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Scientists explored secrets behind Ruth’s epic 1921 season

One-hundred years ago, Babe Ruth, in the midst of arguably the greatest offensive season any ballplayer has ever enjoyed, spent more than three hours being tested by a pair of psychology researchers to discover the source of his superiority.

Their conclusion? As most American League pitchers knew at the time, Ruth, compared to the average man, was both physically and mentally exceptional.

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In 1921, the 26-year-old Ruth – the former southpaw hurler then a slugging outfielder with the New York Yankees – walloped 59 home runs, setting a new major league single-season record for the third consecutive year. He also led big league baseball with 168 RBI, 177 runs scored, 145 walks, a .512 OBP, and a .846 slugging percentage, and his 457 total bases and 119 extra base hits remain big league records. And the only reason he didn’t win the MVP Award was because the sport was in a period where they weren’t being presented.

This was the “Roaring Twenties” as well as the “Golden Age of Sports” and Ruth, with his childlike enthusiasm and hard-to-resist charisma, was its human embodiment. Newspapers, of which there was more than a dozen in New York City, seemed to document his every move.

So when word spread in early September that this diamond hero had visited a college’s psychology department to ascertain the secret of his greatness, it not only made news in the Big Apple but around the country. It even ran on the front page – above the fold – of The New York Times .

The source of the hoopla was the October 1921 edition of Popular Science Monthly . For 25 cents, a reader could check out the magazine’s cover story, “Babe Ruth’s Home Run Secrets Solved by Science,” as well “Have Sunspots Upset our Weather,” “New Gun will Shoot 300 Miles,” “Motion Pictures that Really Talk,” and “100 Useful Things to Make at Home.”

Authoring the Ruth exclusive was Hugh Fullerton, the sports editor of New York’s The Evening Mail and the 1964 recipient of the BBWAA’s prestigious Career Excellence Award for “meritorious contributions to baseball writing.”

Newspapers throughout the United States ran stories on the 1921 scientific studies of Babe Ruth's hitting. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

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The four-page, 2,500-word article, populated with five images of Ruth undergoing testing, was promoted by Popular Science Monthly with advertisements in newspapers across the country with the headline, “Babe Ruth astounds scientists.”

Prior to the start of the 1921 campaign, catcher Pinch Thomas, a former teammate of Ruth’s in Boston, aptly explained the phenomena.

“I told some of the fellows this spring that Babe Ruth would hit 40 home runs before the season ended,” he told Baseball Magazine . “They laughed at me and what is more offered to bet. I wish now I had taken them up, but I got to thinking it over and concluded that 40 home runs was quite a contract.

“Besides, Babe Ruth is only human and might slump. But I am not so certain now that Babe is human. At least, he does things which you couldn't expect a mere batter with two arms and legs to do. I can't explain him. Nobody can explain him. He just exists.”

According to Fullerton, after a game at the Polo Grounds – the home ballpark of the Yankees in 1921 – Ruth, still wearing his home uniform after homering that day, traveled to nearby Columbia University’s Psychological Research Laboratory.

Babe Ruth's unprecedented hitting skills led scientists and psychologists to search for the secret to his success. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

“The game was over. Babe, who had made one of his famous drives that day, was tired and wanted to go home,” Fullerton’s story began. “’Not tonight, Babe,’ I said. ‘Tonight you go to college with me. You're going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret.’

“’Who wants to know it?’ asked Babe.

“’I want to know it,’ I replied, ‘and so do several hundred thousand fans. We want to know why it is that one man has achieved a unique batting skill like yours – just why you can slam the ball as nobody else in the world can.’”

Ruth was in the hands of Columbia’s Albert Johanson and Joseph Holmes to undergo a series of tests. Holmes grew up in Oneonta, N.Y., only 20 miles from Cooperstown.

“They led Babe Ruth into the great laboratory of the university,” wrote Fullerton, “figuratively took him apart, watched the wheels go round; analyzed his brain, his eye, his ear, his muscles; studied how these worked together; reassembled him, and announced the exact reasons for his supremacy as a batter and a ballplayer.”

Machines, considered complex at the time but undoubtedly primitive by today's standards, were used to evaluate Ruth.

Ultimately, the tests proved that Ruth is 90 percent efficient as against the human average of 60; that his eyes are 12 percent faster than the ordinary man’s; that his ears function 10 percent faster than the average; that his nerves are steadier than 499 out of 500 persons; that he’s 1½ times the average in attention and quickness of perception.

