The Bio

George Herman, famously called Babe Ruth, was the world’s first baseball superstar and one of the most famous athletes of our time. Nicknamed “the Bambino” and “the Sultan of Swat,” for his hitting exploits, he started his MLB career as a star left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, but soon became most famous as a power-hitter for the New York Yankees and in baseball history. Ruth is seen as one of the most important sports figures in American culture, and many people think he was the best baseball player ever.

Babe Ruth was one of the “first five” people to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. From 1914 to 1935, he played in Major League Baseball (MLB) and rewrote the American sports history. His amazing hitting put curtains down on the Deadball Era and start a new era of long-distance hitting and high scoring. Ruth is still a big part of American culture because he was the first baseball player to get a lot of love from the public.

Babe Ruth was born on February 6, 1895, at 216 Emory Street in Baltimore, Maryland. The little boy spent his days unsupervised on the waterfront streets and docks, stealing and breaking things. This was because his father George Ruth worked long hours in a saloon and his mother Catherine Schamberger was often sick. He stole money from the cash register, drank the last drops of beer from old glasses, and started chewing tobacco when he hung out at his father’s bar. Babe Ruth had just turned six then.

Shortly after Little George turned seven, he ended up at St. Mary’s Industrial School, an orphanage and reform school on the edge of the city. The first time the boy stayed at St. Mary’s, he was only there for four weeks before his parents brought him home for the first of many attempts to get him to change. But after a violent fight at his father’s bar, city officials decided that this was not a good place for a small child to be. On June 13, 1902, Babe Ruth started at St. Mary’s. He was labeled “incorrigible,” and he spent most of the next 12 years there.

Most of the boys at St. Mary’s played baseball in leagues, even though they were not all good at it. Babe Ruth steadily moved up the ladder of success and played about 200 games a year. Even though he played every position at some point, he was best known as a pitcher. One day, Ruth was standing off to the side laughing at how badly other students were pitching. Brother Matthias told him to go in and see if he could do better. Babe Ruth accepted the challenge and had become the best pitcher at St. Mary’s. When he turned 18 in 1913, he was allowed to leave the school to play for community teams on the weekends. His prodigy attracted attention and admiration, which was talked about in several newspaper articles, both for how well he pitched and how far his home runs went.

Early in 1914, Babe Ruth signed a contract to play baseball professionally with Jack Dunn. Dunn was the owner and manager of the Baltimore Orioles, a team in the International League. Ruth’s first game as a professional baseball player was on March 7, 1914. It was an inter-squad game. During a 15–9 win, he played shortstop and pitched the last two innings. Babe Ruth hit a long home run to right field in his second turn at bat. The blast was said to be longer than a famous shot made by Jim Thorpe in Fayetteville.

He played his first organized baseball game against the Philadelphia Athletics, who had won three of the last four World Series, in an exhibition game. Babe Ruth pitched the middle three innings. In the fourth, he gave up two runs, but then he calmed down and pitched two innings without any runs. The next day, Ruth came into a game against the Phillies in the sixth inning and didn’t let any runs score for the rest of the game. In the bottom of the eighth inning, the Orioles scored seven runs to come back from being down 6–0. Ruth was the winning pitcher. Dunn sold Babe Ruth to the Boston Red Sox that summer because he needed money.

On July 11, 1914, less than five months after he left St. Mary’s, Babe Ruth played his first game at Fenway Park. He pitched against Cleveland for seven innings, and his team won 4-3. After getting hit hard in his second game by Detroit, Ruth sat on the bench until mid-August, when he was sent to the minor leagues, where he helped the Providence Grays win the International League pennant. For the last week of the 1914 season, Babe Ruth went back to Boston. On October 2, he beat the Yankees by pitching a complete game and hitting a double for his first hit in the major leagues.

In 1916, Babe Ruth won 23 games and had a league-best 1.75 earned run average (ERA). He also had nine shutouts, which remains an AL record for left-handed pitchers. Ron Guidry of the Yankees equaled it in 1978. In Game 2 of the World Series, Babe Ruth pitched all 14 innings and beat the Brooklyn Dodgers 2-1. Boston beat Brooklyn in the series by four games to one. Ruth didn’t bat much in 1917, other than when he was pitching. He hit .325 with two home runs.

