Babe Ruth’s Final Years in the Major Leagues

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Speaker 1: And we returned to Our American Stories. Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all time, yet time has also proven to be his greatest enemy.

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Speaker 2: Barna McNish presents.

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Speaker 1: The story of Babe Ruth’s hectic final years as a baseball professional, as told by Mike Gibbons, who’s the executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Speaker 3: Our story begins in the nineteen thirty-two World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs.

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Speaker 4: The Babe came up in Game Three and in the fifth inning, pointed to where he was going to hit the next pitch and hit it for the longest home run in Wrigley Field history. It became known as “the Called Shot,” one of the most dramatic World Series moments of all time. Now, what happened, though, was this series, which was won by the Yankees, was shortened. Not all the games were played, including the last two, which were scheduled for Yankee Stadium, and the Yankees had to refund one hundred thousand dollars to ticket holders for the games that were not played. This was during the Great Depression. The Yankees, although they were making money, did not have a lot of extra income from the World Series that year and went into nineteen thirty-three having to cut salaries, including a bunch of money from Babe Ruth’s contract. So, Babe takes a cut. He’s not happy about that, but goes off and performs pretty well that season. He beat Lou Gehrig in the home run count that year, but was a distant second to slugger Jimmie Foxx from the Philadelphia Athletics. In his last game of nineteen thirty-three, Babe Ruth was asked to pitch at Yankee Stadium by the Yankees, and he said, “Okay, I’ll going to do that.” He had only pitched once in the previous twelve years, but anyway, he got himself in shape to pitch and went out and pitched a complete game, a six-to-five victory over the Boston Red Sox. So, Babe still had it in him. So, we come to the end of nineteen thirty-three. Ruth knows he’s getting old, and, you know, he says, “I really think that I want to stick around with the Yankees because I’d like to manage.” So he went to Yankees’ ownership and asked them if there was a chance that he could ever manage the New York Ball Club. And Colonel Ruppert, the owner of the Yankees, said, “No, I’m going to stick with McCarthy, our current manager.” And to wit, he gave McCarthy a three-year extension through nineteen thirty-five. Babe Ruth never had a chance with the Yankees. He was approached about that time to manage the Boston Red Sox, but Ruth said, “No.” He still fell that he had too much cachet as a player with the Yankees, and he turned that down. The White Sox were interested as well. Again, Ruth showed no interest. He wanted to play and manage in New York, and after the nineteen thirty-three season, he found out that the Detroit Tigers really wanted him. The Tiger owner was Navin, and Frank spoke with the Yankee ownership and asked them if they could work out some kind of a deal that would get Ruth to come over to Detroit as a player-manager in exchange for a ballplayer or two. And they did work out a deal, and Navin asked Ruth to come to Detroit and meet with him, but the Babe had scheduled a trip to Honolulu with his family and said, “I’ll talk to you when I get back from Hawaii.” In the meantime, Navin was not real happy with that response and signed a guy by the name of Mickey Cochrane, who had played for Connie Mack in Philadelphia. And Cochrane was signed by the Tigers as a player-manager. And Ruth’s response when he found out about this in Hawaii? He said, “Well, I’m another year older, and maybe time to quit, but I will play if I have a chance to be a manager.” The Yankees suggested that Babe in nineteen thirty-four would go and manage their minor league squad in Newark, New Jersey, and he said, “Now, I’m not going to do that. I’m a major league baseball player. And why would I need to go and manage in Newark? I know this game well. I can take over as a major league manager right now.” They offered to pay him less money again that year, and he did accept another salary decrease, going from fifty-two thousand in nineteen thirty-three down to thirty-five thousand in nineteen thirty-four. That was still the most money made by any major league player that year. His skills badly diminished. And when he got going in that season, he had a cold in his back, whatever the heck that means. He was hit by a pitch that sidelined him for a while. And then Lou Gehrig hit a ground ball when Ruth was on base. The ball hit Babe above the right ankle and knocked him out for a bit, and, you know, things just were getting worse and worse and worse. The Yankees, who would finish second that year, were fortunate in August to see Ruth hit his seven hundredth home run. But, again, at that time—that really happy time—he said that he was almost done as a regular player and would only play another year if he was offered the opportunity to manage. He asked Colonel Ruppert again about Manager McCarthy. Ruppert said he still believed McCarthy was his guy.

