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Vote. 95.1% (first ballot) George Herman " Babe " Ruth (February 6, 1895 – August 16, 1948) was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. Nicknamed " the Bambino " and " the Sultan of Swat ", he began his MLB career as a star left-handed pitcher for the ...
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- List of Career Achievements by Babe Ruth
1930 (Ruth 49, Gehrig 41) 1931 (Ruth 46, Gehrig 46) Achieved...
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Babe Ruth (1895–1948) was an American baseball outfielder...
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- Overview
- Early life and career
- Boston Red Sox
- New York Yankees
Babe Ruth (born February 6, 1895, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died August 16, 1948, New York, New York) American professional baseball player. Largely because of his home-run hitting between 1919 and 1935, Ruth became, and perhaps remains to this day, America’s most celebrated athlete.
Part of the aura surrounding Ruth arose from his modest origins. Though the legend that he was an orphan is untrue, Ruth did have a difficult childhood. Both his parents, George Herman Ruth, Sr., and Kate Shamberger Ruth, came from working-class, ethnic (German) families. Ruth, Sr., owned and operated a saloon in a tough neighbourhood on the Baltimore waterfront. Living in rooms above the saloon, the Ruths had eight children, but only George, Jr., the firstborn, and a younger sister survived to adulthood. Since neither his busy father nor his sickly mother had much time for the youngster, George roamed the streets, engaged in petty thievery, chewed tobacco, sometimes got drunk, repeatedly skipped school, and had several run-ins with the law. In 1902 his parents sent him to the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a Baltimore, Maryland, asylum for incorrigibles and orphans run by the Xaverian Brothers order of the Roman Catholic Church. For the next 10 years Ruth was in and out of St. Mary’s. When his mother died from tuberculosis in 1912, he became a permanent ward of the school.
Baseball offered Ruth an opportunity to escape both poverty and obscurity. While a teenager at St. Mary’s, he achieved local renown for his baseball-playing prowess, and in 1914 Jack Dunn, owner of the local minor-league Baltimore Orioles franchise, signed him to a contract for $600. Ruth obtained the nickname “Babe” when a sportswriter referred to him as one of “Dunn’s babes.” For his day, Ruth was a large man; he stood more than six feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds. Before the end of the 1914 season, his performance as a pitcher was so impressive that Dunn sold Ruth to the American League Boston Red Sox. That same year Ruth met, courted, and wed waitress Helen Woodford.
Ruth soon became the best left-handed pitcher in baseball. Between 1915 and 1919 he won 87 games, yielded a stunning earned run average of only 2.16, won three World Series games (one in 1916 and two in 1918), and, during a streak for scoreless World Series innings, set a record by pitching 292/3 consecutive shutout innings.
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At the same time, Ruth exhibited so much hitting clout that, on the days he did not pitch, manager Ed Barrow played him at first base or in the outfield. In an age when home runs were rare, Ruth slammed out 29 in 1919, thereby topping the single-season record of 27 set in 1884 (by Ned Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings). In 1920 Harry Frazee, the team owner and a producer of Broadway plays who was always short of money, sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 plus a personal loan from Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert. While initially reluctant to leave Boston, Ruth signed a two-year contract with the Yankees for $10,000 a year.
As a full-time outfielder with the Yankees, Ruth quickly emerged as the greatest hitter to have ever played the game. Nicknamed by sportswriters the “Sultan of Swat,” in his first season with the Yankees in 1920, he shattered his own single-season record by hitting 54 home runs, 25 more than he had hit in 1919. The next season Ruth did even better: he slammed out 59 homers and drove in 170 runs. In 1922 his salary jumped to $52,000, making him by far the highest-paid player in baseball. That summer he and Helen appeared in public with a new daughter, Dorothy, who was apparently the result of one of his many sexual escapades.
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In 1922 Ruth’s home run totals dropped to 35, but in 1923—with the opening of the magnificent new Yankee Stadium, dubbed by a sportswriter “The House That Ruth Built”—he hit 41 home runs, batted .393, and had a record-shattering slugging percentage (total bases divided by at bats) of .764. He continued with a strong season in 1924 when he hit a league-leading 46 home runs, but in 1925, while suffering from an intestinal disorder (thought by many to be syphilis), his offensive production declined sharply. That season, while playing in only 98 games, he hit 25 home runs.
He also struggled in his private life. Two years earlier he had met and fallen in love with actress Claire Hodgson, and in 1925 he legally separated from Helen. Helen’s death from a fire in 1929 freed him to marry Hodgson the same year. The couple then formally adopted Dorothy, and Ruth adopted Hodgson’s daughter, Julia.
On the field during the 1926 season, Ruth returned to his old form. Indeed, in the 1926–32 seasons Ruth in his offensive output towered over all other players in the game. For those seven seasons he averaged 49 home runs per season, batted in 151 runs, and had a batting average of .353 while taking the Yankees to four league pennants and three World Series championships. In 1927 Ruth’s salary leapt to $70,000. That season he hit 60 home runs, a record that remained unbroken until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961 (see also Researcher’s Note: Baseball’s problematic single-season home run record). That same season Ruth teamed with Lou Gehrig to form the greatest home-run hitting duo in baseball. Ruth and Gehrig were the heart of the 1927 Yankees team—nicknamed Murderer’s Row—which is regarded by many baseball experts as the greatest team to ever play the game.
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- Ruth first gained fame as a pitcher. Although best remembered for swatting a prodigious 714 home runs and slugging .690, which remains a major-league record, Babe Ruth was one of baseball’s most dominant left-handed pitchers in the 1910s.
- He did not retire as a New York Yankee. Ruth’s major-league career not only started in Boston, it ended there as well, but not with the Red Sox. Discarded by the Yankees as his performance waned, Ruth signed with the National League’s Boston Braves in 1935 in the hopes of becoming the team’s manager the following season.
- Ruth was not a unanimous choice for the Baseball Hall of Fame. A year after his retirement, Ruth was among the five initial inductees elected to the new National Baseball Hall of Fame under construction in Cooperstown, New York.
- Ruth was not an orphan. Although Ruth attended St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, Delinquent, Incorrigible and Wayward Boys in Baltimore, he wasn’t an orphan, but merely delinquent, incorrigible and wayward.
Location. New York City, US. Hawthorne, New York, US. Type. Funeral. Babe Ruth died on August 16, 1948, from a type of throat cancer. He underwent hormone therapy, and surgery in an attempt to treat his cancer. He was also one of the first cancer patients to receive sequential radiation and chemotherapy treatment.
Born Feb. 6, 1895 in Baltimore, Md., Ruth came of age as mass communication devices like radio and movies shrunk the distance from sea to sea. As a young left-handed pitcher with the Red Sox, he was one of the game’s heroes. But later as a power-hitting outfielder for the Yankees, Ruth became an icon – transcending sport.
Apr 3, 2014 · Baseball Players. Babe Ruth. Baseball icon Babe Ruth set numerous records as a pitcher and slugging outfielder. He was among the first five players inducted into the sport's Hall of Fame....
George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr. (February 6, 1895 – August 16, 1948) was a famous baseball player during the 1910s and 1930s in Major League Baseball. He played with the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and the Boston Braves, and hit 714 home runs in his career. Only two players, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds, have hit more.
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