But the Red Sox saw Ruth’s ability at the plate and started moving him to the outfield. In 1918, the Red Sox won their fourth World Series in seven years, and Ruth was there for three of them. He led the American League with 11 home runs and went 13-7 as a pitcher. Then, in 1919, Babe Ruth set a new single-season record with 29 home runs and 113 RBI. He went 9-5 as a pitcher in his last year when he made more than two starts.

On May 6, 1918, when the Yankees played at the Polo Grounds, Ruth played first base and batted sixth. It was the first time he played in a game other than as a pitcher or a pinch-hitter, and it was also the first time he hit in a spot other than ninth. Babe Ruth went 2-for-4 and hit a two-run home run. At that point, five of Ruth’s 11 career home runs had happened in New York. The Boston Post’s Paul Shannon started his game story by saying, “Babe Ruth is still the hitting idol of the Polo Grounds.”

The next day, against the Senators, Babe Ruth was moved up to the fourth spot in the lineup, where he stayed for most of the season and hit another home run. Ruth hit.469 (15-for-32) and slugged.969 with four singles, six doubles, and five triples in 10 games at Fenway. He was very good at first base, which was his favorite spot. In his last ten starts, he never let more than two runs score on him. Babe, who was known as “The Colossus” in Boston, kept his status as a top pitcher while also becoming the best hitter in the game.

In 1919, there were more people at games than ever before, and Ruth’s home runs for Boston made him a national star. But on December 26, 1919, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the New York Yankees because they didn’t like how he behaved or followed rules. With Ruth, the Yankees were taking a chance. He would be laughed at for what he said, but at the time, the Yankees agreed with him. The amount paid was huge ($100,000), Ruth ate and drank too much, went to prostitutes often, and had been in several car accidents. But during his 15 years in New York, “The Sultan of Swat” led a powerful and well-known team to seven American League pennants and four World Series titles. Twelve times, Babe Ruth led the AL in home runs. In 1927, he set a record with 60 home runs, which stood for 34 years.

In 1920, the Babe had a slow start. After a bad April in which he missed time because of a sore right knee, Babe Ruth started May by hitting home runs in two straight games against the Red Sox. He went on to hit 11 home runs in one month, which was a major league record. When he hit 13 long balls in June, that record only stood for 30 days. On July 16, he tied his own single-season record of 29 home runs, which he set the year before with Boston. Two weeks later, he had 37.

He hit an unbelievable 54 home runs by the end of the year. He hit more home runs than 14 of the 15 other big league teams. George Sisler was second in the American League with 19. Cy Williams won the National League with just 15. Babe Ruth hit 14.6% of the 369 home runs in the American League. Barry Bonds would have had to hit 431 home runs in 2001 to beat Babe Ruth of 1920. Ruth also had a batting average of .376 and was fourth in the league in terms of power. His slugging percentage of.847 stood for more than 80 years until Bonds hit .863 in 2001.

When he moved to New York, he started a run of offensive dominance that the game is unlikely to see again. Babe Ruth led the AL in slugging 11 times, home runs 10 times, walks 9 times, on-base percentage 8 times, and runs scored 7 times in the 12 years between 1920 and 1931. Eight times, his average was better than .350. In six of those 12 seasons, he hit better than .370.

Babe Ruth hit home runs early and often in 1921. He broke Roger Connor’s record of 138 home runs in a career during that season. Ruth broke his own record with each of the almost 600 home runs he hit after that. After a slow start, the Yankees and Cleveland, who won the 1920 World Series, were soon in a tight race for the pennant. Babe Ruth hit his 55th home run on September 15, breaking the record he had held for a single season for a year. In late September, the Yankees went to Cleveland and won three of the four games they played there. This gave them the lead in the race, and a few days later they won their first pennant. Ruth hit .378 and had a slugging percentage of.846 for the regular season. He hit 59 home runs. Ruth’s 177 runs scored, 119 extra-base hits, and 457 total bases set records for the modern era that still stand as of 2022. But the Giants beat them to the title in 1921.

Babe Ruth signed a new contract on March 4, 1922, for three years at $52,000 a year. This was more than twice as much as the most any baseball player had ever been paid up to that point, and it was 40% of the team’s player pay. Before the 1922 season, Ruth became the Yankees’ new captain on the field. He played in 110 games and hit .315 with 35 home runs and 99 runs driven in. The Yankees lost to the Giants in the World Series for the second year in a row. In 17 at-bats, Ruth only got two hits.