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Speaker 3: The Babe turned down offers from other teams until he was approached by the Boston Braves.

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Speaker 4: During that time, a deal was worked out between the Yankees and the Boston Braves, who were interested in having Ruth come over to be a fan draw, and they dangled in front of Ruth the opportunity later on to manage. So they gave the Babe twenty-five thousand dollars to be an assistant manager and player and also a vice president of the team. And so he accepted the deal and agreed to play and to be an assistant manager to Manager Bill McKechnie, and so off they went into nineteen thirty-five. In the first game of the year, Ruth hit a two-run homer and accounted for the other two runs that the Braves got as they beat the Giants four to two. But then his body really turned against him. He is forty years old, and he collected two more hits; one being a homer over the next month of the baseball season. So things are really spiraling down for the Babe at this time, and he starts to talk about being put on the voluntary retired list and doesn’t want to play anymore.

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Speaker 3: But Fuchs convinced Ruth to suit up for one more series of away games.

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Speaker 4: He suits up, he goes out, goes on the trip, starting in St. Louis. And as we get into late May of that year, things are just not going very well, but he continues to play. His batting average dropped to one fifty-five. “Can you believe that?” By the time he gets to Pittsburgh, he does have a Ruthian day. On Saturday, May twenty-fifth, Babe comes to the plate, first inning, and hits a two-run homer. Then he comes up again, this time off of Pitcher Guy Bush, who was a rival of Ruth, stating back to the nineteen thirty-two World Series where Bush was pitching for the Cubs and hit Ruth in an at-bat. And so Ruth remembered that, and he hit another two-run shot off of Guy Bush. In the seventh inning, Bush is still on the mound, and Babe comes up and hits Home Run Number Three off of Guy Bush. Bush later said that he had never seen a ball hit so hard, and it went over the roof at Forbes Field, the first ever to travel that distance. Someone measured the home run as being six hundred feet, the longest in the history of any game ever played at Pittsburgh.

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Speaker 2: It proved to be that mammoth.

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Speaker 4: Six-hundred-foot home run proved to be Ruth’s final hit in the Major Leagues. In Philadelphia, on May thirtieth, Thursday, he batted. It was Babe Ruth Day in Philadelphia, and he came to the plate, struck out in the first inning. And then, in the bottom of the first, as he was playing the field, he hurt his knee and left the game, and he would never go back and play again. Now, the owner, Fuchs, he was saying, “Come on, Babe, we got to have you here.” Babe said, “Look, I’m hurt. I’ve been invited to get on board the new ocean liner called the Normandy, a French boat back in New York.” And he said, “Let me just go down there and heal, and I’ll take a couple of days and then I’ll come back with the club.” Fuchs said, “No, you’re staying right here with us,” and so that was it. Ruth blew up, Fuchs blew up, and on June second, a Sunday, Ruth went ahead and retired from the game of baseball, given his unconditional release by Fuchs. It’s interesting: the Braves were ten and twenty-seven when Ruth quit and wound up finishing thirty-eight, eight, and one point fifteen, the worst record of any National League team in the twentieth century, and.

00:10:07
Speaker 1: A terrific job on the storytelling in production by Carter McNish, and a special thanks to Mike Gibbons, who’s the executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace in the Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Speaker 2: And what a story! Imagine this, folks.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty-three, ballplayers took a pay cut like the rest of America, and Babe Ruth’s Sowery continued to get cut as his talents and skill faded.

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Speaker 2: But what did he do?

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Speaker 1: His last hit in his life, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, six hundred feet, cleared the roof, never to have another hit again in his life.

00:10:39
Speaker 2: The story of Babe Ruth’s retirement, here on Our American Stories.