08. In the 1916 World Series, he pitched a complete game 14inninging victory.
In the 1918 World Series, he pitched 29 Wal consecutive scoreless innings, a record that stood for 43 years. But his bat was simply too dangerous to keep out of the lineup every four days. In 1919, they made him a full-time outfielder. He hit 29 home runs, a new major league record. And then came 1920. Ruth hit 54 home runs. The entire rest of the American League, seven other teams, hit 315 combined.
Ruth alone was out homering most entire franchises. Before Ruth, baseball was a low-scoring, grinding sport built around singles and bunts and stolen bases. After Ruth, the home run became the defining theatrical moment of the game. He didn’t just break records. He changed what the game was.
I went to the site of the old polo grounds once. This is up in Harlem, 155th and 8th Avenue, and now it’s a housing project. There’s a small plaque on the wall, easy to walk right past. Before Yankee Stadium was built, the Yankees were renting the polo grounds from the Giants. The Giants grew so resentful of how much Ruth was drawing crowds, of how the babe was filling their stadium for a different team that they told the Yankees to find somewhere else to play, which led to the Yankees building their own stadium directly across the Harlem River, Yankee
Stadium. The house that Ruth built, literally constructed because of one man’s presence. Standing at that plaque, I thought, “This guy didn’t just change baseball. He moved the physical geography of New York City. Now we have Ruth in New York in the 1920s, the most famous athlete in America. The stories about his eating habits before games are legendary.
Hot dogs, multiple hot dogs in the clubhouse, sodas, beer.” His teammate Ping Bod asked what it was like rooming with Ruth on road trips. Reportedly said, “I don’t room with Ruth. I room with his suitcase.” Because Ruth was never in the room. He was out late every night. No nutrition protocols, no sleep optimization, no sports psychologists.
Ruth ate what he wanted, drank what he wanted, stayed out as late as he wanted, and showed up the next day and hit the ball harder than anyone in the history of the sport. But here’s the psychological thing I find genuinely fascinating. The excess wasn’t random. A kid who grew up in an institution where you ate what you were given, wore what you were assigned, and your life was controlled by other people for 12 years.
That kid when the world opens up doesn’t do moderation. Every appetite suppressed for 12 years comes out at full volume. Ruth also gave money away constantly. He visited children’s hospitals. And by multiple accounts, these weren’t PR events. He actually showed up. He actually talked to sick kids. He paid strangers medical bills anonymously.
Is that generosity or is it a man who never felt secure enough in anything to hold on to it? I think it’s both. And both come from the same root. In April 1925, Ruth collapsed on a train platform in Asheville, North Carolina, and had to be carried off on a stretcher. The newspapers called it the bellyache herd around the world.
He was hospitalized for weeks, missed the first months of the season, got into a severe public conflict with manager Miller Huggin, who suspended him indefinitely, and fined him $5,000, the largest fine in baseball history at that point. The whisper in baseball circles was that Ruth’s career might actually be over.
He came back in 1926 and hit 372 with 47 home runs and 145 RBI’s. That’s not a movie redemption arc. That’s a real human being refusing at 31 years old after the worst year of his career to be defined by his lowest moment. And then came 1927, 60 home runs.356 average, 165 RBI’s. The team went 110 to 44. They swept the World Series.
In one of the great stories from that series, the Pittsburgh Pirates watched the Yankees take batting practice before game one and by some accounts were mentally defeated before the games even started. Ruth in 1927 was the physical embodiment of inevitability. October 1st, 1932, game three of the World Series. Yankees versus Cubs at Wrigley Field.
The Cubs have been on Ruth all day. Brutal, relentless. In the fifth inning, he comes up with the game tied. Two strikes. The Cubs bench going crazy. Ruth steps out of the box. He gestures, points with his bat or his finger or some combination, depending on which eyewitness you believe, toward the outfield.
On the very next pitch, he hits the ball to deep center field. One of the longest home runs in Wrigleyfield history. Did he call it? Here’s the honest answer. Nobody knows. The game film is grainy and inconclusive. Eyewitness accounts contradict each other. Ruth himself gave different versions at different times. But here’s what I think matters more than the factual question.
This was a country in the depths of the Great Depression. Banks had failed. Unemployment was catastrophic. And here was this enormous man in pinstripes, the son of an orphan from Baltimore, stepping up to the plate, making a gesture of absolute defiance, and hitting the ball so far it barely seemed real. Whether he called it or not, America needed him to have called it.
And Ruth was, among his many gifts, a man who understood instinctively what people needed from him. A few years ago, I went to a small memorabilia auction in Midtown. They had a vintage jersey on display. Not Ruth’s actual jersey, just a period accurate replica, but the right cut, the heavy wool they wore in those days. The guy running the place let me hold it for a second. It was heavy.
I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. Those old uniforms were nothing like the lightweight synthetics you see today. Thick, stiff, scratchy, and I thought they played double headers in July and this in New York City summer heat in wool. And then I thought about the kid from St. Mary’s who wore an institutional uniform for 12 years.
How the first time he put on a professional baseball uniform, it must have felt like becoming someone. Like the world finally seeing him as something other than encourageable. I think about that whenever I see a vintage jersey in a store window. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just history being heavier than it looks.
Ruth’s career ended badly, as careers often do. The Yankees released him after the 1934 season. In May 1935, in one of the final weeks of his career, he hit three home runs in a single game in Pittsburgh. The last of the three, estimated at over 600 feet, was the first ball ever hit completely out of Forbes Field.
His last career home run was also one of the most extraordinary balls he ever hit. He retired with 714 career home runs, a record that stood for nearly 40 years. Off the field, his later years were harder than the public knew. He desperately wanted to manage a major league team and was passed over consistently for years.
It was the great professional disappointment of his life. In 1946, he was diagnosed with nasoperingial cancer. In June 1948, he appeared at a farewell ceremony at Yankee Stadium. Frail, barely recognizable as the physical force who had dominated the sport for two decades, leaning on a bat for support at home plate.
And the crowd of nearly 50,000 people gave him a sustained standing ovation. He died on August 16th, 1948. He was 53 years old. His body lay in state at Yankee Stadium for 2 days. An estimated 100,000 people came to pay their respects. A 100,000 people saying goodbye to an orphan from Baltimore who was told as a child that he was encouraable. I keep coming back to that.
Not the 714 home runs, not the called shot. I keep coming back to the seven-year-old in the institution and the 53year-old leaning on a bat at home plate while 50,000 people stood up to honor him. That’s the whole story right there. Everything in between is just the details. The lesson isn’t that talent wins.
It isn’t that hard work conquers all. The lesson is that the things that are supposed to disqualify you, the difficult start, the chaotic life, the appetites that people judge you for, sometimes those things are also exactly what makes you extraordinary. The hunger that drove Ruth to excess was the same hunger that drove him to step up to the plate in the ninth inning of a World Series game and point at the outfield.
You can’t separate those things. They’re the same engine. He was encouraable and he was magnificent. And he was the same person both times. If you want to dig deeper into the real stories behind these legends, the stuff that doesn’t make it onto the trading cards, hit subscribe and drop a comment telling me which player or which era you want me to go into next. I read every single one.
That’s not a bit. That’s just the truth. I’ll see you in the next
