NYT Bestseller Jane Leavy on Babe Ruth, Baseball, & 1920s Celebrity

The Learning Curve Jane Leavy

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody and welcome to a special episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I am one of your hosts for this special episode, Dr. Albert Cheng, the University of Arkansas, and co-hosting with me is Baseball aficionado, Charlie Chieppo.

[00:00:38] Charlie Chieppo: I don’t know about aficionado, but I definitely know more about baseball than some of the things I’ve talked about on the podcast before.

[00:00:44] Albert Cheng: But hey, you know, I guess I was calling you out for being a, a baseball afic. We’ve got a fun show today. We’re gonna talk, babe Ruth and baseball, and the rise of, you know, modern celebrity culture with Jane Levy. So, yeah, I’m real glad to have you co-hosting with me on this episode.

[00:01:01] Charlie Chieppo: Well, I’m glad to be here. You know, and speaking of modern baseball, modern celebrity culture, one of the people I think, you know, somebody who we ought to talk about or was worth mentioning too. And the thing that got me aware of Jane Levy was her incredible book about Sandy Koufax. Ah-huh. Which was absolutely amazing. So I’ve been a huge fan of hers ever since.

[00:01:24] Albert Cheng: Yeah, well, I, I guess we have to have another special episode to talk about Sandy Kovac, in addition to Babe Ruth here. But hey, you know, actually a few episodes ago we had Michael Duffy, who’s the president of Go Tutor Core. Yep. Mention, well, again, if you haven’t checked out that show, go check it out.

[00:01:41] Michael was play a big part in Massachusetts education reform and before heading off to work with, I remember him back in the day. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well I, I mean, you probably remember him going to New York to work with Klein. Yeah. So in that episode, he took time to reiterate that he did not lose,

[00:02:00] His red SOS allegiance upon moving to New York City. And so now I don’t know how you feel about that. I can relate because you know I grew up except the other way, right?

[00:02:10] Charlie Chieppo: I grew up in New Haven as a child of New York media and all these, what? 45 years after moving to Boston, I’m still a Yankee fan, so yeah, so there you go.

[00:02:21] There. These childhood impacts are important, you know, and one thing I always remember heading back was being eight years old and being at one of these, Baseball dinners that I got into as a result of my uncle and getting to meet Joe DiMaggio and being on the, the front page of the New York Register with my Joe and I, me undoubtedly being the lure.

[00:02:46] Yeah. And I got his autograph, you know, which My mother quickly threw out like, what would this ever, what were the scrap of paper? Oh no.

[00:02:56] Albert Cheng: So it was the prelude they were throwing out by 1100 baseball cards. Oh, oh, oh boy. Yeah. I mean, baseball cards. I collected a few when I was a kid. Um, I by no means call myself a collector.

[00:03:09] I mean, I have some friends Yeah. Like collections that are vastly larger than mine. So it sounds like you collected a ton. So I’m curious now. Most valuable baseball card that you lost or your favorite one?

[00:03:22] Charlie Chieppo: You know that, that’s a hard one because it was also depended on the condition they were in, and I probably wasn’t the best about, you know, keeping them in in the finest condition.

[00:03:31] But I do remember I used to have them organized by team in order of how much I liked each team Uhhuh, so. It was a very unusual attack of organization in my early life, at least not stuck unfortunately, but yeah, it’s funny the impact that baseball has or you know, sports generally when you’re, when you’re young and, and I think that’s one of the things about Babe Ruth or about today, because I think that he was really the beginning of that, you know, the first, mm-hmm.

[00:04:01] Big sports celebrity. Yeah. Back in the day, you know, they were celebrities and now they’re probably somewhat celebrities, but they’re. Mostly more rich. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right. But I guess things change over time.

[00:04:15] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of celebrities, I mean, look, you know, my first memories of baseball growing up in the San Francisco Bay area was, I grew up on the East Bay, so, so we went to a’s games back when the Oakland Coliseum was still a destination, ballpark, not anymore, but look, I grew up, came of age and or, you know, grew up in the nineties and so have very vivid memories of, you know, the Bash brothers and Oh yeah.

[00:04:39] You know, I guess it’s not nineties, but a little bit, you know, late eighties, I guess.

[00:04:42] Charlie Chieppo: Well, how about that 89 World Series with the

[00:04:45] Albert Cheng: Yeah. In the middle of it. I mean, that’s right. And I, I remember that I wasn’t watching the game because that was a Bay Bridge series against the Giants, but I actually remember some high school friends that I had that, you know, they, they were at the game.

[00:04:55] They were recollecting what that was like. But what a, I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound like some kind of eulogy of the Oakland Coliseum, but you know, there plenty of memories there. I have a bunch my sisters went out to be.

[00:05:07] Charlie Chieppo: Hippies in Berkeley back in the seventies. I’m so, I’m older than you, so I have actually been there too. And when I think about it, I think, boy, you know, if the United States is ever gonna be under like a sneak attack, that’s where I want to be. Nothing’s gonna penetrate that place.

[00:05:26] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well anyway, I mean, I guess, you know, baseball I think is, I’m kind of. Reflecting on this, I mean, what a tradition. I mean, you know, we, we call it America’s pastime.

[00:05:35] What a, a unifying thing baseball can be and, and has been, you know, I mean, it was a big part of certainly my parents and, and my relatives, um, who came to the country much later in life. Fell in love with baseball as well and took us to games and marked our childhood with that and, and helped us to, I don’t know, assimilate in some ways to broader culture,

[00:05:57] Charlie Chieppo: I think. I think that’s exactly right and I think, you know, it’s funny, that’s why, you know, my mom came here from Italy and That’s why in places in New England, for example, that are more often Red Sox. Yeah. More often Red Sox fans. There are these big pockets of Italian American Yankees fans. Mm-hmm. And that was largely because of Diaggio, you know?

