Mr. Book just finished Babe Ruth: His Life & Legend, by Kal Wagenheim.
There were too many errors in this book, including three in a single chapter. The book described Ed Barrow as someone who “knew little more than the ordinary fan about baseball.” Who are we going to believe, the author or Branch Rickey, who said, “I say there has never been a smarter baseball man than Mr. Barrow. He knows what a club needs to achieve balance, what a club needs to become a pennant winner. I, perhaps, can judge the part; but Mr. Barrow can judge the whole.” Actually, we don’t have to just believe Rickey. We can instead Barrow’s brilliance with his record with the Yankees.
The next error was about Ruth’s 1918 season, in which he was credited with 11 home runs. The author says that Ruth would have hit 12–there was a walk-off home run with the game tied and a runner on first, Under the scoring rules of the day, since Ruth could only get a triple before the winning run scored, it was credited as a triple. But, then the author claimed that the rule was later changed, but not made retroactive. It was changed retroactively … but only for people whose names were not Babe Ruth. Just like Cobb’s hit total couldn’t be changed to reflect the 4,191 that he really had due to “tradition”, Ruth’s 714 total also couldn’t be changed. And, finally, the author said the players threatened to strike during the 1918 World Series because of a dispute involving too much of the World Series shares going to war charities. Instead, it was just a dispute over there being low gate receipts—not about charity.
The final straw for this one was when the told the story about Ruth being in a near-fatal accident, while driving from Washington to New York, on July 6, 1920 in which coach Charley O’Leary was nearly killed. According to the book, two days later, Ruth had a 22-game streak when he extended it with his 25th homer of the season, coming in the Polo Grounds. But, two days later, the Yankees were in Chicago. So, the author expects us to believe that they left New York on July 5, where the Yankees were playing the Athletics, travelled south to DC, in order to get to Chicago to play the White Sox a couple of days later. The details don’t make any sense.
And, to make things worse, there was only one time in Ruth’s career that he had more than 20-game hitting streak and that came the next year, It was a 26-game hitting streak in which the game that he extended the hit streak to 23 was a 3-hit game, all of them being singles, in St. Louis, not the Polo Grounds. And instead of having 24 homers entering game 23 of the hitting streak, Ruth had 46.
In the very next paragraph, the author claimed that Ruth broke his single season record of 29 HR on July 15, with a walk-off home run and then proceeds, in the paragraph after that one to say that the record was broken in the doubleheader the next day with a fourth-inning homer. The facts were he tied the record of 29 with a walk-off homer on July 15 and then broke it with that fourth-inning homer on July 19–not the next day. The author also claimed that, when he set the record on July 15, he still had 61 games left to play. But, anyone who passed elementary school math could calculate that 154 minus 83 means there were 71 games left.
With so many errors in such a short period of time, I pulled the plug on this one. I was only in Ruth’s first year with the Yankees. I’ll never get to find out how many more mistakes the author crammed into the rest of the book.
I give this book an F. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an F equates to 1 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.
We don’t know when Mr. Book originally read this. My records show “January 1, 1901”, which is my code for read the book at a time prior to me starting to keep records. Mr. Book reread this on October 2, 2024.
