One Summer: America, 1927

he have had something this special to call his own – he immediately shared them all around. This was a kid who deserved a happier childhood. From 1912 to 1914 not a single person visited him.
    The brothers at St Mary’s were exceedingly devoted to baseball. The school fielded no fewer than forty-four teams, all fully equipped and with uniforms. No amount of money could have bought Ruth better preparation for a career in baseball. It was through baseball that Ruth ‘met and learned to love the greatest man I’ve ever known’ – Brother Matthias Boutilier. Of French stock from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Matthias was a gentle, kindly giant. He stood six feet six inches tall and weighed 250 pounds, but always spoke softly. He was a wonderful baseball player, too, as well as a gifted coach – and in Babe Ruth he had a youngster who was both more talented and hard-working than anyone he had ever come across. At eight, George was playing with twelve-year-olds; at twelve with sixteen-year-olds. By early adolescence he could playevery position on the field better than anyone else at the school – even catcher, where he had to wear a right-handed mitt on the wrong hand because the school didn’t own a left-handed mitt. As a batter, he was incomparable. By his teenage years, he stood six feet two inches tall, weighed nearly 200 pounds, and was immensely strong.
    Hearing about an amazing kid at St Mary’s, in 1914 a scout for the Baltimore Orioles, then a minor league team in the International League, came to have a look. When George came to the plate, the scout was surprised to see that the right fielder left his normal spot and trotted to a position much further out – so far out, in fact, that he stood on another playing field. Ruth still lofted the ball over his head. It was one of three long shots he hit that day. Surprisingly, the scout was not particularly captivated by Ruth’s power. Hitting baseballs a great distance in 1914 was an interesting talent, but not one worth cultivating. It was pitching that the Orioles needed and it was as a pitcher that they signed him.
    Thus it was in early March 1914 that George Herman Ruth, just turned nineteen, bade farewell to Brother Matthias and his St Mary’s friends, boarded a train and headed south to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for his first spring training and a new life as a professional baseball player. It was the first time he had been on a train, first time he had been out of Maryland, first time he had seen small towns and open countryside, first time he had stayed in a hotel or ordered from a menu. He could not have been greener. He didn’t even realize that the majors consisted of two leagues. The nickname his teammates gave him now, ‘Babe’ (on account of his innocence and youthfulness), could hardly have been apter. Ruth was in every sense but the physical one a little boy. With his first paycheque he bought himself a bicycle. In hotels, when there was nothing else to do, he rode the lifts for hours. His years of communal living had left him wholly innocent of modesty when naked or on the lavatory, and with virtually no sense of private property. His first roommate, Ernie Shore, was dismayed to discover weeks intothe season that throughout that period Ruth had been sharing his toothbrush.
    Almost at once Ruth displayed the outsized appetite for which he became famous. The notion of being able to order whatever he wanted in hotel dining rooms was a treat he never got over. He also quickly discovered sex. He had no shyness there either. A teammate named Larry Gardner recalled walking into a room and finding Ruth on the floor having sex with a prostitute. ‘He was smoking a cigar and eating peanuts and this woman was working on him,’ Gardner said in a tone of understandable wonder.
    ‘When they let him out,’ another teammate recalled, ‘it was like turning a wild animal out of a cage.’ Neither then nor later was Ruth terribly picky. Marshall Hunt of the New York Daily News once remarked of Ruth’s women that generally they ‘would really only appeal to a man who was just stepping out of a prison after serving a 15-year sentence’.
    The Orioles in 1914 were a team in trouble. Their fans were deserting them in droves for the Baltimore Terrapins of the new (and short-lived) Federal League. fn1 At one point the Orioles played before an audience of just seventeen people while the Terrapins entertained a full and roaring house across the street.