Number 3?
JULY 20, 2007 TAGS:
By Mike Jensen
BALTIMORE -- There wouldn’t be a ballgame at nearby Camden Yards for seven more hours, so it made sense that the place would be empty, this narrow red-bricked Baltimore rowhouse, the birthplace of a ballplayer who had been dead for almost 60 years.
But it wasn’t empty. People had found their way. Open for less than three hours, the place had welcomed visitors from Rocky Mount, N.C., and Englewood, Colo., from Ossining, N.Y., and Jim Thorpe, Pa. The visitor’s log indicated that others had arrived from Connecticut and New Jersey and Illinois and Virginia and New Hampshire.
You can see the second-story room where Babe Ruth was born in 1895, and a continually playing video asserts that this was the man who made baseball our national pastime. It mentioned how baseball even pushed back its fences, changing the sport’s physical dimensions to deal with Ruth’s power.
His greatest slugging records may have fallen, but when it comes to a bigger question – what in life really lasts? – The Babe seems to make the cut.
Michael Gibbons has an informal quiz he gives every year, asking his University of Baltimore writing students how many recognize the name Brooks Robinson. Twenty years ago, they all knew the great Baltimore Orioles third basemen.
This year, he said, just 2 out of 20 professed any recognition.
“They all know Cal Ripken Jr.,’’ Gibbons said. “It will be interesting to see how Cal’s legacy sustains itself.’’
Every year, Gibbons asks about one other baseball player -- Babe Ruth. If students haven’t heard of him, they are asked to raise their hand.
“In 25 years of teaching, no one has ever raised their hand,’’ Gibbons said. “It appears that Ruth is safe. He is tucked so far into our cultural consciousness.’’
Gibbons asks about Ruth, who died of throat cancer in 1948, because the teacher has another job, as executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum. He has seen Japanese tourists walk in the museum, spot Ruth’s photo, and bow in respect. Years ago, a BBC camera crew came in, reporting to an audience that has little contact with baseball.
As Ruth’s greatest record, his all-time home run record, is being turned over again now --from Hank Aaron, Ruth’s successor, to Barry Bonds -- it doesn’t seem to affect Ruth’s iconic status.
“He’s important,’’ Gibbons said. “When you think of Barry Bonds as a skyscraper on the landscape, then Babe Ruth is Mount Everest. You can’t mess with it. It’s too substantial.’’
For instance, Bonds will have baseball’s home-run record, but Ruth may have another one -- most nicknames. In his recently published book, The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs, Bill Jenkinson includes “a partial list of George Herman Ruth’s nicknames or titles.’’ He lists 80 names. Many of them are familiar to this day. Nobody else could be the Big Bambino or the Sultan of Swat.
But the book does far more than detail nicknames (King of Klout, Mandarin of Maul, Rajah of Rap, etc.). Jenkinson did years of research, sometimes with a tape measure, trying to provide precise information about Ruth’s slugging prowess.
The title of the book refers to Jenkinson’s assertion that Ruth may have hit 104 home runs in 1921 – 45 more than he actually did that season – in today’s conditions, with bandbox stadiums, lower pitching mounds, a longer season and slightly different rules. He provides charts showing average park dimensions then and now, and where Ruth’s hits fell every season of his career. He believes that under present conditions Ruth, credited with 714 career home runs, would have hit 1,158 regular-season homers. (Jenkinson shows how Yankee Stadium, where Ruth played most of his home games, was 490 feet to dead centerfield, but today is only 405 feet).
The book isn’t designed simply as an argument between Bonds and Ruth, or Ruth and Aaron. However, a central premise is that nobody in the game hit balls farther than Ruth did on a consistent basis. Jenkinson provides a lot of persuasive facts, but also tells one story about his own father being taken by an uncle to a Yankees game against the Philadelphia Athletics in 1930, and being crushed when they didn’t actually get inside old Shibe Park. The uncle instead decided to buy 50-cent rooftop seats across the street, past right field.
Jenkinson’s father told him how he was disconnected from the events inside the stadium until a Ruth shot arced directly toward him, then whizzed far over his head, landing on a street more than 500 feet from home plate.
“All of a sudden, it was like I was in the infield,’’ Jenkinson’s father told him.
