Babe Ruth: Biography of a Baseball Legend

My essay is about George Herman Ruth Jr., or mainly known as Babe Ruth. Ruth was a famous baseball player from the 1900s. He had a troublesome childhood, but when he started to play baseball, he learned some discipline. As many people know Babe Ruth was the best baseball player of his time. He set all kinds of records, like his home run record, which he held for almost forty years until it was broken on April 8, 1974, by Hank Aaron. He played for the minor league the Baltimore Orioles and for the major league teams Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Ruth played in twenty-two seasons, ten World Series, and hit 714 home runs. He was one of the first five players to be inducted into the hall of fame and remains the most famous player in the game’s history. Many young baseball players still look up to Babe Ruth as a role model today. In this paper, I will talk about his childhood, his baseball career, his family, and some fun facts about him.

George Herman Ruth Jr., also known as Babe Ruth, was born on February 6, 1895. He was born in Baltimore. His parents were Katherine Schamberger and George Herman Ruth. They were German-American immigrants. Ruth was one of eight children, but six of his siblings died during infancy. His sister was Mamie Ruth. To make money his parents owned a tavern where they worked long hours. The Ruths were known as hard workers, but his father was known as a heavy drinker. They lived in a rough neighborhood where there were often many street fights. His father died in a fight with a family member in August 1918. He was tending a bar when 2 of his brothers-in-law broke out into a fight. Ruth got into an argument with a relative and walked with him outside. George fell and hit the back of his head. He died of a skull fracture. Ruth’s mother died on August 12, 1912.

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What kids did in their free time was a lot different than what kids do today. Back then kids spent a lot more time outside and exploring the world instead of sitting inside and being on electronics. Parents usually had to work longer hours to earn money to support their families. Since Babe’s parents were never home a lot, he became a very troublesome child at age seven. He roamed around the bad parts of his neighborhood. George Jr. was caught multiple times chewing tobacco and drinking. It was hard for his parents to keep an eye on him because they were both working at their saloon. He often got into small street fights. It was found that Babe suffered from ADHD, which contributed to his actions. ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It’s a medical condition. People with ADHD have differences in brain development and brain activity that affect attention, the ability to sit still, and self-control. Even though this condition made Babe more of a troublesome child, it was also said that his ADHD was a factor in his baseball skills.

George Jr. was becoming too much for his mother and father to handle. So, his family sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys because of his behavior. It was a Catholic orphanage run by monks of the Xaverian Brothers. The orphanage was known for its strictness and discipline. He learned many different skills while he was there like shirt-making and carpentry. This became his home for twelve years, before he went to this school he took care of himself. While Ruth was at the Catholic school he looked up to and gained respect for a monk’s older brother named Matthias. Matthias started to bring discipline to Babe Ruth’s life and was the first person to introduce him to baseball. Ruth became very interested in playing and practicing baseball. At age fifteen Ruth started to show skills as a strong hitter and pitcher. He pitched and threw left-handed and batted left-handed. The more he played the better he got. At one of his games with the St. Mary’s Industrial team the scout from the minor league Baltimore Orioles team, Jack Dunn, liked the skills and potential Babe Ruth had. It was particularly Ruth’s pitching that caught his attention. Ruth needed to be twenty-one to sign his baseball contract with the Orioles, but he was only nineteen. So, Dunn became his legal guardian. When he joined the team, he got the nickname ‘Jack’s Newest Babe’ and from then on was known as Babe Ruth.

Babe played his first professional game with the Baltimore Orioles on March 7, 1914. He pitched two innings of the game. He continued playing and became a star pitcher. His team, the Orioles, became the top team of 1914 and had two-thirds of their games. Dunn began to suffer financial losses and had to sell off his best players to major-league teams. Babe was only with Dunn for five months until he was sold to the Red Sox. Ruth did very well on the team. He hit his first career home run with the Red Sox against the Yankees. While he was with the Red Sox, he became an amazing left-handed pitcher. Between 1915 and 1919 Ruth and his team won eighty-seven games and won three World Series. Ruth pitched a total of twenty-nine and two-thirds scoreless World Series innings, setting a new league record that would not be broken for forty-three years. While Babe Ruth mainly pitched for the Red Sox, when he wasn’t pitching his coach, Ed Barrow, would play him in the outfield or on first base. With Babe Ruth’s performance and skills, he surpassed the great Ty Cobb as the biggest baseball attraction in history. In 1919, despite Ruth’s performance, his team ended the season with being sixth in the league. He played six seasons with the Red Sox before he was traded. In 1920, the Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed more money for his theater productions, so he sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for 125,000 dollars.

Ruth signed a two-year contract with the Yankees where he would receive ten-thousand dollars a year. After Ruth found out how much he was worth he asked for a salary raise. The Yankees agreed to negotiate a new contract with their new star player. When Babe Ruth joined the Yankees, he grew even better. When he first joined the Yankees in April, things started out slow for him. He didn’t have any home runs until May he had twelve. As he started bringing in more and more money for the team because of his performance, they built Yankee Stadium. It became known as ‘the house that Ruth built’. He didn’t pitch much with the Yankees, he only pitched in twenty games. Instead, Ruth became an outstanding outfielder. He was also the best hitter at the time. As his hitting career progressed sports, writers started to refer to him as the ‘Sultan of Swat’. Babe Ruth had a slugging average of 0.847 which would not be broken for many decades (the average was between .260 to .275). He became the star of baseball. Babe Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920. Then the next year he hit an outstanding fifty-nine home runs and drove in 170 runs, this was Ruth’s best year. His batting average was .378 (the average was in between .260 to .275), and his slugging average was .846.