[00:06:17] Yeah, yeah. It’s very interesting the way it affects our lives. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that’s one of the things I love about Jane Levy. I mean, her books are so good and she’s just done such a great job of. Capturing that magic. Mm mm

[00:06:30] Albert Cheng: Well, you know, on that note, why don’t we invite her on and let’s get her to talk about this some more.

[00:06:36] Talk about Babe Ruth, and hey, stick around. I’m gonna have Jane Levy coming up.

[00:06:53] Jane Levy is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestsellers, the big fella, babe Ruth and the World. He created the Last Boy Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s childhood, Sandy Koufax, a Lefty’s legacy, the comic novel, squeeze Play, and a contributor to Driven to Write 45 writers on the motives and mysteries of their craft throughout this summer.

[00:07:18] Her forthcoming book in September of this year is Make Me Commissioner. I know What’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988. First in the sports section where she covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper, and then writing features for the style section about sports, politics and popular culture.

[00:07:40] On Friday, September 21st, 2018, levy threw out the first pitch for the Yankees Orioles game at Yankee Stadium. Jane Levy, welcome to the show. It’s a real treat to have you on. Thank you. And thank you for saying my name right? Yeah. Well, there’s a backstory there as we know, but we’re here to talk about Babe Ruth, perhaps the greatest major league baseball player ever, and among the first of modern celebrities.

[00:08:05] So you’re the bestselling author of the Big Fella, babe Ruth, and the World He Created. So let’s start. By having you give us a brief overview of who Babe Ruth was and why is he, you know, to this day, such an iconic American sports hero.

[00:08:20] Jane Leavy: He was an original and there aren’t very many of those around. I own, you know, a fabulous house on the beach in Cape Cod, and it’s overlooking all of Cape Cod Bay.

[00:08:29] And people come by all the time and say, can I buy that from you? And I’ll say, why? And they say, well, God only made so much of that coastline. God only made one bay, Bruce.

[00:08:39] Hmm.

[00:08:41] Jane Leavy: He not only was original in the way he comported himself the way he played to cameras, which were basically new at the time in sports journalism.

[00:08:52] Anyway, he was new in the way he played the game and on his in insistence that he could play it his way, that he didn’t have to take orders from some guy in a bow tie in a dugout, telling him to choke up. And hit away. He had an intuitive understanding of what his body could do and what his body could do with a.

[00:09:14] Big bat in his hand was something nobody else really did. One of the most fun things that I learned, thanks to an economist named Michael Halpert at the University of Wisconsin about, I mean, he created the home run as we know it, and the home run as we know it is really what baseball is almost exclusively today, right?

[00:09:35] Mm-hmm. So, so there were. 235 of them in 1918, right before his first really big home run binge year. And according to Michael’s calculations in 1918, you’d be more likely to have known one of the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic than to have seen one two hundred and thirty five home runs. Wow. Wow.

[00:10:02] 0.2%. Yeah, the American population saw those, and what they saw was something completely different from how a home run had been previously described and enjoyed. I mean, usually they were really big band boxes and you’d hit a ball and it would hit the wall and it would roll around out there and somebody would chase it and you’d chug all the way around the bases.

[00:10:26] That was a home run. People were not hitting or trying to hit the ball over the fence. He created the modern swing. He understood leverage and how to use his weight to create power. By shifting from the back to the front his swing, I had it analyzed by a guy who is now running the Red Sox minor League hitting program, and it’s completely modern.

[00:10:53] Completely. They used drills at Driveline, the Hightech batting and throwing stat oriented learning place out in Kent, Washington. They do drills called the Babe Ruth because it imitates ways in which he used and moved his feet in the batter’s box. Now, he may have done it for a different reason. He was facing a lot of slop, as we like to say, today, and in order to.

[00:11:18] Try to time up pitches that were so slow, he, you know, had to move his body in different ways. So he created the modern game. He created power baseball. He created the modern home run swing, and he created modern celebrity. Other than that, he did nothing.

[00:11:36] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s set his story up a bit more and, and, and talk about his life.

[00:11:39] I mean, in your book you did extensive research and dispelled a lot of the myths about babe’s parents, his family, his childhood. Tell us about the lore around his early family life and then just the facts and records you’ve uncovered about his upbringing.

[00:11:57] Jane Leavy: I didn’t wanna write this. Let me just start out by saying I wanted to write a novel about Babe.

[00:12:02] Hmm. And because he’s such a gargantuan figure in American culture and history still today, but for reasons that have to do with reading habits or the lack therein of the American public nonfiction was the better way to go. One of the reasons I didn’t wanna do it is I figured, you know, what was there gonna be left to say?

[00:12:22] Because the guys that came before me did a pretty good job, Bob Kramer, and especially Lee Monville. But what I discovered, and it’s just pure fluke and happenstance, was that by coming to the project later than they did, there were all sorts of historical documents, particularly family documents available and digitized that I had access to that they didn’t.

[00:12:47] So if you look at those other biographies, it’s very skimpy in the early life description. It’s all, you know, they rely on sources. That made stuff up because that’s what people did. They copied each other and they made stuff up and they didn’t have access to what I was lucky enough to find. And what I found was a whole file of legal documents describing the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.

[00:13:16] I was tipped off to this strangely by his daughter Julia, not that long before she died. And when she said, she said, well, of course you know, George and Kate were separated and my eyes got big on what they were, what he said.

[00:13:29] Oh, I just thought everybody knew that. No. So with that hint, I went to the Maryland archives.

[00:13:36] ’cause of course he was born and raised in and around Baltimore and found this docket of information. That explained, it wasn’t that he was this terrible kid left alone on the waterfront of Baltimore by hardworking poor parents who didn’t have the time to pay attention to him. What happened was that

[00:13:59] Put it bluntly. His father caught his mother and he yid. Can I use a little Yiddish? Is Yiddish okay here? Yeah, y Okay. Caught his mother tripping the bartender on what the legal documents refer to as the dinging room floor. So Kate. Ruth had an alcohol problem that does not make her unusual or e or a bad person or anything like that, but her husband ran saloons, none of which he owned, by the way.