“The tests used were ones that primarily test motor functions and give a measure of the integrity of the psychophysical organism. Babe Ruth was posed first in an apparatus created to determine the strength, quickness, and approximate power of the swing of his bat against his ball,” Fullerton wrote. “A plane covered with electrically charges wires, strung horizontally, was placed behind him and a ball was hung over the theoretical plate, so that it could be suspended at any desired height.

Babe Ruth was featured on the cover of the October 1921 issue of Popular Science Monthly, which contained a story on scientific inquiries into Ruth's prodigious power. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

“I learned something then which, perhaps, will interest the American League pitchers more than it will the scientists. This was that the ball Ruth likes best to hit, and can hit hardest, is a low ball pitched just above his knees on the outside corner of the plate. The scientists did not consider this of extreme importance in their calculations, but the pitchers will probably find it of great scientific interest.”

The psychologists also discovered that Ruth did not breathe during his entire swing. They stated that if he kept breathing while swinging, he could generate even more power.

“The scientific ivory hunters of Columbia University discovered that the secret of Babe Ruth's batting, reduced to non-scientific terms, is that his eyes and ears function more rapidly than those of other players; that his brain records sensations more quickly and transmits its orders to the muscles much faster than does that of the average man,” Fullerton wrote.

“The tests proved that the coordination of eye, brain, nerve system, and muscle is practically perfect, and that the reason he did not acquire his great batting power before the sudden burst at the beginning of the baseball season of 1920, was because, prior to that time, pitching and studying batters disturbed his almost perfect coordination.”

After detailed explanation of the testing process, Fullerton ended his Popular Science Monthly piece trumpeting the discovered explanation of Ruth’s diamond superiority.

“The secret of Babe Ruth's ability to hit is clearly revealed in these tests,” Fullerton wrote. “His eye, his ear, his brain, his nerves all function more rapidly than do those of the average person. Further the coordination between eye, ear, brain, and muscle is much nearer perfection than that of the normal healthy man.

“The scientific ‘ivory hunters’ dissecting the ‘home-run king’ discovered brain instead of bone, and showed how little mere luck, or even mere hitting strength, has to do with Ruth's phenomenal record.”

Bill Francis is the senior research and writing specialist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

How babe ruth changed baseball.

During his storied career, he set dozens of records, altered the fortunes of a number of teams and developed a new style of play for baseball

Joseph Stromberg

During the 1919 season, the Yankees were second-class citizens. They shared a field with the Giants and drew the smallest crowds out of all three New York teams. But by the time Babe Ruth passed away, 63 years ago today, they had become the marquee franchise in all of Major League Baseball.

This, in short, is why Ruth continues to cast a shadow as one of the most outsized legends in baseball history. He changed the fortunes of a team, a city and a sport.

“When he came over to the Yankees from the Red Sox in 1920, the Yankees were sharing the Polo Grounds with the Giants,” says Eric Jentsch, a curator of culture and the arts at the American History Museum. “After Ruth came and made such a dramatic change in the game with all his home runs, Yankees attendance doubled and totally surpassed the Giants, so the Giants kicked them out.”

In his first season with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs : more, on his own, than any team except for the Phillies. His unprecedented slugging ushered the game into the new live-ball era.

It’s hard to imagine, but if Ruth hadn’t come along, we might have seen the Yankees head to the West Coast, instead of moving into “The House That Ruth Built.”

“The Yankees built this beautiful, huge stadium, because they got so popular from Ruth, and then were able to create this dynasty that they’ve had,” says Jentsch.”The Yankees ended up running both the Giants and Dodgers out of town, because they were so popular.”

The Smithsonian is home to a piece of this history. In the 1970s, when the stadium was undergoing extensive renovations, workers took out an old, graffiti-marked ticket booth . In time, it would be donated to the American History Museum . Although not currently on display, Jentsch said curators plan to use the artifact in a new exhibition on American mass entertainment and pop culture that is currently under development.

Ruth’s significance went beyond the building of a stadium. At a key point in the history of baseball and American entertainment, he emerged as a superstar and established the sport as America’s pastime.

“The twenties are often called the golden age of sports, and there are a few reasons for that. After World War I, a lot of people became more interested in entertainment and leisure activities,” Jentsch says. “The other thing was a huge change in media, with radio, and with more newspapers.”

As baseball was just recovering from the 1919 Black Sox betting scandal—in which eight White Sox players were banned from the game for intentionally losing the World Series—the game needed a galvanizing star to bring back positive coverage. “Ruth managed his public persona very well. He was a really likable guy, he treated people well,” says Jentsch. “He had this magnetism, and he was a winner.”

