Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball's Campaign against Its Biggest Star by Edmund F. Wehrle (review)

Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball's Campaign against Its Biggest Star By Edmund F. Wehrle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018. 302 pages, 12 halftones, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth, $29.95 ebook.

In breaking Major League Baseball's restrictive "reserve clause," the 1972 Supreme Court case Flood v. Kuhn was a turning point in player empowerment. In the years since, sports fandom has come to take an individual player's influence in everything from controlling their media coverage and negotiating contracts, to affecting social change (as NBA players have done with Black Lives Matter and 2020 voter registration drives) as a given, a perk of achieving the highest level of sport.

Athletes' individual agency in the era before Flood v. Kuhn has only become a subject of consideration in recent years, as historians and other scholars have subjected the lore of sport through a much more critical lens. The commonly held view is that prior to the integration battles of the 1960s, athletes tended to passively toe the industry line. Though uncovering significant levels of conflict between players and management prior to the 1960s, Babe Ruth's role in these conflicts has remained whetted to what Edmund F. Werhle suggests was an "essentially frozen" media constructed image of Ruth as a "talented, alluring, overgrown adolescent who never grew up" (185). Attempts to critically analyze the Ruthian myth, beginning with Marshall Smelser's 1975 The Life that Ruth Built and continuing through Wayne Stewart's 2006 Babe Ruth: A Biography, successfully exposed the ways in which sportswriters and Ruth's handlers capitalized on Ruth's popularity and constructed his image to maximize his value.

In his book, Breaking Babe Ruth: Baseball's Campaign against Its Biggest Star, Wehrle probes further, asking new questions about Ruth's place in baseball history. In ten chapters, he recasts Ruth as a much more assertive and independent force challenging the institutional power of Major League Baseball. He also reframes the sporting press's coverage of Ruth, as more than simply a promotional tool, but also one of control. He argues that while the New York Yankees, and baseball generally, benefitted wildly from Ruth's on-field play, they also viewed him as a threat to the stability of the game and thus actively sought to "break" the star. They did so by controlling the media narrative around Ruth, capitalizing on his triumphs to draw fans, and using his flaws as a way to both control the Babe (during his conflicts with management) and transform the game (during his triumphant comebacks). While Ruth is the subject, the primary characters in this study are the sportswriters who crafted Ruth's public image, and the league and team officials (Yankee Manager Ed Barrow, Owner-Colonels Ruppert and Huston, various league presidents, and Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, primary among these) who had the best access to them during a critical moment in professional baseball's early growth.

Ruth's career began during a crisis moment in baseball history, a culmination of long-running threats to the organizational structure of the sport, from player unions and rival leagues, to persistent in-game violence, and critically, from associations with gambling. The 1919 World Series was marred by the infamous Black Sox scandal, and the emergence of Ruth as a star in Boston, being sold to the upstart Yankees in New York, was a tremendous opportunity to reinvent baseball. Wehrle reviews the familiar and long-accepted narrative of Ruth's rise, then complicates it by highlighting Ruth's involvement with MLB's rival Federal League, shipbuilder leagues during World War I, and his role in the Players Fraternity. If mentioned at all in previous studies, these incidents were viewed simply as more evidence of Ruth's youthful naivety. Wehrle interprets these actions on Ruth's terms and follows this pattern through Ruth's professional career...