Yankee Stadium was finished in time for the home opener on April 18, 1923. Babe Ruth hit the first home run in what quickly became known as “the House that Ruth Built.” The superstar hitter was in mind when the ballpark was built. In 1923, Ruth hit 41 homers making him the joint-topper in the league with Cy Williams. His .393 average made the Yankees dominate all and took the pennant with a margin of 17 games. He scripted an MLB record with 379 stolen bases. For the third year in a row, Ruth led the Yankees to victory over the Giants in the World Series. During the series, he hit .368, walked eight times, scored eight runs, hit three home runs, and had a 1.000 slugging percentage. This helped the Yankees win their first World Series title, 4 games to 2, and open their new stadium with a bang.

Nearly every day in the 1920s, sportswriters came up with new nicknames for Babe Ruth. His nickname in Boston, “the Colossus,” turned into “the Wizard of Wham,” “the Sultan of Swat,” “the Prince of Pounders,” and so on. His last name, “Ruthian,” is now an adjective that means “huge, dramatic, prodigious, magnificent, and full of power.”

Ruth’s best batting average was .378 in 1924, which was almost 20 points better than Charlie Jamieson’s .359. This was the only batting title he ever won. Babe Ruth hit 46 home runs and had 124 RBIs, which tied for second place. His slugging percentage of .739 was more than 200 points higher than that of Harry Heilmann and Ken Williams, who tied for second place (both at .533). But in the end, the Yankees were two games behind the Washington Senators and came in second place. But in 1925, the Yankees fell all the way to seventh place, and rumors spread that Babe Ruth had died during the offseason. This led British newspapers to print an obituary for him before he had even died.

Babe Ruth came back strong in 1926, when he hit .372 with 47 home runs and 146 runs batted in. From 1926 to 1928, he was in charge of the Murderers’ Row. Ruth hit three home runs in Game Four of the 1926 World Series against the Cardinals. This was the first time that had happened in a World Series game, and it helped the Yankees win. Babe Ruth caught a ball as he crashed into the fence during the fifth game. Baseball writers said that the play was a gem of defense.

Babe Ruth made a promise to an 11-year-old boy who was in the hospital during the 1926 World Series. Ruth told the little boy that he would hit a home run for him. Sylvester had hurt himself when he fell off a horse. His father’s friend gave the boy two signed baseballs from the Yankees and the Cardinals. Babe Ruth, who didn’t know the boy, told the friend that he would hit a home run for him. Ruth went to see the boy in the hospital after the Series.

People think that the 1927 New York Yankees team was one of the best teams to ever play baseball. It is called “Murderers’ Row” because the people who live there are so strong. Appel wrote, “The New York Yankees of 1927. Even now, the words make people feel awe, and every baseball team’s success is measured against the ’27 team.” Babe Ruth and his teammate Lou Gehrig bet on who could hit the ball the farthest. On September 30, he broke it with his 60th home run, which came off Tom Zachary in the eighth inning and broke a tie of 2–2. “Sixty! Let some son of a b*tch try to do better than that “Ruth was very happy after the game.

The Yankees beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in four games in the 1927 World Series. Babe Ruth’s play in 1928 was similar to how his team did that year. He got off to a great start and had 42 home runs by August 1. This put him ahead of his pace from the last year when he hit 60 home runs. He then went into a slump for the rest of the season. In the last two months, he only hit 12 home runs. Ruth’s batting average dropped to .323, which is much lower than his average for his whole career. Babe Ruth still hit 54 home runs by the end of the season. In the World Series, the Yankees swept the Cardinals in four games. In Game Four, Ruth hit .625 and hit three home runs.

Before the 1929 season, the Yankees wore uniform numbers so that fans at Yankee Stadium, which was very big, could easily tell who was who. Babe Ruth was up third and his number was 3. He tried to get the job of player-manager, but the owners never took him seriously for the job. Even though Ruth did well, the Yankees couldn’t catch up to the Athletics. On January 7, 1930, the Yankees and Ruth couldn’t quickly agree on a salary. Ruth had just finished a three-year contract that paid him $70,000 a year, so he quickly turned down the Yankees’ first offer of $70,000 for one year and their “final” offer of $75 for two years, which was the same as the annual salary of US President Herbert Hoover at the time. Instead, he asked for at least $85,000 and three years. After exactly two months, a deal was made, and Ruth agreed to settle for two years at an unheard-of $80,000 per year.

