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.