One more family tale is retold, involving Jenkinson’s Aunt Mary, who worked for Western Electric in North Philadelphia and recalled the times the Yankees came to town by train, getting off at the North Broad Street train station. The way Jenkinson tells it, she would hear shouts of “Babe Ruth is coming!’’ She would get up from her desk and look out the window and see Yankees players walking the five blocks from the train station to the ballpark. All were carrying luggage except Ruth.
“It was because he always led a group of neighborhood children who gathered around him as though he was the Pied Piper,’’ Jenkinson wrote. “On most occasions Ruth actually carried one of the kids on his shoulders or in his arms, while laughing and waving to the adults. That is the way Babe Ruth arrived at the ballpark.’’
The author doesn’t look past Ruth’s hot dog-rich diet or varied nocturnal activities, but does mention that he employed the top exercise trainer of his day to prepare for seasons.
“It is doubtful that any Major League player ever worked harder than Ruth,’’ Jenkinson wrote. “Partying hard and working hard are not mutually exclusive.… Babe also accepted his role as baseball’s preeminent personage with a profound sense of commitment.’’
Gibbons, the museum director, said he believes that worldwide, Ruth is the Baseball Slugger, just as Martin Luther King Jr. is the Civil Rights Leader, Marilyn Monroe the Sex Symbol and Elvis Presley the Rock ’n Roll Singer.
Since you can see the lights of the stadium at Camden Yards from the window of the room Ruth was born in, it makes sense that customers from the ballpark often stop over.
“We can do 400 or 500 [extra] people a day if the Red Sox or Yankees are in town,’’ Gibbons said.
The birthplace drew 60,000 visitors a year when Camden Yards first opened and the stadum was full for every Orioles game, Gibbons said. Now, they get about half that many. Scheduled renovations will help, he said, but even Babe Ruth’s legacy is subject to current fortunes. A planned convention-center hotel should provide more customers.
“I also expect the Orioles will not always stink,’’ Gibbons said.
Mike Jensen is a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He last wrote for Obit about memorial tournaments
BALTIMORE -- There wouldn’t be a ballgame at nearby Camden Yards for seven more hours, so it made sense that the place would be empty, this narrow red-bricked Baltimore rowhouse, the birthplace of a ballplayer who had been dead for almost 60 years.
But it wasn’t empty. People had found their way. Open for less than three hours, the place had welcomed visitors from Rocky Mount, N.C., and Englewood, Colo., from Ossining, N.Y., and Jim Thorpe, Pa. The visitor’s log indicated that others had arrived from Connecticut and New Jersey and Illinois and Virginia and New Hampshire.
You can see the second-story room where Babe Ruth was born in 1895, and a continually playing video asserts that this was the man who made baseball our national pastime. It mentioned how baseball even pushed back its fences, changing the sport’s physical dimensions to deal with Ruth’s power.
His greatest slugging records may have fallen, but when it comes to a bigger question – what in life really lasts? – The Babe seems to make the cut.
Michael Gibbons has an informal quiz he gives every year, asking his University of Baltimore writing students how many recognize the name Brooks Robinson. Twenty years ago, they all knew the great Baltimore Orioles third basemen.
This year, he said, just 2 out of 20 professed any recognition.
“They all know Cal Ripken Jr.,’’ Gibbons said. “It will be interesting to see how Cal’s legacy sustains itself.’’
Every year, Gibbons asks about one other baseball player -- Babe Ruth. If students haven’t heard of him, they are asked to raise their hand.“In 25 years of teaching, no one has ever raised their hand,’’ Gibbons said. “It appears that Ruth is safe. He is tucked so far into our cultural consciousness.’’
Gibbons asks about Ruth, who died of throat cancer in 1948, because the teacher has another job, as executive director of the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum. He has seen Japanese tourists walk in the museum, spot Ruth’s photo, and bow in respect. Years ago, a BBC camera crew came in, reporting to an audience that has little contact with baseball.
As Ruth’s greatest record, his all-time home run record, is being turned over again now --from Hank Aaron, Ruth’s successor, to Barry Bonds -- it doesn’t seem to affect Ruth’s iconic status.