[00:14:28] He always rented the buildings and then ran them, and he later said in connection with the dissolution of the marriage, that the reason he moved around so much is that wherever they went, Kate would get involved with the bartenders and drink too much, and he would feel like he had to move again. Mm. But on this particular occasion.

[00:14:46] He caught her with his bartender creating sexual favors for booze, and he kicked her out. She was allowed to come back to the house to get her belongings, and that was it. She published a notice in Baltimore newspapers, and again, once you have a keyword and a date, you know, it’s not that hard to find these days a notice saying that he was no longer responsible for her debts, allowing Baltimore.

[00:15:10] Merchants to know, don’t sell anything to Kate Ruth ’cause I’m not paying it.

[00:15:14] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:15:16] Jane Leavy: And she was cast out of the family. So that left George Senior with at least three surviving children there. There is some debate whether there were six children originally or eight children originally.

[00:15:30] Certainly babe’s childhood was checkered in the most awful way. Watching siblings die. Yen, the only two to survive were. Babe and his sister Mamie, there was the last child, William died in a sanitarium the August after Kate was kicked out. Mm-hmm. With no family around. So, you know, Babe’s knowledge of instability and of a broken family was predominant.

[00:15:59] And George basically said, I can’t deal with him. Now, you know, all the lore includes that he was broke and that he didn’t know what to, you know, he couldn’t support the kid. He couldn’t feed the kid. Saloons in Baltimore serve food. It’s not like there wasn’t food. And what happened was actually that a local cop named Harry c Birmingham, who walked a beat that included George’s patterns, saw Babe Ruth hanging around, you know, taking sips of beer from leftover glasses and occasionally filching change that left behind for a server, and decided that this was no way for a kid to be raised, and he took it upon himself.

[00:16:41] I knew George Senior well to say, you know, you gotta get him outta here. And so it was Harry c Birmingham, not George Ruth, who actually transported Babe on Friday, the 13th of June, 2000 and. Two. Is it two or six? I can’t remember it.

[00:17:02] Albert Cheng: Yeah. 19,

[00:17:03] 19 0 2,

[00:17:04] Jane Leavy: not 2002. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m, I’m a little lost in the present and part, you know, when you talk about the received wisdom, one of the reasons

[00:17:15] I think, can I absolutely prove it? No, but one of the reasons that Babe Ruth was identified repeatedly as an incorrigible, which was a legal term of a kid who could not be controlled and who had broken some laws, was because Harry c Birmingham as a favor to George Ruth Sr. And to Babe himself transported him in a police cart.

[00:17:37] Mm. They didn’t have police cars and it was a police cart, and so everybody saw Babe Ruth arrive. Mm-hmm. What they presumed was the custody of a policeman. There were no charges against him. There was no record that he, you know, he did anything terrible. In fact, when I’ve tracked down Harry’s grandchildren and interview he did a year before Babe’s death, he said very clearly, you know, he was just a boy and no worse than any of the others.

[00:18:07] Hmm. You know, mischievous. He certainly never gave us any trouble. He did give the brothers trouble because he ran away as often as he could. Once he was of an age, unlike most kids, his father paid boarding. His father paid tuition for him to go to St. Mary’s. His father never came to visit him. Not once, and Babe Ruth was a lifer.

[00:18:31] Mm-hmm. Most kids were there, you know, a couple of nights, six months, maybe a year. He was there, you know, until he was signed by the Baltimore Orioles in 1914. I got the century right. Not one. Yeah.

[00:18:46] Albert Cheng: Well say more about his time at St. Mary’s. So this is St. Mary’s Industrial School for the boys reformatory and orphanage.

[00:18:52] Jane Leavy: Yeah. Talk about what his life was like there and boarding. School and Bo. Yeah. Okay. School. It was a dank, dower looking place. It’s now what’s called Catonsville, so it’s outside Baltimore, a little closer to Washington and it had lots of open fields. They had a farm. They raised animals, they raised vegetables.

[00:19:13] They had all of six sense. Per kid to feed a kid every day. Hmm. That was it. And the one thing babe told his daughter, Julia, that she repeated to me was, I never felt full, but the school gave him something else. It gave him an organized life, told him where to be when, and got after him if he didn’t show up.

[00:19:40] But I think it gave him a sense of how to be. Public. The kids lived in very, very overcrowded. Dorms. There were kids living in, you know, in hallways and things when they were most front, because as you can imagine, there were a lot of kid abandoned kids. Mm-hmm. In Baltimore. Mm-hmm. As well as incorrigibles and orphans.

[00:20:02] They’d slept head to toe in wrought iron cots that went the length of the room, like pin stripes, and there was two feet of space between each of the beds. Just enough for a Bentwood chair and to get down on your knees and pray. And you had no privacy. They went to the bathroom together. They took showers together.

[00:20:24] They ate together, they slept together. And those few who came to puberty there, uh, you know, became physiological. Male adults there. So what be Ruth learned more than anything? I mean, yes, he learned to tailor a shirt in case baseball didn’t work out. And yes, brother Matthias worked with him on his swing every day, but what he learned to be was public and how to live among people and share every waking moment.

[00:20:57] With, you know, the kids in, in his dorm and then the kids on the baseball fields for St. Mary’s. And it hearkens back to a time when baseball mattered so much. Baseball was an organizing principle. Every floor had a team, every dorm had a team. You know, it didn’t, there were thousands of teams and kids organized in them.

[00:21:17] Babe Ruth was by far the best of them. A couple other kids that came through there had a cup coffee in the majors and several in the minor leagues. But this is how they kept control of the kids because how else are you gonna do it?

[00:21:28] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:21:29] Jane Leavy: So, brother Matthias was a huge guy, which would’ve made a big difference, I think, to all of those kids, and especially babe.

