‘OUR MR. RUTH’
BOSTON — One hundred years ago, in a front-page article dissecting the possible pitching matchups for Game 1 of Major League Baseball’s World Series, The Boston Globe referred to Babe Ruth as “Our Mr. Ruth.”
The Globe also called him Hercules Ruth and the Oriole Adonis, a reference to his minor-league club in Baltimore. Within a few years, though, Our Mr. Ruth would become the Bambino — the greatest New York Yankee icon of them all.
But, in 1918, Ruth was a young Red Sox hero, an emerging twoway superstar who was on the verge of winning his third World Series in Boston, and was very much part of the fabric of that city.
“He loved Boston,” said Linda Ruth Tosetti, Ruth’s granddaughter, who lives in central Connecticut, roughly midway between New York and Boston. “He had friends there and my mother grew up there on the farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts. My grandfather loved that city, and he always loved to go back there.”
In many ways, Ruth defines two great eras — one for the Red Sox and another for the Yankees. Decades after his death, he remained the personification of a rivalry that has raged for more than a century and continues today in a playoff series that the Red Sox led two games to one heading into Tuesday’s action after a 16-1 drubbing of the Yankees on Monday night.
Ruth was sold to the Yankees before the 1920 season and quickly became the emblem of Yankee domination over the Red Sox for the next 80 years, a historical imbalance he helped create by leading the Yankees to four World Series championships after he had helped the Red Sox to three.
But the 100th anniversary season of Ruth’s final championship with the Red Sox seems as good a time as any to remember just how vital Ruth was to the most dominant decade in Boston baseball history when, behind two superb pitching performances by Ruth, even The New York Times acknowledged the Red Sox’s place at the apex of the ancient game.
“Boston is the luckiest baseball spot on earth, for it has never lost a world’s series,” The Times article said on Sept. 12, 1918, noting that it was “the fifth world’s series that the Red Sox have brought to the highbrow domicile of the baked bean.”
Without Ruth, whom The Times dubbed the Baltimore Mauler, it might not have happened. Then 23, Ruth, a lefthander, went 3-0 with a 0.87 ERA in two World Series. In 1918, he went 2-0 with a 1.06 ERA, winning Game 1 and Game 4 against the Cubs.
He was not perfect, though. In
Game 1 in Chicago, Ruth hit Max Flack in the head with a pitch. (“Babe bounced the apple off Flack’s head and did not collect any cigars for it, either,” Edward Martin wrote in The Globe.) And in Game 4, Ruth overcame a minor finger injury during a midSeries side trip with his teammate Walt Kinney.
“An iodine-painted finger on his pitching wing, which was bruised during some sugar house fun with W. Kinney, bothered him constantly,” Martin wrote in The Globe on Sept. 10, 1918, “causing the ball to shine and sail. He was ever on the brink of danger and in the ninth it looked
as if he was going to put combat right into hock.”
The World Series that year was played against the backdrop of the closing days of the First World War; American and allied troops pushed the vanquished Germans toward an armistice two months later. The front pages of the Globe during that week were usually split between banner headlines depicting allied victories and reports on the World Series. One Globe story noted how the game results were being cabled to Paris for the benefit of American service members, “far from home on the world’s grimmest mission.”
Gordon Edes, the Red Sox historian, also noted that the 1918 World Series was marred by a brief strike by the players, who were upset about their share of the revenues. They delayed the start of Game 5 for more than an hour, causing an uproar by angry fans when they refused to take the field.
“It may have been the most joyless World Series ever,” Edes said.
Edes says that, in 1918, Ruth was the best young left-hander in baseball.
But that was also the year that he became a regular position player. He played 59 games in the outfield and 13 at first base, going from 142 plate appearances in ’17 to 382 in ’18.
It was also the year he began to separate himself as a power hitter. Ruth hit 11 of the Red Sox’s 15 home runs in ’18, when no teammate had more than one. Fenway Park’s right-field wall, without bullpens in those days, required a good wallop of the old dead ball to reach, and all of Ruth’s home runs were hit on the road.
“If he had stayed with Boston his whole career,” Edes said, “I’m not sure he would have become the prolific home run hitter that he became at the Polo Grounds and then Yankee Stadium.”
In 1919, Ruth hit 29 home runs in his final season in Boston, 23 of them on the road. His career pitching record for Boston was 89-46, and that, combined with his immaculate post-season record, makes him one of the best pitchers in Red Sox history.
But because of how he is embedded in Yankee lore, Ruth has almost been overlooked in Boston.
“I think his place in Boston history just gets forgotten,” said Dan Shaughnessy, the Boston Globe columnist and author of
“The Legend of the Curse of the Bambino.” “People have to be reminded, ‘Oh yeah, he played for Boston.’ He wasn’t a Boston figure. He was a New York figure.”
Marty Appel, the author and Yankee historian, agreed. He said any association that people have of Ruth with the Red Sox is minor, and diminishes over time.
“It was a little more on my mind this year because of Ohtani,” Appel said, referring to rookie Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels, whose ability to hit and pitch recalls Ruth’s tenure in Boston. “It’s just hard to even picture in my mind Ruth in a Red Sox uniform.”
Around Fenway Park, there are a several reminders of Ruth’s great history there. He was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame (along with all other former Red Sox players who are also inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame), and his plaque hangs in the suite level, right above the one for Ted Williams, adjacent to those for Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice.
There is also a banner with Ruth’s name hanging outside the building, in between banners commemorating such luminaries as Rick Ferrell and Harry Hooper. But, according to Edes and Shaughnessy, there has never been a groundswell to have Ruth officially honoured alongside the retired numbers of such Red Sox legends as Williams, Yastrzemski, Rice and Pedro Martinez.
But his granddaughter, who said she asked the Red Sox to put up the banner for the Our Mr. Ruth, the Oriole Adonis, would love to see it happen.
“He doesn’t get enough recognition for his time in Boston,” Tosetti said. “The newer generation does not realize what my grandfather did for the Red Sox.”