Major League Baseball Needs a New Bambino

Another Babe Is the Answer to Game's Deceptions

Mar 17, 2009

As MLB bubble gum millionaires open the season on April 5-7, management should wake-up and remember the public once disowned America's national pastime over cheating.

It happened in 1919, when several players for the Chicago White Sox confessed to throwing the World Series that year. They later recanted, but incriminating evidence abounded and the team was scandalized and nicknamed the Black Sox. Fans felt betrayed and ticket sales plummeted.

The Bambino Was the Ragamuffin Who Saved Baseball

Miraculously, a ragamuffin savior who had escaped the tough streets of Baltimore to the major leagues a few years before saved the game. He excited the sporting world like like a 100-piece brass band on July Fourth. Cynical fans thronged to ballparks to watch him play the game. He was the "Babe," the "Bambino," the "Sultan of Swat." He was Babe Ruth, the flamboyant hero who saved baseball.

Certainly not a shoo-in for the role, he grew up in the custody of a Catholic reform school. There he excelled at baseball, which led to a contract to play with the minor league Baltimore Orioles. In five months, Baltimore traded him to the Boston Red Sox. He won a World Series game there, pitching 13 scoreless innings, after joining their outstanding pitching rotation.

Boston Quickly Traded Him to the New York Yankees

In 1919 Boston traded him to the bottom-rung New York Yankees, and the “Curse of the Bambino” began: Boston did not win another World Series until 2004.

Babe's rapidly developing batting skills changed baseball into a power game. In 1921 he led the future Bronx Bombers to their first American League pennant, and he was just getting started. During his 14-year skein with them, the Yankees won 11 pennants and four World Series.

His hitting set records and was the linchpin of the 1927 Yankee team, considered by many the best team of all time. (See “Gold Standards: The 1927 Yankees” by Christine Daniels in Los Angeles Times online, January 27, 2008.)

He Was the Yankee Team Captain for five Days

On and off the field, Babe was a boisterous, lovable roughneck. One season, after naming him the Yankee field captain, the team rescinded the title five days later. His breach of etiquette was throwing dirt on an umpire and scrambling into the stands to accost a heckler.

His heartfelt humility and remorse, whenever he stepped over the line of good behavior, endeared him to fans the world over. He was the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties, when exuberance was the essential ingredient of America's rising expectations. In later years he mellowed, devoting much time and money to charities, especially those benefiting children.

Babe Liked To Do Everything Big

The Bambino began his career, five years before the White Sox threw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Red Legs. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the stern Commissioner of Baseball, heard evidence privately and banned eight White Sox players from the game forever.

When the 1920 season began, the game was buried under the dirt pile of the Black Sox scandal. Babe burst onto the scene and disillusioned fans soon hungered for his flash and personal honesty. He was not flawless. He drank booze, drove fast cars and womanized. Training was not his style; he ballooned way over his chiseled six-feet-two, 215-pound frame of early years. He liked to say he did everything big.

In the 1920s, after Babe joined the Yankees, attendance in major league ball parks nearly doubled. In his first season in 1921, the Yankees drew the first million-dollar gate in baseball history. He was the apostle of power hitting and big scoring, reducing the dominance of speed and pitching.

MLB Annual Attendance

Today Fans Want No More Steroid Deceptions

In the 2009 season another Babe could ascend from somebody's dugout steps, a superstar who can rescue the proud game from the taint of steroids. He must be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to jump over tall buildings. That's how Casey Stengel, Yankee manager, introduced Mickey Mantle at a press conference in 1952, when the Mick replaced Joe DiMaggio in center field.

Casey Stengel was having fun, of course, as he usually was. One thing is serious in 2009, however. Whatever extraordinary feats a new Babe might perform, he must be able to do them on his own, free of drug enhancement..

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