In 1920, Babe Ruth changed baseball by hitting a then unthinkable 54 home runs. Thanks mainly to the advent of tabloid newspapers, that feat made him a national celebrity. Over the next 15 seasons, 611 more Babe Ruth fly balls would drop to Earth beyond the American League’s outfield fences. No one had ever seen anything like it. No one had ever seen anything like him.
Jane Leavy is the most recent biographer to attempt to explain what made Ruth, Ruth. In The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, she draws a canny portrait of Ruth’s personality, which was profoundly rooted in his appetites, and argues that his inability to restrain himself had its source in deep, existential pain he felt because he was abandoned by his parents. His need to be defiant paid off on the baseball diamond, where his home-run-centered approach showed that everyone else had failed to understand the risk-reward ratios at play in the new, live-ball era.
But Ruth’s narcissism denied him the consolation of self-understanding, not to mention real friendships. He was simply bewildered by others. He told his second wife Claire that he thought people hated him. He added that he reciprocated their dislike.
Ruth grew up on the grounds of Baltimore’s St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, where he not only was given gruel for breakfast and meat just once a week, but was also rarely if ever visited by his parents. No wonder that, as he once told his daughter, he “never felt full.” Ruth was never sated even as an adult. This made piles of money for his loyal agent, Christy Walsh, and wonderful copy for dozens of writers who attached themselves to him. As one scribe explained, Ruth’s “charm lies in the manner with which he succumbs to every temptation that comes his way” — women (as many as four per night), food (18-egg omelets for breakfast, four steaks for dinner, fifths of bathtub gin to wash everything down), and betting (it took years for Walsh to get Ruth’s finances in order, thanks in large part to gambling debts).
In 1928, Ruth’s Yankees gained a new starting shortstop. Leo Durocher was a dapper, mouthy rookie who, within hours of boarding the team train to St. Petersburg, Fla., that March, had joined and taken charge of Ruth’s traditional poker game. Gambling would prove to be Leo’s greatest passion. To this vice, he added many others, including theft, lying, bullying, and philandering. Somehow, Durocher was regarded by many of his contemporaries as charming. As Paul Dickson makes clear in his sprightly and definitive account, Leo Durocher: Baseball’s Prodigal Son, Durocher could be fun, but it usually didn’t take long for matters to become unpleasant.
Born in West Springfield, Mass., to French Canadian parents, Durocher would probably have become a hoodlum had it not been for baseball. By age 12 he had quit school, and as a boy, he narrowly escaped a beating after he was caught switching dice during an illegal game of craps. His mother prudently kept a candle burning for him at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre back in Quebec. She knew better than anyone else that her son needed divine assistance.
And he seemed to get it. In 1921, at 16, Durocher fell into a high-paying job with a battery manufacturer. In 1925, he was invited to try out for the minor-league Hartford Senators and surprised even himself by making the team. More stunning, a few months later he was signed by the Yankees, despite having played professional baseball for only half a season, leading the Eastern League in errors, and managing a mere .220 batting average.
Durocher’s fielding improved rapidly, and it became his ticket to a 17-year major league career. But the bat never got much better. It wasn’t long before Ruth was calling Durocher the “all-American out.” Durocher became famous anyway. His unquenchable thirst for attention meant he would do anything to stay in the spotlight, including playing the role of villain. Fortunately for him, many baseball managers and executives of the time held the curious belief that annoyances like Durocher helped their teams perform better and made their rivals worse. Even thoughtful men such as Branch Rickey accepted this notion. Thanks to Rickey, Durocher was the starting shortstop for the Gashouse Gang Cardinals that won the 1934 World Series. Later, Durocher managed Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers before moving on to manage the New York Giants, and with the trio of Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompson, he started the game’s first all-black outfield.
Through it all, Durocher piled up mountains of debt, fines, enemies, and unwise associations. While in the minors he was accused of snatching hundreds of dollars from the Hartford team till, and in 1929 Ruth charged Durocher with stealing his gold watch. Both claims were plausible. Durocher would later assault an aging Ruth in the Dodgers clubhouse. “It was as unthinkable as pulling a crutch out from under your grandfather,” said one witness. As Durocher’s income increased, he nevertheless blew two or three times as much money as he was making on cars, women, and clothes, while his long-suffering mother scrubbed hotel floors.
No less than for Ruth, the wisdom of personal restraint was a tenet unknown to Durocher. The exploits of both men enthralled the public, eager to see what the outcome of these living moral experiments might be. Ruth and Durocher were in this sense not just ballplayers or celebrities but heralds of a new, revolutionary world.
Leavy and Dickson tell their subjects’ stories well, but neither connects them with a larger and perhaps more interesting narrative of how Americans came to see the unshackling of their passions as the key to liberation, rather than as the path to a different kind of enslavement.
Jeremy Beer is principal partner at American Philanthropic.