Babe Ruth had his best year after 1928 in 1930. He hit .359, hit 49 home runs, and drove in 153 runs. He also won his first game as a pitcher in nine years. Ruth, on the other hand, hit .373 with 46 home runs and 163 RBIs the next year. He had the most doubles since 1924, with 31. But in these two years, the Yankees couldn’t win any titles. The Yankees went 107–47 in 1932 and won the pennant. Babe Ruth was not as good as he used to be, but he still hit .341, had 41 home runs, and drove in 137 runs. In the 1932 World Series in Chicago, people laughed at Ruth by throwing lemons at him, and some people (including the Cubs) yelled insults at Ruth and other Yankees. They were quiet for a moment when he hit a three-run home run off Charlie Root in the first inning, but they soon got going again. In the fourth inning, Babe Ruth made a mistake in the outfield that helped the Cubs tie the score at 4–4. When Ruth stepped up to bat in the top of the fifth, the crowd and players from Chicago, led by pitcher Guy Bush, yelled insults at him. At two balls and one strike, Babe Ruth made a motion, possibly toward center field. After the next pitch, which was a strike, he may have pointed there with one hand. He hit the fifth pitch over the center field fence. It may have gone nearly 500 feet, according to estimates (150 m).

Babe Ruth kept making things in 1933. He hit .301 and had 34 home runs, 103 RBIs, and 114 walks, which was the most in the league. He hit the first home run in the history of the All-Star Game. It was a two-run shot against Bill Hallahan in the third inning, which helped the AL win the game 4–2. As a publicity stunt, Ruth’s team called on him to pitch a complete game win against the Red Sox in the last game of the 1933 season. This was his last game as a pitcher. Even though Ruth’s pitching stats were nothing special, he was 5–0 in five games for the Yankees, bringing his career record to 94–46.

Ruth’s last full season with the Yankees was 1934. Even though Ruppert cut his pay to $35,000, he was still the best-paid player in the major leagues. He was still good with a bat. He had a batting average of .288 and hit 22 home runs. Just before the 1934 season, Ruppert offered to make Babe Ruth the manager of the Yankees’ best minor-league team, the Newark Bears, but the superstar turned it down. He knew that his time as a player was almost over. He wanted to be a manager in baseball. People often talked about him as a possible candidate for managerial jobs, but when the Red Sox job opened up in 1932, Ruth said he wasn’t ready to leave the field yet.

At the beginning of the 1934 season, Babe Ruth made it clear that he wanted to be the Yankees’ manager. But the job with the Yankees was never a real possibility. During the offseason between 1934 and 1935, Ruth and his wife went on a trip around the world. At the same time, the Yankees started talking with Judge Emil Fuchs, the owner of the Boston Braves, who wanted Ruth as a draw. On February 26, 1935, the Yankees gave Babe Ruth to the Braves in a trade and he played in Boston for the first time at home in more than 16 years. Ruth drove in all four runs for the Braves as they beat the New York Giants 4–2. He did this by hitting a two-run home run, a single that drove in a third run, and a run himself later in the inning. There were over 25,000 people at the game, including five of New England’s six governors. Even though he was slowing down because of his age and weight, he made a running catch in left field that sportswriters said was the best defensive play of the game.

Babe Ruth played in the third game of the Pittsburgh series on May 25, 1935, adding another story to his playing legend. Even though Ruth went 4-for-4 and hit three home runs, the Braves lost the game 11–7. Ruth’s old rival on the Cubs, Guy Bush, threw the last two. The last home run of the game and of his career went over the right field upper deck and out of Forbes Field. It was the first time anyone hit a fair ball all the way out of Forbes Field. Babe Ruth was told that this game should be his last, but he had already promised Fuchs that he would play in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. The Braves lost both games of a doubleheader in Philadelphia, and that was his last game in the major leagues. After a fight with Fuchs on June 2, Babe Ruth quit his job. In 1935, he had a batting average of .181, which was by far his worst as a full-time position player, and he hit the last six of his 714 home runs.

