Stewart

Quite some time ago I was fortunate enough to interview Babe Ruth’s charming daughter, Julia Ruth-Stevens, and her son Tom in her winter home outside of Phoenix, Arizona.

The house featured some, but not a great deal of, Ruth memorabilia, but more importantly, it housed a whole lot of Ruthian memories.

Tom shared a story that richly illustrated his grandfather’s greatness. He once ran into the then oldest living member of the Hall of Fame, Joe Sewell.

“He was wheelchair-bound then, but he had played with Babe in the 30s. He was a third baseman with the Yankees (1931-33) in the twilight of Babe’s career.

“He had a twinkle in his eye while he was telling (of the time) he was the last one in the locker room and Babe came in, almost stumbling, late for practice for shagging flies. The first thing that would come to people’s mind was that he had been out partying or something like that, but he wasn’t — even he couldn’t do that forever, particularly at his age at that time. He’d long ago given that up anyway. My grandmother wouldn’t have stood for it; in a lot of ways she was one of the best things that happened to him. She brought him up short, so to speak.

“Anyway, Sewell was just about to go on the field, and by this time Babe was getting dressed and he said, ‘Hey, kid, can you give me a hand getting dressed? There’s something wrong here and I can’t figure it out.’ He had put his pants on backwards.

“What had happened was his knees were so shot by that time in his career he was in a continual search for painkillers. With prescription drugs, some of them don’t necessarily agree with you too well. Apparently that was what happened in this case.

“So he (Sewell) proceeded to tell the story of how he helped him get dressed and then went out onto the field, and Babe followed along afterwards. In spite of all that, he put two out and went 3-for-5, I think, and had five or six RBI, not too shabby a day.

“At that point Joe Sewell looked up at me and said, ‘Son, your grandfather was a baseball god.'” Meanwhile, Julia pointed out how her family had ties to baseball royalty even before her mother Claire married Babe.

“There was a definite association with baseball. Mother’s father, my grandfather who I never knew, was a lawyer and he did some work for Ty Cobb, and mother had met Cobb at the time. She was interested in baseball before she ever met Daddy.

“And Johnny Mize’s grandmother and Mother’s mother were sisters. He was a really nice guy, very quiet. I guess you might say he was a lot like Ted Williams. He didn’t play up to the press that much, but he was a darned good ballplayer, and he is in the Hall of Fame.”

She was aware, too, of Mize’s records such as his being the first player to have the most career three-home run games (six).

Returning to the subject of her father, Julia said, “There’s scarcely a day goes by that his name is not mentioned some way: as the answer to a quiz on a quiz show, or I remember when they were playing the World Series and the playoffs, they’d say (of a prodigious home run), ‘That was a Ruthian clout.'”

Grandson Tom noted, “And there are still some records that Babe holds even after all this time. Some of which, I think, are unassailable. His lifetime slugging percentage (.690) is as unassailable as Cobb’s lifetime batting average.”

As superb as Ted Williams was, his slugging percentage, second to Ruth’s, is a distant 56 points behind the Babe.

Tom went on, “There are a lot of ballplayers who never see .600, and good ballplayers, like Frank Thomas (.568 lifetime).”

Some decent players won’t even “see .600 in a single season in their heyday.” Only 10 players have a lifetime slugging percentage above .600.

His assessment is, of course, correct. Ruth did things others could only dream about, consistently coming out on top. He almost routinely headed the leaderboard for coveted categories such as home runs, runs driven in, slugging, and even batting average one season. His teams won 10 pennants (including his often-forgotten three world championships with the Red Sox) and seven World Series.

Famed sportswriter Heywood Broun had it right when he stated, “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.”

Some material from Babe Ruth: A Biography by Wayne Stewart. Available on line: Amazon, Barnes & Noble.