[00:21:38] And you know, he took ’em by the. Short collar or the sleeve or whatever it was, he took ’em by and you know, took ’em out to the baseball field and that’s where he spent his life. Until Jack Dunna, the Baltimore Orioles came and got him, and everybody in Baltimore knew that St. Mary’s had a good team. They regularly beat the highfalutin kids from private schools that were not reformatories, and he was first called Baby Ruth in 1913 in one of the Baltimore papers.

[00:22:07] Albert Cheng: Well talk a bit about that time when he started playing at least, you know, in the minor leagues, and then certainly then to the majors with the Boston Red Sox. So talk about his early life, his early career in Boston, and just early on, I mean, he had some dominance as a pitcher. Tell us about the early part of his baseball career now.

[00:22:23] Jane Leavy: Yeah, I, he was a fire balling young lefty and he dominated wherever he went, including we initially when he was called up there. He also in the process of, you know, ’cause pitchers had the bat then, as you may recall. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Took a shine to hitting balls over fences. You know, it wasn’t until 1918 or so that he decided after he almost single handedly won the World Series as a pitcher, that he said, you know, being out here in the outfield and hitting balls over fences, that sounds pretty good to me.

[00:22:57] Um, what made him so different, and you know, I know you’re gonna ask this, he was tani before. Tan Yeah. Yeah. My friend Dan Re, the guy who created Rotisserie League baseball. A wonderful baseball writer, said he, you know, he was, I’m gonna, I’m gonna screw up his image. I think it was Picasso and Matis, or two different classical music composers.

[00:23:22] Mm-hmm. He could do both. Uh, that that is the point. And he could do both at the time. I mean, he was the best left-handed pitcher in baseball. For those first years in Boston and you know, that was shocking and nobody’s come along to do that. As well since Babe Ruth until Tani, and I’m not in any way trying to diminish Tani, but remember Babe Ruth lasted 20 years in the major leagues.

[00:23:51] Yeah. And Tani is supremely gifted. I actually hope they don’t let him pitch. I really do. I’m sure they will at the rate they’re going through pictures.

[00:24:01] Yeah.

[00:24:02] Jane Leavy: And he is a superb talent and he’s as fit as. Babe Ruth was slothful, but it’s a. Damn hard thing to be able to do both that well. Yeah. And of course it’s taken a major toll on O’S elbow, which has already had one full Tommy John surgery and, and a revision two years ago.

[00:24:24] Right. So, you know, who knows whether Babe Ruth’s arm would’ve fallen off too. I, there’s no way of knowing. It’s an awfully hard thing to do, and particularly. In this century. Yeah, where the travel is so much and the schedule is longer and you know, so I wish Tani every bit of luck and joy in his career.

[00:24:43] He seems like a very joyous guy, but I hope they don’t let him pitch.

[00:24:48] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well it seems like the, you know, one every hundred years is pretty amazing, you know? Yeah.

[00:24:52] Jane Leavy: Not too shabby.

[00:24:53] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about another well-known aspect of the lore around Babe Ruth when he left the Red Sox to the Yankees.

[00:25:01] Uh, this is 1919. Talk about the sale we used that word, and how it then kind of contributed to the so-called curse of the bambino. But really importantly, I think to a theme that you’ve been hitting so far is how did this then kind of launch him into celebrity status?

[00:25:18] Jane Leavy: Well, as unlettered as he may have been, he also was apparently a great card player and he could count the pennies, and he realized, I think pretty early on that there was value in being able to put.

[00:25:32] Tushies in seats and players, of course, weren’t compensated for that back then. There was a guy named Christie Walsh, who was a failed advertising guy and a failed or semi failed sports cartoonist who was desperate for money, who finagled his way into Beirut’s apartment in the Ansonia on Broadway at.

[00:25:56] 79th, I think it’s Broadway in 79th, bringing him a case of beer and promising that, you know, he could pay him $5 for every one of the ghost written stories that appeared under his byline all year. Now remember, there was no radio, radio. The first radio broadcast was of a game was in 21. The first World Series one was in 27.

[00:26:20] The only way readers could feel that they were hearing their hero’s voices was through these FAE columns. Hmm. Now, they didn’t write them, and they probably didn’t sound like them, but it was a big industry for a while, and it had been around for a while. But what Christie did is he, he systematized it and he created a whole syndicate to sell.

[00:26:47] Athletes accounts of their games, and very often they were written by beat writers who were covering the game for, you know, the Tribune or the Daily News or whoever it total conflict of interest. But he realized there was money in this, and so he. Promised Babe Ruth $5 for each column. And the only problem with that was that Christie had been fired from his last job and he didn’t have the money to pay him.

[00:27:14] He was just bragging on what he thought he might be able to do. He had to borrow the money from his then father-in-law to give him what he owed, babe, at the end of the year. But he made him money. I mean, prior to that I was like, yeah, you were getting shekels pennies on the dollar for things. And he created a huge industry of it.

[00:27:35] He represented ultimately all sorts of guys like Miller Huggins, the Yankee manager, or Lou Gehrig, or occasionally Walter Johnson. I mean it, you know, and it was, it was a huge business. It was doomed to have a very finite shelf life because radio would. Advanced to the point where it became a regular feature of baseball, or as they like to say today, radio became a way to consume baseball.

[00:28:03] Mm. But for the period that, that it existed, it helped make Babe Ruth Rich and Christie, who was kind of dour and had the only war, double breasted suits and, you know, but he had a, a big load on his hands. Babe Ruth was not easy to manage, so he branched out into. Getting endorsements for him. Now, there had been endorsements here and there you’d see and can still see baseball cards where Ho Wagner endorses a kind of cigarette or tobacco or something.

[00:28:38] But again, this was systematic. So suddenly he’s representing. A pair. My, my favorite was called the wizard, which was overalls that he posed in between stops on a barnstorming tour, I think in 27. Christie organized these barnstorming tours. I mean, what were they gonna do in the, in the off season? He.

