Larry King Goes to Bat for Babe Ruth Museum

All shapes and sizes of organizations have tried to recruit Larry King, one of the most distinctive voices in America, with the hope he might agree to stand up and offer an appeal for this or that cause. But it’s not his game. He didn’t want to be linked with fund-raising, or putting one charity ahead of another. So he declined, ever so politely.

He has an imposing stature in the field of broadcasting and, in fact, has earned a presence for himself that rivals such luminaries of the past as Arthur Godfrey, Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. There’s an ethical awareness that prevents him from using his network platform to solicit contributions.

But then along came the Babe Ruth Museum, located in Baltimore, and it asked King if he would become national chairman of its membership committee. His answer was a ringing acceptance and endorsement of a new campaign that will extend the facility’s physical dimensions via an extensive expansion effort.

King will be the point man, the personality who is out front selling the idea to individuals and corporations all across the nation. “The name Babe Ruth catches everyone’s attention,” he said. “The Babe was symbolic of baseball. He was and is baseball.”

A historian of a sport he enjoys and understands, King knows Ruth towers above all players, past and present, in talent and a sense of the dramatic. King never saw Ruth play and wasn’t old enough the one year, 1939, when he served as a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers and took batting practice, which was a cheap grandstand ploy to sell tickets.

“No, but I was in Ebbets Field and heard his farewell speech (April 27, 1947) when baseball celebrated Babe Ruth Day all over America. The comments Ruth made in Yankee Stadium about what baseball represented to the boys of our country and the other things he had to say, with a voice weakened by cancer, were pumped into Ebbets Field and to all other ballparks.”

What Ruth had to say and how he struggled against the pain to speak in not much more than whisper so impressed King that he hasn’t forgotten the tugging emotion of the moment. “No doubt, he was America’s greatest athlete, born and raised in Baltimore and, in fact, as a child lived on the exact location where center field is going to be located in the new ballpark.”

On the subject of a stadium name, King reiterated his position. “It should be Babe Ruth Park,” he emphasized. “To ignore Ruth’s ties to Baltimore amid so much rich background would be some sort of craziness to me. Imagine the marketing value of the name. Without Baltimore, plus the Orioles signing him, the world never would have heard of him.”

And if you want a little-known note about Ruth, listen as King provides it. “With all of Ruth’s hitting attainments, don’t forget he won 94 games as a pitcher. And do you realize that in winning percentage against the New York Yankees, he stands second in percentage. When he was with the Boston Red Sox, he beat the Yanks 17 times and lost only five.”

King has long been a Baltimore booster. He was raised in Brooklyn, worked in Miami and is now based in Washington. But if he has adopted a city by acclamation it would have to be Baltimore. That’s because two of his broadcast friends, the late Bill O’Donnell and Joe Croghan, continually talked of its place in history and what it represented.

So King was impressed. The Orioles draw his personal attention as no other team in sports. King is a student of the game, knows its Hall of Fame heroes as well as the utility journeymen and talks with in-depth knowledge of the character and nuances of baseball.

He mentioned the unprecedented achievement of the Orioles winning seven straight pennants in the International League, a dynasty that stands alone in the record book. And then he pointed out that Al Kaline, a Baltimore-born Hall of Famer, lived only five minutes away from where Ruth was born, the site of the museum at 216 Emory St.

More than 28,000 men, women and children visited the “House of Ruth” last year and the total should continue to climb. It’s the largest baseball museum in the country -- next to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. -- and features exhibits that pay tribute to Ruth, to the Orioles and to other distinguished Maryland players.

King wants to send out a message to stimulate more interest in the United States and Canada among fans, with the enthusiastic expectation they will want to go to bat for Ruth, in a manner of speaking and, in turn, enable the museum to enlarge. The Babe would’ve liked that.