“He was the best baseball player who ever lived,” wrote Robert W. Creamer, a former Sports Illustrated writer and Ruth biographer, in a 1995 Smithsonian article. “He was better than Ty Cobb, better than Joe DiMaggio, better than Ted Williams, better than Henry Aaron, better than Bobby Bonds. He was by far the most flamboyant. There’s never been anyone else like him.”

In the Smithsonian’s collections, there are three Babe Ruth-autographed balls. Pictured above, is one that was originally a family heirloom: when Ruth visited Scranton, Pennsylvania, sometime in the early part of the century, one Evan Jones got it signed as a gift for his son. The signed ball was donated to the museum in the 1990s.

The stories of the two other balls were told in a Smithsonian Magazine article in 2003 . One was signed by both Ruth and Hank Aaron, who broke Ruth’s all-time home run record in 1974. The other was autographed by the entire 1926 New York Yankee team, a gift from a team trainer to a sick child who lived next door. That team lost the World Series in seven games, ultimately losing as Ruth was caught stealing second base in the bottom of the ninth.

In his 15 years as a Yankee, though, Ruth led the team to four World Series victories and rewrote baseball’s record books. As Red Sox fans know well, the legend all goes back to that fateful trade. At the time, selling the player for $200,000 seemed to make sense. But now, “it’s one of those famous stories,” says Jentsch. “You never can tell where the next great superstar will come from.”

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Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

No one told Babe Ruth he had cancer, but his death changed the way we fight it

The Great Bambino’s treatment came at a major turning point in medicine.

By Eleanor Cummins | Published Feb 6, 2018 9:22 PM EST

George Herman Ruth was sick. It had all started with a deep, searing pain behind his left eye. Now, he could hardly swallow. And the pain seemed to be seeping down his body, like an invisible weight tugging at his hips and legs. Soon, he’d have to use his bat as a cane. But he was no ordinary patient. He was the Babe, the greatest baseball player who had ever lived. And his medical team at what is now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, just a short train ride south from Yankee Stadium, intended to treat him as such. While it seems possible that no one ever told Ruth himself, the baseball legend had terminal cancer. A tumor had grown from behind his nose to the base of his skull and was working its way into his neck. Treatment would be harrowing, but his doctors were determined the Sultan of Swat would get better. Though their effort to save him was ultimately unsuccessful, the record-setting Ruth became a cancer pioneer in the process.

At the time of Ruth’s birth on February 6, 1895, cancer, once a rarity, was suddenly everywhere. “He lived at a time when cancer rates were increasing markedly,” says Dr. Otis Brawley , Chief Medical Officer for the American Cancer Society . These days, Brawley says, we know what to attribute that to: smoking and air pollution. At the time, however, no one actually knew what caused cancer, let alone how to cure it.

Until the late 19th century, many scientists subscribed to the humoral theory of disease , which states that imbalances in blood, phlegm, and two types of bile caused all matter of illness. Others believed cancer, like tuberculosis, was contagious . And as late as the 1920s, some physicians subscribed to the notion that physical trauma caused tumors. This last theory persisted despite all evidence; scientists methodically injured lab animals aplenty and yet no new cancers grew.

Treatments were similarly brutish. For patients with breast cancer, the best that could be offered was total removal of the breasts. And that was better than most courses of treatment. While the mastectomies were painful and often proved unhelpful, at least some action could be taken. For people with cancer embedded deeper in their body, there was really only pain management and prayer.

But Ruth’s first year of life marked a turning point in the nascent field of cancer research. The death of Karl Thiersch , a German surgeon who correctly proposed that cancers grow through the spread of malignant cells, prompted other scientists to pick up his mantle and confirm the validity of his research. And German physics professor Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of the X-ray changed the world in more ways than one. It was clear that this wavelength would be crucial for medical imaging (for the first time, you could see inside people without wielding a knife), but it would be only a few months before scientists realized X-rays had therapeutic value, too.

In 1896, one enterprising French physician initiated the first attempt to use X-ray as therapy . He trained an X-ray on a patient’s stomach tumor for 15 to 30 minutes twice a day for more than a month. According to his report, the mass shrank and the patient reported relief. Though the subject later died of their disease, the short-term successes encouraged doctors all over the world to try this therapy for themselves. The experimental treatment worked by training a beam of radiation on a patient and damaging the DNA of any cell caught in the crossfire , preventing them from replicating further.

Over the next 10 years, X-ray therapy would be tested as a potential cure for a plethora of ailments, from Hodgkin’s lymphoma to non-cancerous skin issues like acne. Unfortunately, these early beams were indiscriminate; they often destroyed as many good cells as cancerous ones. As late as the 1950s, radiation machines still seemed to do as much harm as good. “They burned a lot of patients with the radiation ,” Brawley says. What’s more, “the radiation was not really able to penetrate into, say, a head-neck tumor.”

