Babe's Bats: Headin' Home to Everyone's Hero

It is appropriate that Babe Ruth, the "Sultan of Swat," who transformed baseball from the deadball era to the big-bang era, often was depicted in various photos and films following through after a prodigious swing, cradling a few bats prior to choosing one, and sighting along its length as if looking down the barrel of a gun. Babe maintained that the heavier the bat the better the results:

My theory is that the bigger the bat, the faster the ball will travel. It's really the weight of the bat that drives the ball. My bat weighs 52 ounces. Most bats weigh 36 to 40 ounces.… The harder you grip the bat, the faster the ball will travel. When I am out after a homer, I try to make mush of this solid ash handle and I carry through with the bat. When I swing to meet the baseball, I follow it all the way around.¹

Babe's home runs and ebullient personality were instrumental in presenting him as a "mass-media Achilles" and a populist hero.² Ruth represented a common man who came out of nowhere to achieve prominence as a national and folkloric hero, like Casey at the Bat and Paul Bunyan, who performed well under pressure and attempted to help others.³

Ruth's powerful persona as exemplified by his bat has been represented in three periods of film imagery. From 1920–48, the golden period extending from his first year as a Yankee to his death, Ruth appeared in Headin' Home (1920); The Babe Comes Home (1926); Harold Lloyd's silent comedy Speedy (1928); five one-reel instructional baseball films for Universal Pictures (1932) entitled Slide, Babe, Slide, Just Pals, Perfect Control, Fancy Curves, and Over the Fence; and The Babe Ruth Story (1948), in which his bat is magical, potent, and therapeutic.⁴ These films fit the image of Ruth

as the man with the club, primitive but successful …, who was victor over everything. Like Hercules, he satisfied the feeling … that there was … nothing a man couldn't do if he was strong enough and had a big enough stick.⁵

The second period (1984–92) of filmic imagery of Babe Ruth can be considered the negative reaction to his earlier sacralization. The three films in this category, The Babe (1985), Babe Ruth (1991), and The Babe (1992), present a more embattled, unruly, and angry Ruth who uses his bat to hit prodigious homers as an assertion of his appetitive personality and as a weapon against those who attack him or prevent him from accomplishing his goals. The third period (1993 to the present) represents a return to the laudatory style of the golden era, as Ruth is celebrated as "everyone's hero," especially by children, who are encouraged by him or his spirit to keep swinging. Babe's bat becomes the talisman that enables them to achieve their goals. The revival of Ruth's heroic image began in The Sandlot (1993), where the Babe appears in Benny "the Jet" Rodriguez's dream, shrouded in a nimbus, to urge Benny, whose room is filled with Ruth memorabilia, to take his one chance at greatness. Dressed in his Yankee uniform and carrying his bat, Ruth declares that "heroes get remembered but legends never die. Follow your heart and you'll never go wrong." "Take the chance to be great," he advises as he leaves with the bat over his shoulder a la Paul Bunyan. As a result of the dream and his subsequent heroism, Bennie earns a major-league career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, wearing Ruth's sacred number 3.

Everyone's Hero, the first full-length animated film with a baseball plot, continues the revitalization of Babe Ruth's heroic mythos through the union of a boy, a bat, and a ball. The fact that the film is animated enhances the notion of a child's world and perspective being created. In such a world it is appropriate that the ball and the bat are alive and that Babe's bat holds central interest as the...