“He’s important,’’ Gibbons said. “When you think of Barry Bonds as a skyscraper on the landscape, then Babe Ruth is Mount Everest. You can’t mess with it. It’s too substantial.’’
For instance, Bonds will have baseball’s home-run record, but Ruth may have another one -- most nicknames. In his recently published book, The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs, Bill Jenkinson includes “a partial list of George Herman Ruth’s nicknames or titles.’’ He lists 80 names. Many of them are familiar to this day. Nobody else could be the Big Bambino or the Sultan of Swat.
But the book does far more than detail nicknames (King of Klout, Mandarin of Maul, Rajah of Rap, etc.). Jenkinson did years of research, sometimes with a tape measure, trying to provide precise information about Ruth’s slugging prowess.
The title of the book refers to Jenkinson’s assertion that Ruth may have hit 104 home runs in 1921 – 45 more than he actually did that season – in today’s conditions, with bandbox stadiums, lower pitching mounds, a longer season and slightly different rules. He provides charts showing average park dimensions then and now, and where Ruth’s hits fell every season of his career. He believes that under present conditions Ruth, credited with 714 career home runs, would have hit 1,158 regular-season homers. (Jenkinson shows how Yankee Stadium, where Ruth played most of his home games, was 490 feet to dead centerfield, but today is only 405 feet).The book isn’t designed simply as an argument between Bonds and Ruth, or Ruth and Aaron. However, a central premise is that nobody in the game hit balls farther than Ruth did on a consistent basis. Jenkinson provides a lot of persuasive facts, but also tells one story about his own father being taken by an uncle to a Yankees game against the Philadelphia Athletics in 1930, and being crushed when they didn’t actually get inside old Shibe Park. The uncle instead decided to buy 50-cent rooftop seats across the street, past right field.
Jenkinson’s father told him how he was disconnected from the events inside the stadium until a Ruth shot arced directly toward him, then whizzed far over his head, landing on a street more than 500 feet from home plate.
“All of a sudden, it was like I was in the infield,’’ Jenkinson’s father told him.
One more family tale is retold, involving Jenkinson’s Aunt Mary, who worked for Western Electric in North Philadelphia and recalled the times the Yankees came to town by train, getting off at the North Broad Street train station. The way Jenkinson tells it, she would hear shouts of “Babe Ruth is coming!’’ She would get up from her desk and look out the window and see Yankees players walking the five blocks from the train station to the ballpark. All were carrying luggage except Ruth.
“It was because he always led a group of neighborhood children who gathered around him as though he was the Pied Piper,’’ Jenkinson wrote. “On most occasions Ruth actually carried one of the kids on his shoulders or in his arms, while laughing and waving to the adults. That is the way Babe Ruth arrived at the ballpark.’’
The author doesn’t look past Ruth’s hot dog-rich diet or varied nocturnal activities, but does mention that he employed the top exercise trainer of his day to prepare for seasons.“It is doubtful that any Major League player ever worked harder than Ruth,’’ Jenkinson wrote. “Partying hard and working hard are not mutually exclusive.… Babe also accepted his role as baseball’s preeminent personage with a profound sense of commitment.’’
Gibbons, the museum director, said he believes that worldwide, Ruth is the Baseball Slugger, just as Martin Luther King Jr. is the Civil Rights Leader, Marilyn Monroe the Sex Symbol and Elvis Presley the Rock ’n Roll Singer.
Since you can see the lights of the stadium at Camden Yards from the window of the room Ruth was born in, it makes sense that customers from the ballpark often stop over.
“We can do 400 or 500 [extra] people a day if the Red Sox or Yankees are in town,’’ Gibbons said.
The birthplace drew 60,000 visitors a year when Camden Yards first opened and the stadum was full for every Orioles game, Gibbons said. Now, they get about half that many. Scheduled renovations will help, he said, but even Babe Ruth’s legacy is subject to current fortunes. A planned convention-center hotel should provide more customers.
“I also expect the Orioles will not always stink,’’ Gibbons said.
Mike Jensen is a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He last wrote for Obit about memorial tournaments
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MikeJ wrote on July 21, 2007 7:26am
'Take me out to the ballgame... the golden era of baseball!' [Report Comment]