Another avenue of radiation therapy was also developing around this time. In 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium, the radioactive substance that causes her laboratory notebooks to glow to this day . By the 1910s, as Ruth entered the major league, medical usage of radioactive substances surged. Researchers had started to differentiate the numerous ways in which radium could be injected into a patient’s body. Unlike X-ray therapy, which had to be beamed in from the outside, researchers could experiment with radium inhalation, therapeutic baths in the substance, radium salts inserted directly into the diseased area, and other methods of attack.

Finding a way to deploy the cancer-fighting agent responsibly was still decades away. Like Curie, who died of aplastic anemia as a result of her radium and polonium exposure , many early researchers—and the patients they worked on—were sickened by their would-be cure. “Radiation was a very primitive type of thing in the 20s and 30s,” Brawley says. “They literally used the same machines they used to do chest X-rays, they just turned them on longer.”

For much of the 20th century, cancer was still considered generally incurable; most cancer patients, a lost cause. “Even in the early 1970s, people couldn’t say ‘cancer,'” Brawley says. “It was considered a bad word.” Patients were typically not told the truth about their diagnoses . Instead, they were provided excuses and euphemisms. Though it may seem strange or even unethical today, families and physicians feared that if patients knew the truth, they’d lose hope.

As World War II came to a close, a new day was dawning in medicine. And good thing, too, because Babe Ruth had just lost his voice.

A hoarse voice can mean many things, most of which aren’t life-threatening. As a lifelong smoker and the literal posterboy for White Owl cigars and Raleigh cigarettes , it was plausible that Babe Ruth just couldn’t smoke the way he used to, and that the problem would go away on its own if he cut back.

But between September and November of 1946, things only got worse. Ruth’s runaway voice was accompanied by severe eye pain and weakness in his record-breaking shoulders. At a doctor’s appointment in Manhattan’s now-defunct French Hospital, doctors found exactly what they feared: A tumor protruding from the base of Ruth’s skull.

Dr. Nadim Bikhazi, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, is the author of a headline-making 1999 article for the journal Laryngoscope titled “‘Babe’ Ruth’s illness and its impact on medical history.” In his paper , Bikhazi used the remaining scraps of Ruth’s original medical reports to piece together the progression of the legend’s disease. Though it appears Ruth was never told he had cancer—when Ruth arrived at Memorial Sloan-Kettering for treatment, he reportedly said, “Doc, this is Memorial. Memorial is a cancer hospital. Why are you bringing me here?”—he was swiftly subjected to the painful cancer therapies of the day.

He received X-ray therapy to his head, failed surgery to remove the mass, and injections of female hormones, as some incorrectly theorized his cancer may have been caused by chemical imbalances of some kind. (Hormones do a play a role in some cancers, including those of the breast, ovary, and uterus, but were likely irrelevant to Ruth’s head-neck disease.) “In total,” Bikhazi wrote, “he had spent [three] months in the hospital, had lost approximately 80 [pounds], and remained in great pain.” Over the course of the next two years, Ruth would also receive other largely unhelpful interventions including rest, relaxation, and radiated gold seeds , which were implanted into his neck. “They were clearly reaching for a lot of things,” Bikhazi says.

In the summer of 1947, however, Ruth was offered a trial therapy of an entirely new class of cancer treatment. He was, Bikhazi says, “in the right city at the right time.”

“Chemotherapy came to us because of an accident in World War II,” says Brawley of the American Cancer Society. In 1944, German bombers attacked the Allied forces at a port in Bari, where Italy’s boot meets its heel. The air raid itself killed troops and civilians and damaged military supplies. But it was what the Americans were hiding in one of the wrecked cargo ships that made the event historic: The U.S. SS John Harvey contained more than 120,000 pounds of mustard gas. As the ship sunk into the sea, it released its secret stash, poisoning some 628 people. Within the month, at least 83 were dead.

It was a tragic event—and a shameful one, as the Geneva Convention had outlawed chemical weapons almost 20 years before. Given its inherent illegality, the United States and British governments worked quickly to cover the crisis up, suppressing Bari’s secrets for decades. But the data could not be denied. Based on tissue samples stealthily collected from the bodies of autopsied victims, scientists saw for the first time the therapeutic potential of this chemical concoction.

“One of the effects of people exposed to mustard gas,” Brawley says, “[is that] their white blood cell counts come down.” Researchers hypothesized that mustard gas might be used to treat cancers like leukemia, which results in abnormally high concentrations of white blood cells. Doctors also noted that in many victims, the somatic cells, which normally branch off around the clock to restore aging or dying cells, ceased to divide. Given that cancer is the result of cell division gone wild, this result indicated another potentially positive effect of the chemicals.

