About
The babe Ruth💯💯
What about Babe Ruth? Now, he was clearly no vessel of human physical
perfection. Here was the guy with the famous appetites and a giant stomach
bulging out of his Yankee uniform. Wow, doesn’t that make him even more of a
natural? Didn’t he just carouse all night and then kind of saunter to the plate the
next day and punch out home runs?
The Babe was not a natural, either. At the beginning of his professional career,
Babe Ruth was not that good a hitter. He had a lot of power, power that came
from his total commitment each time he swung the bat. When he connected, it
was breathtaking, but he was highly inconsistent.
It’s true that he could consume astounding amounts of liquor and unheard-of
amounts of food. After a huge meal, he could eat one or more whole pies for
dessert. But he could also discipline himself when he had to. Many winters, he
worked out the entire off-season at the gym to become more fit. In fact, after the
1925 season, when it looked as though he was washed up, he really committed
himself to getting in shape, and it worked. From 1926 through 1931, he batted
.354, averaging 50 home runs a year and 155 runs batted in. Robert Creamer, his
biographer, says, “Ruth put on the finest display of sustained hitting that baseball
has ever seen….From the ashes of 1925, Babe Ruth rose like a rocket.” Through
discipline.
He also loved to practice. In fact, when he joined the Boston Red Sox, the
veterans resented him for wanting to take batting practice every day. He wasn’t
just a rookie; he was a rookie pitcher. Who did he think he was, trying to take
batting practice? One time, later in his career, he was disciplined and was
banned from a game. That was one thing. But they wouldn’t let him practice,
either, and that really hurt.
Ty Cobb argued that being a pitcher helped Ruth develop his hitting. Why
would being a pitcher help his batting? “ He could experiment at the plate,”
Cobb said. “No one cares much if a pitcher strikes out or looks bad at bat, so
Ruth could take that big swing. If he missed, it didn’t matter….As time went on,he learned more and more about how to control that big swing and put the wood
on the ball. By the time he became a fulltime outfielder, he was ready.”
Yet we cling fast to what Stephen Jay Gould calls “the common view that
ballplayers are hunks of meat, naturally and effortlessly displaying the talents
that nature provided.
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