Babe Ruth-Role Model?

It was on this date in 1935 that Yankees slugger Babe Ruth hung up his cleats and called it a career. Now, I’m not a Yankee booster (far from it), but being a baseball fan, you have to acknowledge the place that Babe Ruth and many other Yankees hold in the history of the game.

After 22 seasons, 12 World Series and 714 home runs, Ruth was a larger-than-life personality who became one of the inaugural members of baseball’s Hall of Fame. Let’s not get into the fact that Ruth started out with the Red Sox-prompting the “Curse of The Bambino” which supposedly kept the Sox from winning the World Series until 2004.

All that said, it’s easy to mentally travel back to the good ol’ days, when a sentence containing the name of a baseball player didn’t ALSO include the term “performance enhancing drugs”. To do so would be nostalgic, but not necessarily accurate. The truth is that the great Babe (and most of his contemporaries) would collectively keep today’s gossip magazines and websites humming for weeks on end.

The point is that behavior was not much different back then-but the media coverage of it certainly was. Babe Ruth stretches the meaning of the term "athlete". He was overweight, a man prone to grotesque displays of binge eating, drinking and carousing. His fellow players also enjoyed a lifestyle that would never escape the scrutiny that today’s media inflicts on the famous.

A-Rod goes to a restaurant with Madonna-and it is front page news. Back in Ruth’s time, his escapades were often in front of-or WITH members of the media, who abided by a code of silence with regard to matters of a personal nature. Baseball writers, after all, were interested in the GAME , as were their readers. What these stars did in their off time was their own business.

That’s the way it used to be.

Now, ballplayers-rightly or wrongly-are held to the standard of role model. As such, they remain under the microscope on and off the field. I’m certainly not defending steroid use or infidelity, but before we castigate today’s players, let’s be careful not to make comparisons to the “stars of yesteryear”, whose “image” doesn’t always square with reality.

Enjoy the rare footage below of Ruth hitting his historic 60th Home Run in one season in 1927:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS7Iq_I0i6M
If you’d like my blog in your box daily, drop me an e-mail! Tim.moore@citcomm.com