BABE RUTH: FAT AND 43 AND NEVER TO PLAY BALL AGAIN (Published 1985) (2024)

LET'S go back in time for a baseball story that comes as a deep, dark secret. I give you Babe Ruth, fat and 43, and suddenly back in the game in 1938 as a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers, of all teams. After a few months, he asks one small favor. He wants to be activated, to play again. Incredibly, the Dodgers, who are going nowhere, say no. They take the bat out of his hands. You don't believe it? It happened.

I think of this wrenching scenario every year as we approach September, traditionally the time when rosters expand. I think of it for two reasons. First, because it seems utterly incomprehensible that anybody would tell Babe Ruth he couldn't play baseball, if only for a month, if only as a pinch-hitter. Second, because his appeal was turned down in the last days of August.

There was a third. I think of it because it was my story, no one else's. As a kid baseball writer on The New York Sun, I sat next to the Babe in a Pittsburgh dugout when he asked to play again - and I could see those headlines jumping on Page One. How wrong I was.

Ruth was still the idol of the masses, the man who turned a nation of immigrants into baseball fans.

Now it was the summer of 1938 and Ruth had been yanked off the golf courses and stuffed into a Dodger uniform by the new man in charge of the Flatbush Follies. The name was Larry MacPhail, lampooned in song by the New York baseball writers as Thomas A. Edison MacPhail because he always thought of something. Now he thought of the Babe three years in retirement and what a waste of a natural resource.

So he struck a deal. The Babe - from mid-June on - would get $15,000 to position himself on the first-base coaching lines, to let people see him as if he were a national monument, which he was. He would get to play some on the open dates MacPhail would fill with exhibitions in places like Syracuse and Elmira and Buffalo.