After the war, scientists sought to put this knowledge to work in the clinic. Confident now that chemicals could combat cancer, Boston pediatrician Sidney Farber , who would come to be known as the father of modern chemotherapy, began conducting his own experiments on children with leukemia. He saw that folic acid encouraged the proliferation of disease in his patients. From this observation, Farber decided to administer doses of the opposite chemical, folate antagonists, to children under his care. To his delight, every single patient in his small study went into remission. Though none were permanently cured, the principle was established: Antifolates could be an important avenue for cancer-fighting drug development.

“They actually had some therapeutic responses,” Brawley says of Farber’s experiments. “No cures, but therapeutic responses. That led other folks to use some of the folate antagonists; in fact, one of the early folate antagonists was the one that was given to Ruth.”

The drug that Ruth took was called teropterin. Richard Lewisohn , a researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, extracted the antifolates from brewer’s yeast. The compound seemed to work in a few mice, but it had never been tried in humans. Against Lewisohn’s will , the nascent drug was nonetheless made available for Ruth’s use. “It went from mice to Babe Ruth,” Bikhazi says with a sense of amazement, even after all these years. “There was no intermediary.”

In this piece from 1921, PopSci subjects the Sultan of Swat to a battery of scientific tests hoping to discover the secret behind his superhuman swing.

Miraculously, the drug worked. At least for a short time. Ruth started daily injections on June 29, 1947. In short order, Bikhazi reports, he gained back some of the weight he’d lost, reported less pain, and was finally able to swallow solid food. He continued chemotherapy for about six weeks and various radiation treatments for another year, as doctors cast about in search of a permanent cure. They never found one, and Ruth ultimately died of cancer on August 16, 1948, at the age of 53. But in the process of that trial and error treatment, Bikhazi reports, Ruth became perhaps the first patient to receive sequential radiation and chemotherapy . Now called “chemo-beamo,” this two-pronged approach is standard treatment for many cancers today.

Bikhazi says the coordinated attack extended Ruth’s lifespan significantly beyond the prognosis of the day. Perhaps most importantly for the Americans who so admired Ruth, the drug allowed him to live long enough to say goodbye to Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1948, just two months before his death. On that last visit to “ the House that Ruth Built ,” he retired his No. 3 jersey and permanently sealed his No. 3 locker. Later, while leaning on his bat for support, Ruth received a standing ovation from the crowd .

For half a century, doctors believed that Ruth had cancer in his larynx, which grows from the voice box in the throat. The hoarse speech, as well as Ruth’s prolific consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, supported this theory. But by evaluating Ruth’s private autopsy reports, Bikhazi showed that Ruth actually had nasopharyngeal cancer, a rare illness that starts behind the nose. More than 70 years after his death, the distinction might seem minor, but the takeaway is staggering: Ruth, through sheer dumb luck, got almost exactly the right treatment. Laryngeal cancer typically requires radiation and surgery (including total removal of the voicebox), but nasopharyngeal cancer is still tackled with chemo-beamo today. “If Ruth had presented today with advanced-stage nasopharyngeal cancer as he had in 1946,” Bikhazi wrote, “he would have had a favorable chance of long-term survival.”

Bikhazi, who put the pieces of Babe’s illness together in spite of damaged and even intentionally destroyed records, sees the story as an inherently uplifting one. At the very least, it’s a reminder of how far cancer treatments have come. But that doesn’t mean the tale is entirely rosy. “One of the problems in medicine is that there has always been this concept that people who are famous get treated special,” Brawley says. “It’s not a surprise to my mind that they threw thing after thing at him because he was Babe Ruth.” While Ruth got the time he needed to say goodbye, no one else did, as experimental drugs like teropterin weren’t made available to the masses and chemotherapy wasn’t widely available until the 1950s .

More unnerving, perhaps, is the evidence that suggests Ruth was largely in the dark about his own illness. While it cannot be confirmed—his family says he didn’t know, but contemporaneous reports of his death clearly describe the cancer that killed him—Ruth’s potential ignorance of his own disease calls into question the ethics of his doctor’s decisions. Medical principles and the rules around clinical trials have evolved dramatically since Ruth’s time, and today no one would be allowed to undergo experimental treatment without being fully briefed on the risks they were taking on.