[00:29:01] Created tours where he would have Babe and Lou, the busting babes, and the Laup and Lou go around the country playing, basically pickup games against teams, comprised of minor leaguers, and every once in a while they’d bring in a ringer, major leaguer, basically. So babe would have somebody to go drink with at night.

[00:29:21] Because Lou didn’t, but they went to all these towns where nobody had seen baseball. And the idea that you could see Babe Ruth, you know, at the plate, and you might even see Babe Ruth pitching against some of the great black pitchers who he otherwise wasn’t gonna have. An opportunity to face. So that made a lot of money in 1927 when he signed his big contract that, you know, broke the Yankees back and changed all of baseball.

[00:29:47] He earned more money in what Christie liked to call byproduct money than he did from his 70. One $72,000 a year contract with the Yankees. In fact, he earned $3,247 more in outside income than he did from his salary. Rupert, Was every bit as smart as Christy Walsh, and he realized that, remember he bought Babe Ruth just before Prohibition is about to go into effect.

[00:30:19] The actual contract date. Sale date, I think it was, it was either December 19th or December 26th. I’m not sure. But the 26th is my birthday, so I’m saying it’s the 26th, but it wasn’t announced until the beginning of January that he bought Babe Ruth and everybody. Wrote, including the New York Times that he bought ’em for $125,000, which is not true.

[00:30:40] He bought ’em for a hundred thousand dollars from Harry Frazee, the Boston owner who had lost money in the theater and needed more to keep producing shows. It had nothing to do with no, no. Nanette, which is another one of the legends. Yes, but, but Harry had to pay him 6% interest. Loan. And in addition, he borrowed 300 grand from Rupert.

[00:31:06] The net result, and this is from my economist buddy, by six years after Babe Ruth signed with the Yankees and was, you know, sold to the Yankees, he had paid off the entire purchase price. So in effect, Rupert ended up paying nothing. Not a dime for Babe Ruth.

[00:31:28] Charlie Chieppo: Wow, that’s amazing. Cease.

[00:31:31] Jane Leavy: And Michael would tell you, by the way, ’cause I didn’t go back and read all this, but when you counted up what they earned in babe’s first year in New York in terms of ticket sales and you know, merchandise food in the stadium and crowds on the road, et cetera, et cetera, babe Ruth’s $100,000.

[00:31:52] Price point was paid off by the end of the first year.

[00:31:56] Charlie Chieppo: Wow. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Well. Jane Charlie Chieppo here. I just, before we move on, I just wanna follow up with one other Christy Walsh question, which is one of the other things I wanted to hear from you about is that he was certainly a very smart guy who did very well, obviously with the babe, but also had the increasingly challenging job of sort of.

[00:32:20] Trying to manage his outta control spending and reckless behavior. Uh, can you

[00:32:25] Jane Leavy: talk a little bit about that? I’m so glad you asked that ’cause I started to say it and then I drifted off into, well, ways to consume baseball. So he started out by forming one company, which was to produce these ghost written columns, and then he formed another one that was his syndicate.

[00:32:42] Then he formed another one, which was basically, you know, he was Scott Boris before Scott Boris. He managed everything for a fee, and babe was, he was a lot to handle. He was gambling and he had to borrow money from Christie to cover gambling debts. The Yankees had him tailed by private eyes. Christy had to figure out how to cover that up.

[00:33:05] So while he is creating a template for how to be famous, and Christy was really golden at that, but he also had a guy, and remember this is the twenties, he’s in New York. It’s the locus of media such as it was. But it was a lot more advanced than people remember. So the daily news becomes this Tablo with the back page just in time for Babe Ruth.

[00:33:30] And one of the things that back page did was reveal the existence of. A mistress named Claire, who he eventually married even though he was married to Helen Woodruff, the waitress he met, met in Boston, his first year there. It was a very, very sloppy ending, and Christine negotiated a separation from Helen.

[00:33:55] This’ll sound familiar, that required babe to pay her a hundred thousand dollars. 25,000 installments over a period of four years in order to get rid of her, right, make her go away. She remained Mrs. Babe Ruth, and then had custody of their adopted daughter who they didn’t admit was adopted. Dorothy, and then would die in a very.

[00:34:21] Tragic house fire in 29 before the baseball season, and babe didn’t wait much more than three months before marrying Claire after that. So you know, Helen is in the Concourse Plaza Hotel crying her eyes out in 1925 when this picture of Claire is wired because you could do that then. It was expensive, but you could wire a picture from New York City.

[00:34:50] To Chicago, to Los Angeles, and so it might not be, you know, the next 20 minutes, but within a day her face was all over the United States. So this is a moment, it’s a revolutionary moment in terms of media and what we know about people. When he was a rookie, what you knew about people and knew about him was what you could read in the, in the, your newspaper, tossed on your lawn or picked up at a news stand, you know, at the corner of 160 first and, and River.

[00:35:22] That was it. That was all you knew and all the sports writers covered up. Everything. And some people still do that. I wouldn’t, I would venture to say it sounds like the

[00:35:33] Charlie Chieppo: way it used to be for politicians.

[00:35:35] Jane Leavy: Yes. Phil. Phil, Gary Hart. Right,

[00:35:38] Charlie Chieppo: right.

[00:35:39] Jane Leavy: I think this is really interesting. In 1929, he did an interview with a guy named Harry Brundage, who was a reporter for the St.

[00:35:48] Louis Star. And reporters who didn’t know him well would bring up the issue. Oh, well you were a bad kid, right? You know, everybody knows you were a bad kid. You were an orphan. You got dumped there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Brother Matthias took care of you. Brother Matthias was kicked out of St. Mary’s ultimately when they discovered he was having a, a fling with a woman around the corner.

[00:36:11] But anyway, so this guy, Harry Brundage says, you know, so you were an orphan babe. Never would take the bait. Why would you, why would you open your mouth in 1929 and say, no, I’m not an orphan. My mother took my father’s bartender and they were divorced. There was no Sally, Jesse, Raphael, or whoever’s the equivalent today to go, you know, lean your head on her shoulder and cry in public and get sympathy and more endorsements.

