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The New Yorker Classics Newsletter
Profiles
Babe Ruth’s Bad Behavior
At thirty-two, baseball’s “bad boy” is erratic, impulsive, and—despite a slew of financial scandals—nearly a millionaire.

By Arthur Robinson
On Friday, the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks will take the field for Game 1 of the World Series, a long-standing rite for two relatively young teams. In their combined histories, the squads have become major-league champions just once—six times fewer than Babe Ruth, who won a total of seven World Series playing for the Yankees and Red Sox.

In 1926, The New Yorker published a Profile of Ruth, outlining the player’s “thousand and one failings,” along with a few of his strengths. Then thirty-two and baseball’s highest-paid athlete—with an annual salary of fifty-two thousand dollars—Ruth had become an early master of the endorsement deal, multiplying his income by shilling everything from ice cream to suspenders. His impressive earnings didn’t translate to financial savvy: Ruth’s gambling losses were so staggering that his wife, Helen, resorted to secretly siphoning off funds to safeguard their future. A story about Ruth’s response to a harmless prank—chasing another player with a bat—would almost certainly be viewed differently today. But, whatever his misdeeds, Ruth always redeemed himself with fans. “One thing and one thing alone Ruth does well,” the writer Arthur Robinson observed, “and this he does with supreme distinction. He can hit a baseball harder and farther and higher than any hitherto recorded.”

There are accounts, plural, of Ruth dangling Miller Huggins off the back rail of a fast moving train. Don't know if that is fact or fantasy.