In 1922 Babe Ruth became the highest-paid player with a salary of 52,000 dollars. He became the Yankees on-field captain in 1922 but soon lost this position when he threw dirt on an umpire. That season his home runs dropped to only thirty-five, and he only played in 101 games. That was a very disappointing season for him. During the next season, he hit forty-one home runs and had a batting average of .393. Also in 1923, he led the Yankees to their first World Series title with his performance. He had a very successful career all through the 1920s and led the Yankees to a win over the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1928 World Series by hitting .625. In the third game against the Cubs in the 1932 World Series, Babe hit a ball 500 feet into the stands in center field. It was the longest home run ever hit at Wrigley Field. Although Ruth had a very successful career in the 1920s, it started to decline in the 1930s. Even though he played well on the field his performance was much worse than in his earlier days. Babe Ruth retired in 1935 with fifty-six major league records and 714 home runs. He retired at the age of forty-one. He was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 receiving 91.53% of the votes. Thirteen years after he retired, the Yankees retired Babe Ruth’s number three in the 1948 season.

Although Ruth had a very successful career, after his career he could never successfully gain a managerial job. Babe wanted to manage a major league team, but no one was interested in giving him the job. He was offered a job to manage the minor league team, the Yankee farm team in Newark, but turned it down. He spent his last thirteen years giving his time to charitable events and fishing. Ruth also enjoyed hunting, bowling, and golfing in his free time. He actually turned out to be a pretty decent bowler with a 117 average. Still keeping his love for baseball, he would attend many games still. In 1938, he was offered his last official baseball job as the coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He still had hoped to become the manager of the team, but at the end of the season, his position was given to Leo Durocher. He made his last appearance at the Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1948, to celebrate the building’s 25th anniversary. In 1946, Ruth was diagnosed with a tumor on his neck. The tumor on his neck turned out to be throat cancer and is what caused his death. For the last twenty-one months, he lived in pain. His daughter Dorothy said that he threatened to kill himself. He spent his last few days in the hospital. Babe Ruth died on August 16, 1948, at age fifty-three.

Babe Ruth won many different awards during his life and after his life. He was a two-time all-star selection in 1933 and 1934. He was a seven-time World Series champion from 1915 through 1932. Babe Ruth was a member of the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. He was voted Athlete of the Century by the Associated Press and was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His STATS were: a batting average of .342, 714 home runs, 2,783 hits, and 2,213 RBIs.

Babe Ruth had two wives his first wife was Helen Woodford Ruth. Helen was born on October 20, 1897, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Michael C. Woodford and Joanna Breen Woodford. Babe Ruth and Helen got married on October 17, 1914. Babe and Helen Woodford Ruth adopted Babe’s daughter Dorothy Helen Ruth Pirone. Dorothy Helen Ruth Pirone was the biological daughter of Babe Ruth and his girlfriend Juanita Jennings. Ruth fell in love with another girl named Claire and legally divorced Helen in 1925. Helen died on January 11, 1929, from a house fire. Claire Merritt Ruth was Babe Ruth’s second wife. She was born on September 11, 1897. Claire was an actress. Claire’s first husband Frank Hodgson died on February 16, 1921. This left her alone with her daughter Julia until she met Ruth in 1923. Ruth fell in love with Claire but was still married to Helen at the time. After Helen died in 1929, Ruth and Claire then got married on April 17, of that same year. They then adopted Dorothy who was Babe’s daughter and Babe adopted Claire’s daughter Julia. Claire lived to see two of Ruth’s records broken. His single-season record of sixty home runs and his career record of 714 home runs. After Babe Ruth’s death, she attended some of Hank Aaron's games and watched him break Ruth’s record in 1974. She died on October 25, 1976, and was buried beside Babe at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

Here are some extra facts that you might not know about Babe Ruth. He was only one of two people who ever hit three home runs in a World Series game. He served jail time for being a reckless driver. On June 8, 1921, Ruth was arrested in Manhattan for speeding. Babe Ruth had twelve nicknames. Some of his nicknames were ‘the Great Bambino’, ‘Babe’, ‘the Caliph of Clout’, and ‘the Big Bam’. George Herman Ruth Jr., or Babe Ruth, was 6ft 2in tall and weighed 215 pounds. In 1998, Ruth was ranked number one on the list of ‘Baseball’s 100 Greatest Players’ by The Sporting News. Babe Ruth’s favorite color is blue and his favorite superhero is Batman. He was signed to the major leagues at age nineteen. In a game at Griffith Stadium, Ruth was knocked unconscious when he hit a concrete wall trying to catch a foul ball. Even though Ruth was a great outfielder, he gained most of his fame as a pitcher. He was also one of baseball’s best left-handed pitchers in the 1910s. Babe Ruth appeared as himself in many different movies. Some of the movies were ‘The Sandlot’, ‘Speedy’, ‘The Pride of the Yankees’, ‘Home Run on the Keys’ and ‘Ways to Strength and Beauty’. These are six of Babe Ruth’s most famous quotes: “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run”, “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way”, “It's hard to beat the person who never gives up”, “Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world”, “A ballplayer should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill”, and “I only have one superstition: I make sure to touch all the bases when I hit a home run”.

George Herman Ruth Jr., Babe Ruth, came down to be one of the greatest baseball players in history. Through his troublesome childhood, he changed to become the star player he was. His baseball career was the main part of his life because after it was over, he had enough money that he did not to need to get a job. After he retired, he still wanted to manage a major league team but never had the opportunity. He won many different awards and set many different records which weren’t broken for decades. One of his awards was being put in the top 100 of greatest baseball players of all time. One of his major accomplishments was being selected to be in the Hall of Fame. Overall, Babe Ruth was an amazing baseball player and became a huge role model to younger baseball players.