[00:36:41] You shut up. You didn’t talk about things like that, especially if you were a public person. So Harry makes the mistake of asking Babe, and Babe says, get me right now. I’m no orphan. There was a series of exclamation points, all that stuff about me being an orphan kid, too tough for my aunts and uncles to handle, and about being shoved into a reform school for bringing up, or a lot of baloney.

[00:37:11] I just realized that’s misspelled in the book. Okay. A lot of bologna, just plain every day applesauce and hooey. Now that was, I, I believe that a lot of the New York sports writers certainly Grantland Rice, you know, they would intimate every now and then that they knew the real story of his childhood, but nobody wrote it.

[00:37:31] Yeah. And I thought the, you know, reporters, you guys know this. You, you have a, a BS detector, right. You can tell when something is false or when it actually sounds real. Yeah. Even if you don’t know of, that sounds real to me. And the heatedness of the reply was very significant and it reinforced my feeling that, that he carried with him a lot of shame.

[00:37:58] And he married this waitress. He met, you know, when he was what? They had to get permission from his father to marry because he was underage. What did he know? Coming straight out of St. Mary’s about how to be a husband? You know, he desperately wanted a family. He wanted to feel wanted. I mean, who doesn’t, but he had no idea how to accomplish that.

[00:38:21] He had no idea that women were gonna be throwing themselves at him wherever he went. And that, you know, prohibition was for everybody else. I have great sympathy for him on that score.

[00:38:33] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah. Well, let’s move on to the field now and talk about his years with the Yankees and his amazing career hitting stats.

[00:38:41] You know, 3 42 batting average. 714 home runs, 2,873, hits 2,214 RBI 2,174 Run score. It goes on and on. You know, led the American League and home runs 12 times during his 15 seasons in New York, seven American League. Pennants four World Series Championships. Talk a little bit about his, or beyond what you said about what he’s was doing off the field about his life and his career in New York.

[00:39:08] You know, as he was rising to the top of New York.

[00:39:11] Jane Leavy: Well, I mean, it’s the roaring twenties. Yeah. And it’s the beginning. It’s also the golden era of newspapers. And he was, you know, he wasn’t just a, an booth for every newspaper. He was a buffet of nonstop quotes and more to the point actions because actually you had to.

[00:39:31] Cover the game and describe what happened. Back in those days, he filled two thirds of every back page of the, of the New York Daily News. They had a full-time 24 7 writer, you know, traipsing around the country after him, Marshall Hunt, you know, think how modern that is.

[00:39:49] Charlie Chieppo: Yes.

[00:39:50] Jane Leavy: It’s astonishing how modern it is.

[00:39:53] So you had. The marrying of the technology, the cameras that could take pictures that were motion was in progress. The beginning of his career. Every picture is posed. There’s no way to capture what’s going on on the field, and that evolves during the twenties. The ability to transmit by wire images and to have the money to spend, you know, to have just a Babe Ruth reporter.

[00:40:20] Was pretty amazing. Yeah. Um, and he gave them something to write about every day. Every day. It was unheard of. The New Yorker, which was new then too. I think 26 is the first year, 25 or 26 actually had a column that was a pseudonym about how the home run Babe Ruth’s home run. Is an act of radical reinvention of the relationship between the player and the spectators because in the surmounting, the outfield wall,

[00:40:55] In that moment when the ball, you know, leaves the back, travels through the air and lands in the stands among the people, there is a connection between the game and the fans and it’s, it was a brilliant column. It’s absolutely brilliant. And it’s true. And think about what happens today. You still have people running children for to get a ball.

[00:41:18] Oh, yes. Memorabilia doesn’t do much for me, so I can be sardonic about it. But if you think about it in those terms as a connection that forms a relationship, it’s absolutely, I think it’s absolutely true.

[00:41:33] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah. And a new and very different thing at the time.

[00:41:36] Jane Leavy: He also, of course, made himself incredibly available.

[00:41:40] There wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t do. He, we asked him to pose with a monkey, fine, you wanna pose with a live lobster on lobster day? Fine. It didn’t matter if there was money attached to it, all the better. And of course, Christie made sure that he went to plenty of orphanages and reform schools to Greek kids.

[00:42:00] And I don’t think he had to be crowbar into doing that, by the way. Right. I think that. Genuine, but people were more cynical than, I think it was just for pr. I am sure that it crossed Christy Walsh’s mind that this would help offset those times when he got stopped beating or wreck cars, which was frequent.

[00:42:19] What he stayed out too late, what he had a headache when he was caught, what somebody wasn’t his wife. I mean, all those things. But those two make him very modern. Right. And he certainly wasn’t the only one doing that kind of stuff.

[00:42:31] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah, no, and that’s, that’s a great point. So in the 27 Yankees obviously are one of the greatest teams ever, you know, and known for the Murderers row that included Future Hall of Famers, Ruth and Lou Garrett.

[00:42:45] Of course, babe hit 60 home runs that year, which stood as a record for what, 34 years. I’m interested to hear about. Steve’s role in that 27 team and his relationship with owners, fans, the press, you talked a little bit about that and what’s also very interesting to me is his relationship with his younger and very different teammate, Lou Garrett.

[00:43:11] Jane Leavy: So Lou appears actually in a film clip. 1925 was the nay Dear for Babe. It’s when Helen, you know all that stuff about Helen and Dorothy becomes public. It’s the stomach ache curved around the world when he eats too much and drinks too much and has a fistula and has out. Is out of the lineup for more than two months, and then he tries to come back and he, he can’t, and the day he tries to come back, there’s a news real camera who catches Young Lou Gehrig in uniform for the first time in the Yankee dugout.

[00:43:42] You know, they couldn’t have been more opposite. Yeah, and Christie certainly fostered the notion that they were best of friends. I don’t think there was animus between them until very late, like 1934 when Lou’s wife disappeared into Babe’s Cabin on the ship going to Japan for an All Star tour, and whether or not it was more than having.

