BUZZ BOOK: Inside the Yankee clubhouse friction of Babe & Gehrig

Former Yankee stars Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez had a famously frosty relationship when they played together. Now, as the 2018 baseball season gets underway, another clash of Bronx Bomber greats comes to light in a new book. And this feud is way more personal.

In “Gehrig & the Babe: The Friendship and the Feud” (Triumph Books), author Tony Castro describes a relationship more at home on Page Six than in the sports pages. Women, Castro says, doomed the relationship between the two eventual Hall of Famers.

The Babe himself admitted it, telling confidant Johnny Grant, “Most people don’t know this, but we had a falling out . . . we didn’t talk for years.” Grant asked what was behind it. “Women,” Ruth said. “It’s always broads.”

Gehrig’s own mother complained that Ruth’s second wife, Claire, sent her daughter to games “in silks and satins” while giving Ruth’s own daughter — Claire’s stepdaughter — “nothing but rags to wear.” Claire went to Babe in tears t and demanded that he h “tell Lou to muzzle his m mother.” Ruth confronted Gehrig in the Yankee clubhouse yelling, “Your mother should mind her own goddamned business,” until the two stars had to be separated. Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, was also a source of friction. As a young woman in Chicago, Castro writes “Eleanor developed a partygirl lifestyle.” The author also reports on a story from Leigh Montville’s 2006 Ruth bio, “The Big Bam”: “Before she had known Gehrig, she had known the Babe,” Montville wrote in his book. “To have known the Babe at that time was, well, to have known the Babe. He didn’t suffer many platonic relationships with women.”

Castro says there were other reasons Gehrig and Ruth fell out. Ruth thought little of Gehrig’s record-setting consecutive-game streak. And he also was dismayed that Gehrig didn’t support his quest to become the Yankee manager.

But those tales are for the sports pages.