Old Newspaper Articles About Babe Ruth

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New-York Tribune, August 22, 1920

If the lamented Shakespeare were a baseball writer he might use a line that he vested upon some more or less obscure hero of antiquity and say of "Babe" Ruth, "He doth bestride the narrow baseball fields like a Colossus." For "Babe" Ruth is Hercules and Thor reincarnated, the Colossus of Swat. His bat is the club of Hercules and the hammer of Thor, the symbol of sheer, primitive might before which the puny folk bow and offer worship. But for the game of baseball, the youngest game of the youngest people, George Herman Ruth, the "Babe" Ruth who dwarfs all other personalities in the daily news, might have been a peaceful cigar maker or perhaps a third-rate heavyweight pugilist instead of the national idol of the American people.

The "Babe" was Fortune's darling, though Fortune concealed her great and kindly intentions as far as he was concerned when the "Babe" was a boy. For the "Babe" was born left-hander!. Hercules was a right-hander. Thor never was pictured as wielding his hammer from the port side. None of the heroes of antiquity, as far as can be ascertained, was a southpaw.

Harry Leon Wilson was the first novelist to put a left-hander in the near-hero class, and he did it in a half-hearted fashion. Moreover, little George Herman Ruth was a half-orphan at a very early age and was sent to an institution for orphans. He was nearly an orphan boy, and, according to the San ford and Merton books, he should have taken a morbid sort of point of view at an early age and learned something useful. But the youth of "Babe" Ruth was applied mostly to the study of the great American game of baseball.

You are not going to draw any conventional moral from the early boyhood of "Babe" Ruth. He was not a particularly industrious or thrifty lad, chockful of conventional virtues. He was just a normal, chuckle-headed combination of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was just natural and just human.

Fortunately, the boyhood of "Babe" Ruth was intrusted to men who understand

human nature, and particularly the human boy. The Christian Brothers, of Baltimore. The fraternity is not limited to Baltimore. It is all over the world. It is made up of big hearted men consecrated to the work of making men out of the raw material.

Red Sox, 1916 (Ruth is pictured on the bottom row, 4th from the left)

Another from the New York Tribune from July 20, 1920

He knew it was a home run almost before the bat struck it. The ball was hit into the lower right field grandstand. Once more Ruth trotted around the base paths with the same broadv boyish smile, doffing his cap a little self-consciously as he crossed from the plate to the Yankee dugout. The first home run meant $100,000 to Babe Ruth, who not very many years ago was a gawky boy in "an institution" in Baltimore.

He came to the institution without a dime, and the future of little. George Herman Ruth was something of a problem to the good fathers who cared for him. It is no problem to George Herman Ruth at the present writing. He draws a salary of $20,000 a year, and the first home run of yesterday brought him a contract of $100,000 to go into the movies. The story of Ruth, the idol of the male American, reads in
life more like romance than any of the Horatio Alger stories of "Ragged Dick" and "Tattered Tom."

The career of George Herman Ruth is offered in evidence that it is no handicap to be born left-handed and to refuse to take life too seriously at an early age if one can hit. And Babe Ruth can hit. Even before the achievement of yesterday the oldtimers, even the Old Orioles, the famous players of the national game for all time, admitted that Ruth could hit them harder and oftener than all who had gone before.

Babe Ruth broke his own major league home run record, made last year, by slamming out his thirtieth and thirty-first circuit clouts of the present season at the Polo Grounds yesterday, he still has quite a distance to go to surpass the world's record made by Perry Werden, of the Minneapolis Club of the Western League, In 1905, when the latter amassed a total of forty-five homers.

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1916 Red Sox Print or Poster by oldiesbutgoodies
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