[00:44:07] A lot of champagne and caviar with Claire Ruth and Babe Ruth, or there was something more nefarious at play. Lou had spent that time, that afternoon stalking around the ship look, looking for Eleanor. Yeah. And, and that, that was the source of the enmity there. It was a good deal for both of them. And I don’t think there was hatred between them until Lou got plenty pissed about that.

[00:44:33] But you know, babe was much older than almost all of his teammates, and I got the feeling that I picked the picture that I picked that’s on the cover of the book, which shows him sitting in a Bentwood chair, legs crossed. On the dirt by second base at the polo grounds. And it was taken by a fashion photographer who later had a, a huge affair with Frida Callow.

[00:44:59] And it’s a beautiful picture though. We inverted it so that his head wouldn’t appear where the sticker saying, you know, bestseller had to go. But if you look at, if you look at his eyes in that picture, what you see is sadness. And that’s how I perceive him, you know, when he was in public. There are, there’s another great picture of him also taking that year on an off day when the Yankees played a, an exhibition game.

[00:45:30] I’m gonna say Syracuse, but I may be wrong. And he’s surrounded by 5,000 kids. You know, he’s just like pressing the flesh and you know, yanking on him and tugging on his cap and you’ve never seen a smile that big.

[00:45:45] Yeah. Yeah. That’s

[00:45:46] Jane Leavy: where he felt at home. Mm-hmm. In public. And that goes back to what I was saying about being so public in St.

[00:45:55] Mary’s because you had no privacy, no alone time at all. But I think there was great sadness in him. There’s only so many home runs, you know, that can drive away that kind of sadness.

[00:46:07] Charlie Chieppo: Right? You only can drive it away for so long. So that gets to what the next thing I wanted to ask about. The end of his career and his life were in many ways tragic.

[00:46:17] You know, his health deteriorated, although he was, you know, one of the first people elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. He died in 1948. When he was only 53 years old. I mean, I certainly remember the tapes and the video and audio of his, that final appearance at Yankee Stadium when he was so diminished, and talk a little bit about those later years and his death.

[00:46:41] Jane Leavy: Well, he desperately wanted to manage. Yes. And he desperately resented that the Yankees went elsewhere. Sharky, particularly was a source of, was a sore spot for him after Miller Huggins died and before McCarthy came in. And of course the thing that was said and said too easily and too often was, you can’t control yourself.

[00:47:04] How are you gonna control anybody else? Right. And I think there’s some code in there. As you probably know, there were lots of rumors and it was just soci that Babe Ruth was actually black and passing. And that too is traced back to St. Mary’s where they boys on the playground had a very racist and unpleasant name for him.

[00:47:28] And Unless you tell me to say it, I won’t. We’ll pass

[00:47:31] Charlie Chieppo: on that.

[00:47:33] Jane Leavy: But he had big, full lips and he had a big wide nose, and he was darkly complected. As you know, half the Sydor. His family had very olivey skin, and then he was outside all the time, and there was nothing in the absence of any documentation about who his parents were and how he ended up at St.

[00:47:55] Mary’s without him. Refuting it until that piece that I read a little of in 1929. Yeah, it was easy to fill in the chasm of ignorance with supposition. And so members of his family have gone so far as to say that he wasn’t allowed to manage because they thought he was black. I’m not sure that I accept that.

[00:48:19] They’ve also said that he’s a civil rights pioneer. I’m not sure that I accept that either. He did, however, make sure that when he and Gehrig went on the barnstorming. Tours off season that they would play against black negro leaguers and he did heap them with praise in, in the thirties. But that doesn’t mean, you know.

[00:48:41] Yeah, I don’t think he was a racist. You know, I don’t, but I, nor do I think he was Martin Luther King, but that all became. To a head in the thirties when the Yankees had to make a decision about what to do with him. You know, by 33 his legs are really shot. Yeah. He’s taking medicine for them and they keep him on, but you know, they’re really not happy about it.

[00:49:05] They try to arrange for him to do a deal to become manager of the Tigers, but he was on a barnstorming tour in Hawaii with Claire who didn’t wanna go home. And Babe certainly thought, oh, there’ll be another chance. You know? And so they went and hired somebody else. I think that was his last really good chance of Right, major league manager.

[00:49:28] Well, did he know? And once he was done as a player with that. You know, show of bravado and power in Pittsburgh in 1935 when he had gone back to play for the Braves, sold by the Yankees for a dollar, and he hit 7 13 7, no, 7 12, 7 13, 7 14. In Forbes Field baseball had no use for him. He reappeared in uniform as a dodger coach when they were desperate to put.

[00:49:57] People in the stands, he had no power. He, you know, whatever belief he might have had that it would lead to something more serious was proved untrue. And so, you know, to be rejected by baseball, the way his family, his father had rejected him was the source of incredible sadness. And, you know, he made a life going around to events and to parties and, but he was always sort of an outsider from then on.

[00:50:26] Charlie Chieppo: Boy, it must have been so bizarre to suddenly have baseball of all things, you know, turn its back on him. Right. That’s really stunning

[00:50:34] Jane Leavy: that they couldn’t figure out something for him to do. Right. It’s just astonishing. Of course it was the depression and all those things, but, and the war, but still that they couldn’t figure out a role for Babe Ruth is just, yeah.

[00:50:48] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah. Finally, you know, the dictionary defines Ruth and as a superlative use to describe a particularly impressive or outstanding performance. What should we most remember about Babe Ruth’s towering legacy as an American sports figure? A popular culture icon and, and as a man,

[00:51:07] Jane Leavy: he was the original. If you look up people who changed the way their sport was played, you’ll come up with Johnny Unitas who, you know, spread the ball around and went down, you know, through downfield.

[00:51:19] Mm-hmm. Bobby Orr who turned, you know, his position into an offensive position. Same with Bill Russell, who center for the Celtics made defense a a weapon, and Jimmy Connors with his return of serve. Certainly that is true of Babe Bruce. He invented the Power Gang, but more than that, he invented a way to be public.

