Ruth’s Losing Streak Will End in a Movie

A few of us were sitting around discussing the grand old game. “Who,” Don Klosterman wanted to know, “was the best-hitting pitcher of all time?”

I had the answer. “Wes Ferrell,” I told him promptly, calling on musty records remembered from childhood. “Hit 38 home runs. Had nine home runs in 116 at-bats once. Had a slugging average of .621 one year, same as Lou Gehrig’s (a year later). Lifetime batting, .280.”

The music man, Mac Davis, frowned. “What about George Herman Ruth?” he demanded. “Belongs in there somewhere, doesn’t he?”

Of course! America’s Troubadour was right. Babe Ruth was, after all, a pitcher, one of the best. Had an ERA of 1.75 one year, had 35 complete games another, nine shutouts one season, held the World Series record for 30 years for scoreless innings pitched consecutively. Hit 29 home runs in his last year as a pitcher. Led the league, is all. By 19 home runs.

I was glad for another reason: The poor old Babe has been on a long losing streak of late. All anyone seems to want to recall about him in this era of runaway cynicism, antiheroism, is his drinking and carousing. A guest came up to me the other day and asked, “Is it true Babe Ruth was drunk all the time on the field?” I was shocked. “You can’t hit or pitch a fastball drunk,” I assured him. “And Ruth did a lot of both for 22 years.”

Ruth was probably no better or no worse than his contemporaries in those roaring ‘20s. He probably looked worse playing alongside the straight-arrow Gehrig. Ruth’s appetites would have gone unnoticed if he weren’t such a towering figure in the game. He truly was a genius when it came to anything to do with a baseball. If baseball were an art, then he was Rembrandt with a bat. Undoubtedly, the most magnificent coordination of hand and eye the game has ever seen.

And such a good, great-hearted guy. Did you know that Babe Ruth-autographed baseballs for years brought less on the market than a Joe DiMaggio or a Willie Mays because Ruth signed more of them? The hospital visits to dying children were all true. As uncomplicated as a summer day, Ruth gave away more money than the federal government. Once, when someone accused Leo Durocher of stealing his watch, Leo was scornful. “You didn’t have to steal Babe’s watch,” he said. “If you liked it, he gave it to you.”

So, it was with great interest that I heard that the producers Larry Lyttle and Frank Pace were bringing out a new drama on the Babe. I had to see it.

What were we going to get--Babe Ruth as saint or satyr? A saccharine jejune rehash of the old William Bendix debacle? Or another load of posthumous abuse leveled at the great home run hitter? The Sultan of Swat? Or the Sultan of Smut?

I am happy to report that we got neither. “Babe Ruth,” the television movie, which will be aired by NBC on Sunday, Oct. 6, in prime time, is neither praise nor censure. It shows Babe Ruth, warts and all--but not Babe Ruth, all warts.

Stephen Lang, who plays the title role, is the best Babe Ruth I have seen since the original. That’s because they picked an actor, not a caricature.

The Babe was well-named. He was the little kid who wouldn’t grow up. He never had a real childhood. So he got one in his adulthood. One of the touching scenes in the teleplay shows when he revisits the reform school he grew up in, finds another lonely abandoned child and tells him: “My father brought me here and left me. He said he’d come back for me, but he never did.” It probably told more about Babe Ruth than all his baseball statistics ever could. A boy who was not an orphan raised in an orphanage. A boy who was not a criminal raised in a jail.

In his early years, he was an undisciplined lout. But in everybody’s early years, they are undisciplined louts. Ruth lived life as if he were going to be brought and left on an orphan asylum doorstep any day now.

He loved kids. Of that, there is no doubt. Hell, he loved everybody. Ruth’s feuds were one-sided. Babe couldn’t remember what they were about the next day.

This movie defines Babe Ruth as never before. Glutton? Sure. After years of reform-school mess hall, who wouldn’t be? Boozy? Hey, in the ‘20s of speak-easies, bathtub gin, silver flasks and raccoon coats, who wasn’t? Crude? He never went to Oxford. He grew up in a 40-bed dormitory with one bathroom. Womanizer? I’ve never known a ball team yet that wasn’t full of them. Ruth wasn’t even world class compared to some who came after him. Undisciplined? In his early years, perhaps, but anybody who knows anything about baseball knows you can’t play the game 20 years without a strong streak of discipline somewhere. And anybody who knows anything about a Jesuit school knows where it comes from.

He was larger than life. He saved baseball after the Black Sox scandal. The film has him boasting about it, but Babe Ruth never knew he was saving anything.

America loved him and it was requited. People break his records, but there has never been another like him. His private life was sacrificed on the altar of celebrity. It’s doubtful that he ever found happiness, as the picture clearly shows.

His name went in the language. A great chef is “the Babe Ruth of chefs,” a great performer is “the Babe Ruth” of his craft.

He lived life at a Falstaffian pitch. Maybe he knew it wouldn’t be long--he died at 53. He had a fear of being alone, as many abandoned children have.

He made a lot of people happy. If Babe Ruth wasn’t one of them, he never let on. He was a man of prodigious talents starved for affection. His relationship with Manager Miller Huggins (Bruce Weitz almost steals the picture in the role) was that of a man testing the father he never had. Ruth lived in a gaudy, giddy era, and he played it to the hilt. He belonged in baseball. He never had a home anywhere else. But baseball ill-served him. When he was through, it dumped him. Baseball left him on a doorstep, too. He never really recovered from that.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.”