Baseball’s Limitless Dramatic Possibilities: Keynote Speech to the Fourteenth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 17, 2007

It’s not supposed to be good form for a speaker to tell an audience he’s nervous, but I am. I shouldn’t be. I’m not a professional speaker, but I’ve talked before, an average of maybe once a year or so, going back a few years. So I shouldn’t be nervous. But I have never before spoken to an audience like this one. I’m supposed to know something about baseball, and I do know something about baseball, but, paraphrasing what George Schubert said this morning, I’ve never spoken to an audience where just about everybody in the room knows more about the game than I do.

I’m not being coy. Every time I thought about something to put into this talk tonight I felt, hell, they know more about that than I do. Even Babe Ruth, about whom I’m supposed to be an expert. I keep hearing things about Ruth that are new to me. When I was reading Leigh Montville’s biography of Ruth last year, I kept saying, “I didn’t know that.” It’s disturbing. What can I tell this audience about Babe Ruth—or about anything in baseball—that you don’t already know?

Maybe I should start with a question about Ruth that I’ve been asked over and over again since my book was published years ago and I became an automatic expert.

How good would the Babe be if he were playing today? How would he shape up? Would he be just as great?

God, how I hate that question. I hate it because it is essentially unanswerable. It’s a different world. How would George Washington do if he were president today? First of all, could George Washington be elected president today? I mean, here’s a guy who has bad false teeth, a white wig, and owns slaves. Come on!

It’s a different world. You can’t compare.

But, okay, the Babe today. How good would he be?

Not as good as he was.

He’d be too small.

Eighty years ago when the Babe was hitting home runs, he was big. Six-foot-two, six-two and a half, 225, 230 pounds—when he was in shape. Actually, he was in reasonable shape most of the time during his great years, despite the myths to the contrary. When he broke into the majors in 1914, he weighed a trim 190, 195—about the size of Derek Jeter—but by the 1920s, he had added 30, 35 pounds to that. He had a round face and a big man’s belly and a big man’s butt, but he wasn’t the fat blobby Babe of the myths.

I hate myths too. It should be remembered that of the four sacred gods in the New York Yankee pantheon—Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle—the Babe, the fat, out-of-shape slob, had by far the longest career. He played more years and more games and had more hits, scored more runs, batted in more runs, and lasted longer than any of the other three. Gehrig was thirty-five when disease ended his career, and Mantle and DiMaggio were thirty-six when they were all through. The Babe hit his called-shot home run when he was thirty-seven, and he played into his forties, which, despite Jack Quinn [an earlier speaker talked about Jack Quinn, who pitched in the majors into his late forties], was rare in those days. He was not only a better athlete than Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, he was a much better physical specimen.

And in his day he was big. Huge. I haven’t double-checked, but I’m pretty sure only two men on the 1927 Yankees were taller than Ruth and only two, not the same two, were heavier. He was a very big man for the time. But today? How many major league players today are six-two, 225—about the size Ruth was? Would you say...