One Summer: America, 1927

Unable to meet their payroll, the Orioles began selling players. In July of his rookie season, Ruth found himself abruptly dealt to the Boston Red Sox. He hurried north and on the day of his arrival in Boston, 11 July, was sent out to pitch, which meant that the first major league game he ever saw was one he played in. fn2 He scattered eight hits and won 4 to 3.
    So, just four months after leaving St Mary’s, without ever having lived independently in the outside world, Babe Ruth was a major league baseball player. During that summer, Ruth frequently ate breakfast at a coffee shop called Lander’s. There he chatted to a pretty waitress named Helen Woodford. One day, if Ruth’s own account is to be believed, he said to her: ‘How about you and me getting married, hon?’ After a few minutes’ reflection, she accepted and they were wed in the autumn of 1914. Ruth was nineteen, she possibly no more than fifteen. It was not a hugely successful pairing. In his autobiography, Ruth got her name wrong.
     
    From the perspective of our own age, it isn’t easy to grasp just how central to American life – how culturally and emotionally dominant and unchallenged and saturating – baseball was in the time of Babe Ruth. It was the nation’s joy and obsession. It was called ‘the National Game’, with capital letters. In sporting terms, it was all that much of America thought about for a good part of the year.
    For big events like the World Series, newspapers in every major city erected giant scoreboards outside their offices, and these unfailingly attracted large crowds. In many cities, impresarios hired theatres or other grand spaces (Madison Square Garden, for instance) to provide paying audiences with simulated games. One version employed a large diagram of a baseball diamond, with coloured lights to show balls, strikes and outs, bells for hits, and white footprints tracing a path around the base paths. An announcer on the stage would relate – and sometimes creatively embellish – developments on a distant playing field from fragmentary information supplied by ticker tape while the scoreboard lit up, clanged and traced footsteps in support. Anothersystem used live boys, each representing a real player, who took up positions on a baseball field on the stage, where they pitched, batted and fielded an imaginary ball, and ran from base to base as distant reality required. As one observer marvelled, no crowds in ballparks were ‘more loudly appreciative of every fine play than those millions jammed into the various halls or thronging the streets in front of newspaper offices’.
    This was the happy and exciting world in which Babe Ruth found himself now. Considering all that he wrought with his bat, it is an extraordinary fact that Ruth spent nearly the first quarter of his career as a pitcher – and not just a pitcher, but one of the very best in baseball. In 1915, his first full season with the Red Sox, he won 18 games against 8 losses, the fourth best winning percentage in the league. He struck out 112 batters, gave up fewer hits per game than any other player in the league but one, and finished the year with an exceedingly respectable earned-run average of 2.44. The next year, he had a record of 23 wins and 12 losses, and led the league in earned-run average, shutouts, hits per game and opponents’ batting average. He was third in number of wins, second in winning percentage and strikeouts, and fourth in number of complete games. His nine shutouts (that is, holding the opposing team scoreless) remains a record for a left-hander. In 1917, he again dominated or featured in nearly every pitching category and had a record of 24 wins and 13 losses. Almost incidentally, in the same period he began a run of twenty-nine and two thirds consecutive scoreless innings pitched in World Series play – a record that stood for forty-three years.
    It is almost impossible to exaggerate how extraordinary this was. Boys straight out of school didn’t just stroll into major league ballparks and start confounding experienced hitters like Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Even the best young pitchers needed time to gain confidence and perspective. Walter Johnson in his first three years in the majors had a record of 32 wins and 48 losses. Christy Mathewson was 34 and 37. Ruth in the same period was 43 and 21. Altogether in his time as a pitcher Ruth had a win–loss record of 94–46 and anearned-run average (a basic statistical