Book Review: "The Big Fella" by Jane Leavy

Back in 1970, my first year at Robert Morris College - before it became Robert Morris University - I was faced with choosing a topic for  a research term paper for an English Comp class.  I chose to do one which I pretentiously titled "Babe Ruth and His Role As An American Hero".  Up until then, I, of course, knew who Babe Ruth was, knew all his records, remembered reading a grade school level biography of him when I was a little kid, but I didn't know much more than that.  When researching that term paper, for which I received an "A" by the way, I became an even bigger fan of George Herman Ruth, Jr., and have always been a willing reader of just about anything about him.

Ever since Jane Leavy announced that she would be writing a new bio of The Babe five or so years ago, I looked forward to it's publication.  What more could be written about Ruth, what could Ms. Leavy possibly write about that we didn't already know?  Fair questions, but having read her previous biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, I figured that she would be able to deliver the goods, and after just finishing the book this morning, I can positively say that deliver them she did.

Publication of "The Big Fella" is a major event in the book world, so reviews of it in major publications across the country can be found all over the Internet, so I will not go into great depth here, but will highlight a couple major points here that make this book different from other Ruth biographies.

• Research.  Leavy spent eight years researching and writing "The Big Fella".  She conducted over 250 interviews, and her bibliography of source materials covers ten pages.  She also had available to her digital records that were not available to previous biographers.
• She uses the device of the 21 day coast-to-coast barnstorming tour that Ruth took with Lou Gehrig following the 1927 season  as the structure around which she tells her story.  She used similar devices in both her Koufax and Mantle books, and, as it did in those books, it works perfectly.
• Unlike previous books (and very good books at that) by Robert Creamer and Leigh Montville, the digitization of newspapers, birth, marriage, and death records, as well and websites like ancestry.com enabled her to tell the story of Ruth's  childhood and what led him to be committed to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore at the age of 7 in a way that no previous author could. Ruth was not an orphan, he was one of only two Ruth children to survive childhood, and his parents were divorced.  It was not a happy childhood.
• The book tells the story of Christy Walsh.  In today's terms, he was Ruth's agent, although back then he was described as a "business manager".  He was the first of his kind, and the precursor to the ubiquitous sports agents of today.   He was the promoter behind that 1927 barnstorming tour, was able to secure commercial endorsements for Ruth, and provided astute financial advice and management that enabled Babe to become the first athlete whose off-field earnings exceeded his team salary, and, more importantly, survive and even prosper financially throughout the depths of the Great Depression.  
• Unfortunately, baseball rules at the time prohibited anyone accompanying a player when he was negotiating his contract with his team.  While Ruth was the highest paid player of his time, this pesky little rule enabled the Yankees to pay him far blow what his actual worth was to the team.  It would take another forty plus years before Marvin Miller came along to balance that particular inequity.
• The book does not dwell a lot on the runs, hits, and errors aspect of Ruth's career.  I guess Leavy figures that if you are reading the book, you already know that. Instead it dwells along little known aspects of his life, such as the previously mentioned childhood, the circumstances of his first marriage and how it tragically ended.  His various peccadilloes are not obscured, but they are not sensationalized either.  It also tells about his final years outside of baseball and the grimness of the illness that ended his life.
• "The Big Fella" also is a social history of life and sports in the 1920's and -30's.  And of celebrity.  As much as he was a great ball player, he could also be called the first big time sports celebrity in American history, a precursor to Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Muhammad Ali, and Tom Brady.  He could never go anywhere without crowds,   cameras, newsreel photographers, and those newfangled radio microphones following him.
• Oh, and for all of us Pittsburgh people out there, Leavy gives a great accounting of the game of May 25, 1935 at Forbes Field when Babe hit his final three home runs of his career (his four hits that day would also be the final ones of his career), including Number 714, which was the first to ever clear the right field grandstand roof at Forbes Field.  Her research into this included an interview with Phil Coyne, who was a Forbes Field/Three Rivers Stadium/PNC Park usher for over eighty years, and whose 100th birthday was celebrated by the Pirates this past season at PNC Park.

Okay, I won't go on any longer with this, but I will include one little anecdote from the book.  With the subject of the use (overuse?) of analytics and defensive metrics as the game is played in 2018, these paragraphs from page 301 sort of jumped out at me:

Like Gehrig, Ruth divided the world into "choke" hitters and "swing" hitters. Ty Cobb, who would get his 4,000th hit on July 18 that season, was the best of the former; Ruth was the prototype of the latter. "The choke was all right," Ruth would say later, damning with faint praise.  "But he couldn't give you much of a thrill."

Having created that expectation, he understood it was his job to fulfill it. During the 1946 World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals employed a then radical defensive shift to foil Ted Williams, packing the right side of the infield and leaving the left virtually unprotected.  "They did that to me in the American League one year,"  Ruth told (sportswriter) Frank Graham.  "I coulda hit .600 that year slicing singles to left."

"Why didn't you?" Graham asked.

"That wasn't what the fans came out to see."

That was The Babe.  The Greatest of Them All.  And as for Jane Leavy's "The Big Fella", it gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.  

Read it.