It Would Be 100th Birthday for Babe : Baseball: Ruth was special, a character of legendary proportions with accomplishments to match, a huge man with a gargantuan appetite for life.

Break out the balloons and put up the streamers. Decorate the joint with flappers and fat cats. Bake a cake, a big one with a giant candle planted right in the middle of it, maybe in the shape of a great, big baseball bat.

Hey, this is no ordinary party. Monday is Babe Ruth’s 100th birthday. Just imagine the shindig he would have thrown for himself.

There would have been wine, women and song--and plenty of each. He’d have all his Yankees teammates there--Gehrig, Meusel, Lazzeri, the whole gang. Can’t have a birthday party without your pals.

Ruth would be all over the room, puffing on a big cigar, pounding people on the back, playing practical jokes on unsuspecting foils, and generally having a wonderful time. And if that little pipsqueak manager, Huggins, started acting up, why the Babe might just hold him out a window for a while, you know, just for laughs.

And there would be plenty of laughs all around, guaranteed.

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Babe Ruth was special, and he knew it. He was a character of legendary proportions with accomplishments to match, a huge man with a gargantuan appetite for life, who never did anything understated.

“I swing big, with everything I’ve got,” he once said. “I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.”

And he did that.

When he began playing baseball, Ruth was one of the best pitchers around. When he stopped pitching, he became the best slugger around. And when baseball got into trouble because of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, he merely saved the game.

He was the Babe, one of a kind, an outrageous looking character in his baseball prime with a bulbous body supported on pipe-thin legs, and a moon face that broke into wide grins easily and often.

Ruth reigned during the Golden Age of Sports, the time of Tilden and Dempsey, Grange and Rockne. He overshadowed them all. It was the Babe who put the exclamation point on the era by hitting 60 home runs in a single season, a remarkable accomplishment considering that baseball had yet to become a game of sluggers.

When he ran out that final homer on Sept. 30, 1927, and reached the Yankees dugout, the Babe knew exactly what he had done and precisely what it meant.

“That’s 60,” Ruth roared. “Count ‘em, 60. Let’s see some son of a bitch beat that.”

It took 34 years before Roger Maris would, hitting 61 homers in 1961. And 34 years after that, it is Ruth, not Maris, who remains the symbol of the long ball.

In 22 major league seasons, the Babe hit 714 home runs. It was an easy number to remember because it had a certain symmetry to it. Take the 7 and double it for the 14.

Forty-two years later, Hank Aaron broke that record, surviving vicious racist attacks along the way. Beyond the inexcusable racism, though, Aaron was reviled for overtaking an American icon. He might as well have set a trap for Mickey Mouse or kidnaped Santa Claus.

When Aaron finished his career with 755 homers, his accomplishment was suitably celebrated. It did not, however, erase Ruth from the mind-set of baseball fans. That’s because the Babe had this way of showing up at center stage, equipped with a panache that few could ever duplicate.

When they opened Yankee Stadium, he had the good sense to hit a home run.

When they played the first All-Star game, he hit another home run.

When he called his shot--or did he?--it wasn’t during some meaningless game in the middle of August. It was, instead, in the spotlight of the World Series, when everybody was watching.

He was the Babe, almost a made-up character, whose achievements were so unbelievable that current Yankee hero Don Mattingly honestly thought he was some kind of cartoon character. It was not until Mattingly got to New York that he found out otherwise.

Ruth was plucked out of a Baltimore orphanage at age 19 by baseball entrepreneur Jack Dunn, operator of the old Orioles, who had seen the young man hit some prodigious home runs and recognized his potential. Babe was still George Herman then, shortly before Dunn delivered him to Boston late in 1914.

The young man was a pitcher in those days, and quite a good one. He won 18 games in his first full season with the Red Sox and then 23, leading the league with a 1.75 earned run average in 1916. The next year, he was 24-13, then 13-7. He won all three of his World Series starts, allowing just 19 hits in 31 innings. His Series earned run average was a microscopic 0.87.

He also could hit, though, and the Red Sox soon became restless at having his bat in the lineup only once every four or five days. When Dick Hoblitzell, the Boston first baseman, went into a slump, Ruth was inserted in the lineup on May 6, 1918. His days as a pitcher were numbered.

He led the league with 11 home runs in 317 at-bats that season and a year later hit 29, again leading the league. By then it was clear that Ruth was a special slugger. He caught the attention of the Yankees, who knew Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was strapped for money and interested in selling off his commodities.

The deal was done on Jan. 3, 1920, and Ruth was dispatched to New York for $125,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan. The cash-squeezed Frazee used part of the payoff to fund a Broadway venture, “No, No, Nanette.” The show became a hit, and so did the Babe.

New York and Ruth were made for each other. It was during Prohibition, a time of speakeasies and bathtub gin. Ruth never felt restricted by the rules of the day. He did what he wanted, where and when he wanted. He was, after all, the Babe, the cornerstone of the Yankee franchise.

To punctuate that point, consider the 1926 World Series. Ruth hit a record four home runs, including three in one game. In the ninth inning of Game 7, New York was trailing St. Louis, 3-2. Grover Alexander, who had struck out Tony Lazzeri to escape a bases-loaded jam in the seventh, retired the first two batters. That brought up Ruth, the tying run. Pitching carefully, Alexander walked the Babe.

Now, with Bob Meusel up, representing the winning run, and Lou Gehrig on deck, Ruth decided to do what he wanted to do and took off on his own, attempting to steal second. It wasn’t close. Cardinal catcher Bob O’Farrell gunned down the lumbering Ruth, hardly a speedster, for the final out of the World Series.

It was stuff like that that drove manager Miller Huggins wacky. He clashed frequently with his star slugger, threatening and sometimes imposing fines and suspensions. It never made much difference to the Babe, who was alternately amused and annoyed by the gnat-sized manager.

In 1932, Ruth either did or did not call his shot in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs.

There are some who swore he was merely gesturing in response to some fierce bench jockeying by the Cubs and that if he had the audacity to predict a home run, pitcher Charlie Root would have put Ruth on the seat of his pants. There are others who insisted the Babe pointed to the bleachers and then hit Root’s next pitch to precisely that spot.

Ruth, who knew a good story when he heard one, never said he called his shot. Then again, he never said he didn’t.

Ruth’s salary increased along with the home runs, the pennants and the legends. As the story goes, it reached the sum of $80,000, astronomical in those days, and one enterprising newsman reminded the Babe that he had made more than President Hoover.

“Well,” Ruth replied matter-of-factly, “I had a better year.”

And he did.

Ruth was impossible with names, calling most people “Kiddo,” or “Pally,” or by some other nickname. He loved kids and cameras, often mugging for them, a big, lovable guy with a lust for life.

The Babe did not believe in depriving himself of anything he wanted. The one thing he wanted most, however, was beyond his reach.

Ruth desperately hoped to manage the Yankees. The front office, however, was convinced he could not manage himself, much less the ballclub, and never considered him for the job. He was released in 1934 and signed on with Boston--the Braves, not the Red Sox.

He was 39 then, out of shape and near the end. In his last game, he went out with a flair, hitting three home runs in Pittsburgh, one final exclamation point in a career that produced 2,211 RBIs--again a nice, symmetrical number--and one home run every 11.75 times he batted.

There was a brief stretch when he was put on display as a coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers and then it was over. After that, Ruth’s health deteriorated rapidly.

In June 1948, the Yankees celebrated the 25th anniversary of Yankee Stadium. Ruth, frail and weak, appeared in uniform, leaning on a bat to support himself. Six weeks later, at age 53, he was dead.

Cancer killed Ruth. It could not extinguish his memory, however.