Babe Ruth left the big leagues after 22 years and 714 home runs. He played for the Boston Braves for part of the 1935 season and then retired. He also had 2,873 hits, 506 doubles, 2,174 runs, 2,214 RBI, a batting average of .342, an on-base percentage of .474, and a slugging percentage of .690 over the course of his career.

Babe Ruth also led the league 13 times in slugging percentage, 11 times in bases on balls, 10 times in on-base percentage, eight times in runs scored, and five times in runs batted in. Ruth was one of the first five people to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He once said, “The fans would rather see me hit one home run to right than three doubles to left.”

On July 4, 1939, Babe Ruth gave a speech at Yankee Stadium for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. The 1927 Yankees and a sold-out crowd were there to honor the first baseman, who had to retire early because of ALS, which killed him two years later. Ruth went to Cooperstown, New York, the following week for the official opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Three years earlier, he was one of the first five players to be inducted into the hall.

Babe Ruth went to New York’s French Hospital for tests in November 1946. These tests showed that he had a cancerous tumor at the base of his skull and in his neck that was too big to remove. The problem was a growth called nasopharyngeal carcinoma, which is also called “lymphoepithelioma.” On August 16, 1948, Ruth died.

Babe Ruth’s Greatest Moments

Glenn Stout, the author of History of the Yankees, writes “Ruth was New York incarnate—uncouth and raw, flamboyant and flashy, oversized, out of scale, and absolutely unstoppable”. He was a symbol of American pride in his lifetime. During World War II Japanese soldiers often yelled in English, “To hell with Babe Ruth”, to anger American soldiers. Thomas Barthel called “one of the first celebrity athletes.” Babe Ruth won the Baseball’s Greatest Player Ever in a vote on the eve of the 100th anniversary of professional baseball in 1969. In 1993, the Associated Press put him alongside Muhammad Ali “as the most recognized athlete in America.” He came second after Michael Jordan in 1999 in a poll to rank the greatest U.S. athlete of the century.

• 2-time AL All-Star (1933 & 1934)
• AL MVP (1923)
• AL ERA Leader (1916)
• AL Complete Games Leader (1917)
• AL Shutouts Leader (1916)
• AL Batting Average Leader (1924)
• 10-time AL On-Base Percentage Leader (1919-1921, 1923-1927 & 1930-1932)
• 13-time AL Slugging Percentage Leader (1918-1924 & 1926-1931)
• 13-time AL OPS Leader (1918-1924 & 1926-1931)
• 8-time AL Runs Scored Leader (1918-1924 & 1926-1928)
• 6-time AL Total Bases Leader (1919, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1926 & 1928)
• 12-time AL Home Runs Leader (1918-1921, 1923, 1924 & 1926-1931)
• 5-time AL RBI Leader (1919-1921, 1923 & 1926)
• 11-time AL Bases on Balls Leader (1920, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1926-1928 & 1930-1933)
• 15 Wins Seasons: 3 (1915-1917)
• 20 Wins Seasons: 2 (1916 & 1917)
• 200 Innings Pitched Seasons: 3 (1915-1917)
• 300 Innings Pitched Seasons: 2 (1916-1917)
• 20-Home Run Seasons: 16 (1919-1934)
• 30-Home Run Seasons: 13 (1920-1924 & 1926-1933)
• 40-Home Run Seasons: 11 (1920, 1921, 1923, 1924 & 1926-1932)
• 50-Home Run Seasons: 4 (1920, 1921, 1927 & 1928)
• 60-Home Run Seasons: 1 (1927)
• 100 RBI Seasons: 13 (1919-1921, 1923, 1924 & 1926-1933)
• 100 Runs Scored Seasons: 12 (1919-1921, 1923, 1924 & 1926-1932)
• 200 Hits Seasons: 3 (1921, 1923 & 1924)
• Won seven World Series with the Boston Red Sox (1915, 1916 & 1918) and the New York Yankees (1923, 1927, 1928 & 1932)
• Baseball Hall of Fame: Class of 1936

FAQs about Babe Ruth

The Stats

Babe Ruth’s Standard Batting Record

Babe Ruth’s Postseason Batting Record

Babe Ruth’s Career Graph