Still, Bikhazi says, Ruth’s contributions to medical history are bigger than any criticism. Thanks to patients like Ruth and scientists like Farber and Lewisohn, new chemotherapy drugs are more potent and more targeted than ever. The same is true of radiation. Instead of exposing an entire region of a patient’s body to a giant X-ray machine, hundreds of razor-thin beams can be trained onto a tumor to bypass most of the healthy issue as they attack the cancerous cells. “A shotgun approach is the old way of doing it,” Brawley says of Ruth’s era. “A sniper is the new way.”

Perhaps most significantly, the publicity Ruth’s disease would eventually receive helped to eat away at the stigma cancer patients felt for centuries. Efforts in subsequent decades by other prominent cancer survivors, like First Lady Betty Ford , ushered in a world in which patients are informed and consulted about their disease and its treatment and, crucially, treated with dignity throughout the process.

After his death, Babe Ruth lay in state at Yankee Stadium, where fans lined up to pay their respects. Photographers on the scene captured tender moments as boys, young and old, cried over the Babe . The treatments at the time weren’t capable of curing their hero, but the medical innovations Ruth shepherded along have gone on to cure countless others. One likes to assume Ruth would be selflessly proud of his contributions. After all, his most famous quote is equally applicable to baseball as it is to the fight against cancer: “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.”

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The Babe Ruth Beginning

This article was written by  Al Kermisch

This article was published in 1975 Baseball Research Journal

After Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record, there was a renewed interest in Ruth and several new books on the Babe were published. At least two of them deal at some length with his early life and entry into Organized Ball. That was more than 60 years ago, and researching the pertinent facts of an obscure phase of Ruth’s youth is not made easier by passage of time. There are a few points, however, that can be cleared up without much difficulty.

For example, in the book entitled “Babe, the Legend Comes to Life,” author Robert W. Creamer speculates that Ruth played with the Bayonne Athletic Club in 1913. Closer research discloses that this player was Frank Ruth, who was still with that club the following year while the Babe was having his first fling in Organized Baseball. This is made clear by the following note which appeared in the Baltimore American on August 23, 1914: “Bayonne A. C. will play St. Elizabeth at Orangeville. Murray or Kansler will pitch while Frank Ruth, the backstop, will be at his old position.”

In the book “Babe Ruth and the American Dream,” author Ken Sobel has doubts about the popular story that Jack Dunn, owner and manager of the International League Orioles, signed Ruth in 1914 after watching him skating on the ice at St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore. Moreover, Sobel does not accept the tale that Dunn was interested in another southpaw by the name of Ford Meadows before he signed Ruth. He states that Dunn was more likely interested in a pitcher named Bill Morisette, who had attended Mt. St. Joseph’s and later pitched for Philadelphia and Detroit in the American League. Sobel further states that although the name of Meadows was mentioned in Ruth’s “The Babe Ruth Story,” the name never appears anywhere else.

In the first place, Morisette was not the pitcher that Dunn was after for the simple reason that he already was a member of the Orioles at the time. Dunn signed him out of Mt. St. Joseph’s in May 1913, and he pitched for the Orioles the rest of that season and was on Baltimore’s reserve list for 1914. Secondly, there really was a pitcher by the name of Ford Meadows who pitched for Mt. St. Joseph’s in 1914. There have been many versions of how Meadows fits into the picture, but one story I heard in Baltimore many years ago seems to have some merit. It concerns Brother Gilbert, who is often credited with the discovery of Ruth.

Brother Gilbert was Director of Athletics at Mt. St. Joseph’s at the time. He had an outstanding college baseball team. One of his new pitchers was Meadows, who had pitched for Rock Hill College in 1913. No doubt Dunn had Meadows scouted in 1913 and was interested in giving the youngster a chance with his team.

Dunn used to pick up several youngsters a year from the local ball diamonds. Among those he had corralled that way up to that time included “Home Run” Baker, “Butcher Boy” Schmidt, Fritz Maisel, George Maisel, Lefty Russell and Allan Russell.

As the story goes, Dunn approached Brother Gilbert about taking Meadows south with his club. Meadows was the only southpaw on the Mt. St. Joseph’s roster and Brother Gilbert was counting on him for the coming season. Brother Gilbert decided to divert Dunn’s attention away from Meadows by telling him about young Ruth down the road at St. Mary’s Industrial School.

Brother Gilbert had seen Ruth play several games and although he was impressed by his hitting and pitching he did not envision him as a big leaguer at that time. But he had heard his associates of the Xavieran Brotherhood rave about Ruth’s playing at St. Mary’s. So Brother Gilbert told Dunn that Ruth was really the one he wanted for his team. He told the Oriole magnate that besides being one of the speediest pitchers around, Ruth could play first base or the outfield as well as drive the ball a mile. That was apparently the way Brother Gilbert “discovered” Ruth while really saving Meadows for his own team.

