Me and The Babe

This appeared May 14, 2006


Before there was Bam, there was The Bambino.

Mr. Margera of West Chester, star of his own "reality" television series on MTV, may owe his nickname to Mr. George Herman "Babe" Ruth, late of Baltimore, Boston and New York City.

Back before there was a cult of celebrity in America, there was a cult of Americans who fed off the celebrity of baseball's greatest player, instantly known as Babe.

There's been much talk lately about The Babe, what with Barry Bonds making his way up the home run ladder toward Ruth's 714 mark. All that chatter pleases me no end, because I love Babe Ruth, and I love hearing stories about him.

And, of course, because of the connection he has with Chester County.

I first learned of that connection when I read Robert Creamer's marvelous 1974 biography, "Babe: The Legend Comes to Life." Creamer digs past the old chestnuts about Ruth and his love of hot dogs, his orphanage background and his called shot home run against the Cubs, and weaves some wonderful little-known tales about Ruth into the mix.

One that caught my attention concerned Ruth's weaving road trip in July 1920, just after he'd joined the New York Yankees. He put his young wife, a few fellow players and an older coach in the passenger seats of his four-door touring sedan and set out from Washington, where the Yankees had played, back to New York.

Now, remember, this was in the day when automobile driving was in its infancy, and drivers really hadn't come to understand how the rules of physics matched with the laws of physiology in determining how your car could stay upright. So Ruth, as was his habit, refreshed himself along the road with sips of bootleg whiskey.

By the time the crew passed into Pennsylvania, one can assume that Ruth's blood alcohol level was something like a point-Avogadro's Number (6.022 times 10 to the 23rd). And so when he tried to round a curve in the road outside Wawa, Creamer said, Ruth flipped the car and sent everyone sprawling.

No one was seriously hurt - the newspapers got it wrong anyhow, reporting "RUTH REPORTED KILLED IN CAR CRASH" - and The Babe continued his marvelous 1920 season. But it got me thinking: Driving north from Baltimore to Wawa, he must have driven through Southern Chester County.

The thought of Ruth tooling up Route 1 in the middle of the night, drunk behind the wheel, while mushroom farmers were asleep in their beds filled me with a great glimpse of how close you can be to history without you even knowing it.

I read elsewhere that later in life, Ruth attended a street fair in Kennett Square hosted by Herb Pennock, his Yankees teammate and a native of mushroom country. After dinner, Ruth and his teammates began winning prizes at one of those booths where you knock down milk bottles with a light baseball.

It was a piece of cake for the crew, even throwing curve balls, but one of the players found the next morning that his arm had swollen to three times its normal size - the fault of the lightweight balls and the curves.

The teammate's name? Why, Waite Hoyt, of course. Hoyt's post-baseball career? Why, Cincinnati Reds' radio announcer, of course.

Hoyt's biggest fan? Why, me, of course.

Get the connection, Bam?