Babe Ruth Changed Everything

Before Babe Ruth, baseball was a game of singles, bunts, stolen bases, and pitching. After Ruth, it was a game of home runs. That sentence is an oversimplification, but it is not wrong.

In 1918, Ruth was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. He was one of the best left-handers in the American League, with a 2.28 career ERA and two World Series wins to his name. He was 23 years old. His manager, Ed Barrow, started letting him play in the outfield on his non-pitching days because he was too good a hitter to sit on the bench four days out of five.

In 1919, Ruth hit 29 home runs. The previous American League record was 16. He hit nearly twice as many home runs as any player had ever hit in a single season, and he did it while still pitching part-time.

In January 1920, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000, plus a $300,000 loan secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park. The sale would haunt Boston for 86 years and produce the Curse of the Bambino. For the Yankees, it was the beginning of a dynasty.

Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920, his first year in New York. He hit 59 in 1921. The numbers were so far beyond anything anyone had seen that they changed how people thought about the sport. Other batters noticed. If a clean ball off a full swing could go that far, maybe choking up and slapping singles wasn't the only way to play. The culture of hitting shifted. Teams began building around power rather than speed and contact.

The timing was not accidental. Ruth's emergence coincided with the end of the dead ball era. The spitball was banned in 1920. Umpires began replacing dirty baseballs with clean ones during games. The ball itself may have been wound tighter. All of these changes favored hitters, and Ruth benefited from every one of them. But he was also simply better than everyone else. In 1920, he hit more home runs than every other American League team except one.

Ruth also saved baseball from the Black Sox scandal. The 1919 World Series fix, which became public in September 1920, threatened to destroy public faith in the sport. Ruth's spectacular hitting gave fans a reason to come back. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923 and was immediately nicknamed "The House That Ruth Built," was constructed specifically because the Yankees were drawing so many fans that they needed their own facility. They had been tenants of the Giants at the Polo Grounds.

Ruth's career statistics are staggering even by modern standards. He hit 714 home runs. He batted .342 for his career. He led the league in home runs 12 times, in RBI six times, in walks 11 times, and in on-base percentage 10 times. His career OPS of 1.164 is the highest in history. He won seven World Series titles.

But the numbers, impressive as they are, understate his impact. Ruth changed the economics of the game, the strategy of the game, and the relationship between the game and the public. He was the first athlete to be a national celebrity in the modern sense, recognized by people who had never watched a game. He earned more money than the President of the United States, and when asked about it, reportedly said, "I know, but I had a better year than Hoover."

Before Ruth, baseball was a sport. After Ruth, baseball was an industry. Every home run hit in every stadium today is, in some measure, a consequence of the fact that a left-handed pitcher from Baltimore decided he would rather hit.