In February 1914, Dunn went out to St. Mary’s, got a glimpse of Ruth as he was sliding on the ice, talked to Brother Mathais about the youngster and signed him to a contract. That Dunn, a shrewd operator, would sign a player in that manner has been doubted by many observers over the years. But there is some evidence that that’s the way it did happen.

Some years ago, during a spring training session of the Orioles, I happened to hear the late Fritz Maisel talking about the first time he had seen Ruth. Fritz was a Baltimore boy and a close friend of Dunn, who had sold him to the Yankees for a fancy price in 1913. Fritz was at home during the winter when Dunn asked him to accompany him to St. Mary’s to see Brother Mathais about Ruth. Maisel recalled that the snow was piled up several feet high the day they went out there. When they got to St. Mary’s they saw a bunch of kids sliding down a hill in the yard. One particularly big boy came sliding down the hill, knocked over three other boys, jumped up laughing, like it was all a big joke.

Brother Mathais turned to Dunn and Maisel and said: “That’s Ruth.” Maisel ended his story by saying that the next time he saw Ruth he was facing him in an American League game.

The recollections by Maisel seem to make sense for the first announcement on the signing of Ruth appeared in the Baltimore papers on Sunday, February 15, 1914. In checking the Baltimore weather for that period I find that the city had its first significant snowfall in two years on Friday, February 13, with more than six inches of snow. The next day was very cold and windy and caused some snow drifts in the outlying parts of the city. It would appear then that Dunn and Maisel went out to St. Mary’s on February 14, accounting for the “several feet of snow” in Maisel’ s reminiscence.

The article in the Baltimore American on February 17 stated that:

“George H. Ruth, southpaw, standing six feet one inch tall and weighing 180 pounds, is the latest Oriole.

He pitched for St. Mary’s Industrial School and among other feats he is credited with fanning 20 men in a game with Bill Byers’ All-Stars. Hefty William admits George made monkeys out of his boys, and while boasting him as a hurler took occasion to say that Dunn will make a mistake if he doesn’t play him at first or in the outfield. Ruth looks like Ben Houser and hits like he does, says the former Oriole catcher.”

The above article would indicate that although Dunn had never seen Ruth perform before he signed him, he probably did check on his ability, with Byers, a catcher with the Orioles for several seasons under Dunn, and perhaps with his own scout — Charles Steinmann.

The rest of the Ruth beginning is well chronicled. The Orioles trained in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1914. On March 7, after several days in camp, the Orioles were divided into two teams, called Sparrows and Buzzards. Ruth, starting at short for the Buzzards, hit a tremendous drive to right field in the second inning, scoring Ensign Cottrell ahead of him. Ruth’s drive landed in a cornfield and he circled the bases before Billy Morisette, playing right field, picked up the ball. The local fans, amazed at the power of the rookie, agreed that the ball traveled some 20 yards farther than the previous record blow for the park made by Jim Thorpe when the famous Indian athlete played for Fayetteville in the East Carolina League in 1910. That was two years prior to the Olympic Games in Stockholm, in which Thorpe won the decathlon in record time only to have his medals taken away when his professional baseball experience was discovered.

Manager Dunn did not witness Ruth’s initial homer since he did not arrive in the Oriole camp until March 10, when he brought in the main contingent of Orioles. But when Dunn saw Ruth in uniform for the first time he was tickled with him and said he thought Ruth might be valuable at some other position than pitcher. Within another week Dunn declared that Ruth was the most promising player he ever had and predicted great things for him.

Ruth got his baptism of real competition in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Phillies on March 18. He was the second of three pitchers used by Dunn in that game, and he proved his mettle under fire at the outset.

The Baltimore American description of the game, which included an early reference to “Babe,” follows:

“Babe Ruth made his debut in the fourth and while the Quakers tied things up it was not entirely his fault. Lobert and Luderus singled after which Magee worked a free ticket. Three on and none out made things look blue for the recruit but he steadied and would have emerged with a pure record but for a bad bounce of a ball hit to Derrick.”

Ruth pitched three innings and the Orioles won 4-3. The next day Dunn called on the youngster to stop a Philly rally in the sixth inning. Philadelphia had scored four runs and had a man on second with only one out. The Babe promptly fanned Henry Matteson and George Paskert to end the frame. In the next three innings,

Ruth struck out three more, allowed no runs and two hits. After watching Ruth hold the Phils to six hits and two runs in six and two-thirds innings in two games, Pat Moran, the Philly pitching coach who as manager the next year was to lead the Phils to their first National League pennant, declared:

“Ruth is a coming $12,000 beauty. A marvel for a kid just breaking in. He has the build, the curves and can hit quite a bit himself. I predict that within the course of a few years Ruth will be one of the best southpaws in baseball.”