[00:51:45] In America and to make that coveted status and to make it remunerative in a way that, you know what, what these guys earned today, you know, for their shoe deals of this and that. I mean, they was making pennies compared to that, but the precedent was set right by him. He was an American original.

[00:52:06] Charlie Chieppo: That says it all. Before you go, I wonder if you have a passage you might wanna read from the book. To help sort of bring together the all that you’ve been talking about here today.

[00:52:17] Jane Leavy: The thing that amazes me the most about him was that he was left alone at a very young age to create a life for himself and a self. For himself.

[00:52:28] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.

[00:52:29] Jane Leavy: And that self wasn’t perfect, but damn he did it, you know? Yeah. And I don’t know how many people you can say that of, and it’s, yes, he had St. Mary enforced. Some, you know, organization on his Randy Rowdy soul, they brought him back. Harry c Birmingham, the cop who took him to St. Mary’s originally would go and collect them when he ran away, but it speaks incredibly well of him.

[00:53:02] That he was able to create that life and he wasn’t. As myth has, you know, colored him to be a 7-year-old, ate, he was, you know, I mean, he was seven. How bad could he be? Right? Even if he filled vegetables and hurled them at, you know, storefronts. Even if he chewed tobacco and stole a dollar from his daddy’s cash register, how bad could he have been?

[00:53:29] The journey, the defining journey of his life was the day that Harry c Birmingham came to get him in that police cart and take him all the way out West Lombard Street to Catonsville, which, you know, might as well have been what my family would’ve called outer Sakana. He put, he could look back ’cause it was, it was up a hill.

[00:53:50] You could look back and you could see that the Tower of the Ice company, that was where Camden Yards is now. And so he could almost visualize his former life and what he had left, or what he had been forced to leave. But here he is with the, you know, all these kids. So here’s the passage and it’s brief of all the many journeys of Babe Ruth’s life, from Uncouth to Kth, impoverished to Ben thrift.

[00:54:21] Abandoned to a abandon and back again from the dead ball era to power baseball from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston for a finale with the only team that would have him from grand tours of Europe in the Orient to barnstorming tours of the American heartland, not to mention 714 trips around the bases.

[00:54:45] The trip from home to the home. Fateful and formative was the most important one of all. Well,

[00:54:55] Charlie Chieppo: that’s so great, and with that we can’t let you go out having you tell us a little bit about a forthcoming book that you’ve got.

[00:55:02] Jane Leavy: Oh yeah, this is gonna get me in trouble, I think. Oh, good. Already has got me in trouble.

[00:55:08] It’s got come out a provocative title. It’s called Make Me Commissioner. I know what’s wrong with baseball and how to fix it, and it’s a first person book. It starts in the Cape Cod League when the new rules were imposed by baseball in, in 2023, I went out to see. How the rules were playing, whether they were doing what baseball felt needed to be done, which was increase the pace of play because it had become so laggardly, whether fans were coming back, whether joy was coming back, because baseball seems to have forgotten how to be fun.

[00:55:46] So I went from the Cape Cod League to spring training to manager’s offices to high school. All star high school tournaments to minor leagues in Worcester and East Lake, Ohio, and to many MA Major League ballparks to talk to people about whether this was enough and what else needed to be done. And so. I thought when Rob Manford announced it, he was going to retire after the completion of this term, which I believe is 29, maybe it’s 27.

[00:56:24] I’m not sure that the least I could do was put myself forward as a person who would take on the challenge and tell them what to do to make it all better.

[00:56:36] Charlie Chieppo: Well, jane, I’m gonna be your Christy Walsh.

[00:56:41] I hope so. When can we, when, when will we get to see it and read it?

[00:56:45] Jane Leavy: It will be published on September 9th. I have to get off with you and go call Buck Showalter. I mean, I have made characters all the way through there. Like Bregman, for example, is, is I’ve been talking to him weekly for almost four years, and JP Crawford who went to Driveline, which is where I went first, to see what analytics has wrought in terms of data driven hitting training and pitching training.

[00:57:11] Dusty Baker Buck. Kevin Cash, I mean, you, you name it. There are a lot of guys in there. And one thing it reinforced for sure is I really like baseball guys. They’re really good. And I might add that Betty, the dog who is out in the pouring rain, is also a character in the book.

[00:57:34] Charlie Chieppo: Oh, I, all right. Well you, you fit now on all my favorite things, dogs, baseball.

[00:57:39] I’m gonna count me in. All right.

[00:57:42] Jane Leavy: You know the Yankee name. Spaceman and Betty can pick it.

[00:57:48] Charlie Chieppo: Well then that’s alright with me. Anything that’s gonna help the Yankees, I’m good with you and me both. Well, thank you Jay. Thank you so much. That was great. My pleasure.

[00:58:11] Albert Cheng: Well, that was fun, Charlie. I had a good time with that.

[00:58:14] Charlie Chieppo: Well, yes, I knew I would. It definitely

[00:58:17] Albert Cheng: lived up to my expectations. Great. Yeah, I know. Fun talk sports and even the largest significance of, of what sports is to us, the human experience. Yeah. Fun stuff everyone. Thanks for tuning into this special episode.

[00:58:31] Charlie, I wanna thank you as well for co-hosting it. Thank you. I always enjoy getting the opportunity to co-host with you. Alright, and maybe we’ll talk about Sandy Koufax or somebody else in the future. Have you back on? Same up. All right. Well for the rest of you listeners, hey, enjoy the rest of the baseball season and we’ll see you next time.

[00:58:50] Speaking of which, we’re gonna have Ben Moynihan, uh, who’s the executive director, as well as his colleague, bill Crombie, who is the Director of Professional Development, both from the. Algebra project. This is your second favorite topic, Charlie Mathematics next to baseball. So hey, looking forward to that episode and hope you all join us, but everyone be well.

[00:59:10] Until then, hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.