pat alston replied to a point that the ny times, julia ruth stevens and i made about babe ruth, namely that the slugger liked to frequent new york's
famed cotton club in the 20s.

pat wrote, with a smile, "Sounds like Ruth might have also had a thing for black women."

to which i say, that ain't all, pat.

if you read leigh montville's recent bio of ruth, you'll see that, from about 1914-'29, when he married, ruth had a thing for all women.
he didn't discriminate, he welcomed young and old, skinny and fat, black, red, white and yellow throughout the evening and into the
wee hours of the morning. often more than one at a time.

perhaps the first most remarkable thing about ruth's baseball career was that he played the first half of it on about 3 hours sleep
a night, nights that were less than restful.

jimmie reese, a former third baseman with ruth's yankees, was his assigned roommate, but that didn't mean reese saw much
of the babe. he used to tell people: "I didn't really room with Babe Ruth. I roomed with his suitcase."

the second most remarkable thing? ruth did all he did without training (and wearing wool uniforms on hot days).

in fact, ruth likely got a pot belly not only because of his gargantuan appetite (he would often eat as many as a dozen hot dogs DURING
a game), but because the "trainers" of his day told him not to run or lift weights while in season, they said running was bad for his legs.
if you see pictures of ruth without a shirt in the late '20s, you'll see he had a barrel chest, a growing pot belly, and muscleless, long skinny arms.

imagine if ruth had welcomed only, say, one woman a night? then slept six hours and trained? barry bonds would still be on 'roids, still chasing his records.

-m.

p.s. if julia ruth stevens' supposition that it was the owners' racism that kept ruth from managing (and i'll bet she's right) because they
suspected that ruth would have brought blacks onto his team, then that's really too bad for ruth, for the black ballplayers, the fans then, and for
for us, too. imagine not only the social justice implications, but the great stories we could have had handed down to us if we had histories
of long-ball slugger josh gibson facing, say, bob feller, or satchel paige pitching against joe dimaggio, or the reed-thin, lightning fast, cool papa bell
trying to steal on yankee catcher and future hall-of-famer bill dickey?

there are moments that highlight what might have been, as when dizzy dean, the hall-of-fame cardinal pitcher on the entertaining
"gas house gang" teams of the mid-'30s and the last nl pitcher to win 30 games, once said that satchel paige was the best pitcher
he ever saw. the arkansan, speaking in the south in the '30s, pitched against satchel on barnstorming teams and said
he wished that the two were on the same major league team, a revolutionary statement for its day. when a reporter asked why, dean
said, "well, hell, if satch and i was on the same team, we'd win 30 games each, wrap up the pennant by the fourth of july and go fishin'
until the world series."

there's more than a little sad truth to that.



-- Edited by mikehart on Wednesday 26th of March 2014 11:42:24 PM