Six days later, on March 25, at Wilmington, N.C., Dunn gave Ruth his first starting assignment against the world champion Philadelphia Athletics. Although nicked for 13 safeties, Ruth was magnificent in the pinches and won 6-2. The Athletics paid him a big compliment after the game, stating that he was one of the best youngsters they had seen in a long time. “Ruth is a sure comer,” said Eddie Collins, the A’s star second baseman. “He has the speed and a sharp curve, and, believe me, he is steady in the pinches.”

Incidentally, it is popularly believed that Ruth showed up Frank Baker in this game by fanning him several times but this is pure fantasy since the slugging third baseman got a double and three singles. The only time he was retired he hit a long fly to right field. Once Baker drove the ball against the top of the right field fence, but it bounced back and he got only a single out of it.

After Ruth had defeated Brooklyn in another exhibition game several weeks later, Dodgers’ manager, Wilbert Robinson, joined the growing list of Ruth admirers. “He will be one of the sensations of the baseball season,” predicted Robbie. Casey Stengel played in that game for the Dodgers and had one hit in three tries against the Babe. Many years later Stengel recalled the game and remembered Ruth hitting a terrific drive over his head in right field to drive in two runs.

When Ruth made his O. B. debut on April 22 in his home town fewer than 200 fans were in the stands. Across the street at Terrapin Park, 3200 spectators, dazzled by the lure of so-called major league baseball, watched the Federal League game.

The lack of customers didn’t bother the Babe. He blanked Buffalo 6-0, giving up but six hits and collecting two hits himself.  In his first time at bat in O. B., the Babe cracked out a single to right field off the delivery off George McConnell, a tall righthander who had pitched for the Yankees the year before.

Ruth went on to a fabulous career, first as one of the outstanding pitchers in baseball and then as the game’s greatest slugger. But what ever happened to the other young lefthander in this story — Ford Meadows?

Well, for one thing, he was an outstanding college pitcher for Mt. St. Joseph’s in 1914 and 1915. After the 1915 college season, Meadows, who was known as Rube, signed with Dunn’s Richmond International League club. (After selling his stars, including Ruth, Dunn had to move his franchise out of Baltimore after the 1914 campaign.)

Meadows made an auspicious start for Richmond. In a relief role at Jersey City on June 15, he pitched two innings and struck out five of the six batters to face him. That earned him a starting assignment the next day but Dunn had to yank him after he gave up four hits and six walks in four innings. Meadows appeared in 13 games and was 0 and 2 for the season. He gave up 27 hits in 23 innings, and was forever plagued with wildness, giving up 45 bases on balls while fanning 23. He had shown enough promise, however, for the Yankees to purchase him for $5,000. Meadows joined the New York club on September 3, but Manager Bill Donovan did not use him in a championship contest. At the time Meadows joined the club, Donovan had an unusually good crop of young pitchers to look over. Among them were Dazzy Vance, George Mogridge,

Neal Brady, Allan Russell, Cliff Markle and Dan Tipple — all with good minor league credentials.

Meadows accompanied the Yankees to spring training at Macon, Georgia, in 1916. He pitched in one Regular-Yanigan game but pitched so poorly that he was returned to Dunn for more seasoning. Dunn had returned to Baltimore in 1916 after the Federal League folded. The Oriole pilot was not impressed with Meadows and suspended him until he got into better shape. Even after he reinstated him, Dunn would not trust the erratic southpaw in a game. Meadows complained to the head of the minor league association, and Secretary John Farrell contacted Dunn and told him that it was up to him to let Rube work or release him.

On June 30, 1916, in a game against Richmond at Oriole Park, Dunn finally thought he had found the proper spot to give the unhappy lefthander a chance to pitch. Two Oriole pitchers had been treated rather roughly and Dunn called on Meadows. Rube lasted only two innings and might have set a record for walks had not Dunn seen enough. Meadows had given up 11 bases on balls in the two innings when he was removed from the game. That night Dunn handed him his unconditional release.

Since Meadows did not appear in a championship major league game his name is not to be found in any of the baseball encyclopedias. However, if anyone should doubt that Meadows actually joined the Yankees, I have a copy of the contract he signed on August 26, 1915. The contract between the Base Ball Club of New York and B. B. (Ford) Meadows was approved by Ban Johnson, President of the American League on August 30, 1915. The contract, beginning on or about the 1st day of September, 1915, and ending on or about the 14th day of October, 1915, called for a total compensation for each month of the season contracted for $500.

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