Known for his on-field success and off-field lifestyle, the Bambino quickly rose to baseball immortality and remains one of sport’s most recognizable figures.

By Nick Klopsis

While Major League Baseball has hundreds of players, it’s the famous few—Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols—who drive merchandise and ticket sales. Fans show up several hours early to the stadium just to see them take batting practice. But baseball itself has been around for more than 100 years; since when did top baseball players become celebrities?

To answer that question, you’d need to travel back in time to the period between 1914 and 1935, when a man by the name of George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr. took the field.  Ruth quickly became one of sport’s greatest figures thanks to his big-time statistics and his larger-than-life personality. Whether they watched him hit one of his 714 career home runs or heard about his off-field antics, Ruth always kept the fans entertained.

“The Babe was fun,” said former Sports Illustrated writer Bob Creamer, who wrote a biography on Ruth called “Babe: The Legend Comes to Life”. “Not just for the fans, but for the players he played with too—both teammates and rivals.  He brought something extra to the game.”

Ruth’s statistics were—and still are—the main reason for his fame. As a pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, Ruth had a career 94-46 record and posted an earned-run average of 2.28—good for 17^th on the all-time list. He also developed a reputation as a feared hitter during his days on the mound, earning the nicknames “The Sultan of Swat” and “The Home Run King”.

After permanently switching to right field with the Yankees in 1920, Ruth ‘s hitting became even more prominent. He held the career home run record for more than 52 years with 714 long balls before Henry “Hank” Aaron and Barry Bonds broke that record, but Ruth’s record is still more impressive.

“Not to disparage Henry Aaron or Barry Bonds, absolutely great players, but when Henry finished hitting homers he was only 41 ahead of Ruth, and when Barry finished he was 12 ahead of Henry,” said Creamer.  “When Ruth was still in his 20s, he had hit more home runs than any other player before him.”

To put it in perspective, Roger Connors held the record with 138 dingers when Ruth broke the record in 1921 at the age of 26, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Ruth’s on-field prowess was matched only by his equally large appearance and personality. In an era when speed and agility ruled baseball, Ruth towered over his fellow ballplayers at 6’2” and 215 pounds.

“There has always been a magic about that gross, ugly, coarse, Gargantuan figure of a man and everything he did,” former sportswriter Paul Gallico wrote in his 1937 memoir “Farewell to Sport”. “It is all the more remarkable because George Herman Ruth is not sculpted after the model of the hero.”

As Gallico alludes to, Ruth’s colorful personality truly made him larger than life.

“He drank, he smoked, he cursed, he wenched, he indulged himself, he brawled and sulked, and got the swelled head and got over it,” he wrote.

“Known for devouring the most hot dogs to drinking the most beers to bedding the most women, [Ruth] possessed an insatiable appetite for life,” wrote Larry Schwartz in an ESPN.com article at the turn of the 21^st century.

But unlike today’s celebrities, Ruth’s actions never led to public outrage. In a newspaper-dominated age where television did not exist and radio was in its infancy, most people just wanted the very basics of sports reporting. They wanted to know who won the game, how they won, and who did what in the game. A simple look through the New York Times’ archives shows how writers of the era focused mostly on game recaps, keeping off-field accounts out of their stories.

“Back then, when [Ruth] was still playing—before today’s intrusive television and almost universal radio and electronic coverage—there wasn’t the intense and incessant reaction to and analysis of almost everything a player or any celebrity does and says,” said Creamer.

That doesn’t mean that Ruth’s vices weren’t well known. It was quite the contrary—the public knew a great deal about his excessive smoking, drinking, and chasing of women. However, they saw him as a once-in-a-lifetime baseball player who was merely living life to its fullest.

“Ruth was still playing ball and hitting home runs when I was a little boy, and as far as I was concerned he was just Babe Ruth, a great baseball player,” said Creamer. “And I think most of the public felt the same way.”

Perhaps the Bambino’s upbringing was the cause for his tremendous personality. Ruth overcame a rough childhood in a working-class family and made the Baltimore Orioles’ roster in 1914, at the ripe age of 19. He was sold to the Boston Red Sox later that year and instantly began cementing his status as one of the best players in baseball history.

On December 26, 1919, he was sold to the New York Yankees for a then-record $125,000—about $1.37 million in today’s terms. The Yankees went on to win World Series championships in four of the Ruth’s 15 years on the team, while the Red Sox would never win another Series until 2004. Fans have attributed the 86-year drought to Ruth’s departure, calling it the “Curse of the Bambino”.

Ruth retired in 1935 following one tumultuous season with the Boston Braves. Ruth had made it known that he wanted to become a manager, particularly for the Yankees. That call never came, however, and he slowly faded out of the public eye until his death in 1948.

But Ruth’s legacy is still felt to this day. He achieved several remarkable feats on the diamond that stood for decades, all the while keeping up an enormous personality. As former Yankees teammate Bob Shawkey told Creamer in his book, “People sometimes got mad at him, but I never heard of anybody who didn’t like Babe Ruth.”