Babe Ruth and the Golden Age of Baseball

When George Herman Ruth Jr. walked to the plate for the New York Yankees on opening day 1920, he was the most expensive player in baseball history, the subject of the most controversial transaction in the game’s young professional era, and the man who would, in less than a decade, transform baseball from a sport of strategy and small ball into the home run era. The 1920s were Babe Ruth’s decade, and the changes he brought to the game — the slugger as hero, the live ball, the soaring salaries, the cathedrals of concrete and steel built to accommodate the crowds he drew — would define baseball for the rest of the twentieth century.

This is the story of how an orphan from Baltimore became the first true American sports superstar, how his bat and his personality reshaped an entire sport, and how the New York Yankees rose from also-rans into the most famous franchise in professional sports.

The Making of the Bambino

Ruth was born on February 6, 1895, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a saloonkeeper and his wife, both of whom struggled with the consequences of the city’s rowdy waterfront culture. By the age of seven, Ruth was drinking beer, chewing tobacco, and running the streets; by the time he was eight, his parents — overwhelmed by his behavior — sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic orphanage and reform school run by the Xaverian Brothers. Ruth would later describe St. Mary’s as the most important influence on his life. Brother Matthias Boutilier, the school’s athletic director, became a father figure and taught him to play baseball. It was at St. Mary’s that Ruth first displayed the combination of raw power and natural coordination that would later make him unstoppable.

In 1914, Jack Dunn, the owner and manager of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, signed the 19-year-old Ruth to a contract. Several versions of the origin of the “Babe” nickname exist, but the most widely told is that Dunn, attempting to protect his investment, told other scouts that Ruth was “one of Dunn’s babes” — a description that stuck, especially after the rookie’s play made him impossible to ignore. Within months, the Boston Red Sox — then owners of Ruth’s contract through the Orioles — had promoted him to the major leagues, where he served primarily as a left-handed pitcher.

Pitcher for the Red Sox

Between 1914 and 1919, Ruth was one of the best pitchers in the American League, posting a record of 89 wins against 46 losses with an ERA of 2.28 in 1,221 1/3 innings. He was a member of three Red Sox World Series championship teams — in 1915, 1916, and 1918 — and his 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play remains a record more than a century later. Ruth was, by every measure, a pitching superstar. He could also hit, however, and his offensive statistics grew steadily more impressive each season. In 1918, he hit 11 home runs — a remarkable total for an era in which the entire league leader often failed to reach 20. In 1919, despite pitching in 133 of Boston’s 138 games and playing the outfield only intermittently, he hit 29 home runs, smashing the previous single-season record of 27 set by Ned Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings in 1884.

The Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, was a theatrical producer as well as a baseball executive, and he was chronically short of cash. When the New York Yankees offered $100,000 for Ruth’s contract in December 1919, Frazee accepted. The transaction was controversial at the time and became legendary in retrospect: the Red Sox would not win another World Series until 2004, fueling the “Curse of the Bambino” mythology that dominated Boston baseball for 86 years. The Yankees, meanwhile, had purchased the foundation of a dynasty.

The 1920 Season: The Arrival of the Slugger

The Yankees had finished third in 1919, drawing fewer than 300,000 fans — far behind their Polo Grounds landlords, the New York Giants. The acquisition of Ruth changed everything. The team moved Babe from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield, freeing him to play every day, and the results were immediate. In 1920, his first season as a full-time outfielder, Ruth hit 54 home runs — more than every other team in the American League, and more than 23 of the 24 major-league teams combined. He also batted .376, drove in 137 runs, slugged .847, and led the Yankees to the pennant.

The 1920 season was the moment when baseball’s identity shifted. The “dead-ball era” — a period stretching back to the turn of the century, in which manufactured runs, stolen bases, and small-ball tactics dominated — was ending, and the “live-ball era” was beginning. The new balls, made with Australian wool yarn and tightly wound, flew farther off the bat. Babe’s power hitting exploited the new conditions more spectacularly than anyone else, and crowds flooded Yankee games to see him. Attendance at Yankee games more than doubled in 1920, and the team’s financial position improved so dramatically that within three years, owner Jacob Ruppert would be planning the new Yankee Stadium that opened on April 18, 1923.

The 1920s Decade: A Year-by-Year Reckoning

Ruth’s decade falls into three distinct arcs. The opening arc (1920–1922) established him as baseball’s first superstar: 54 home runs in his first season as a full-time outfielder, 59 the next year (the first back-to-back 50-homer seasons in major-league history), and a suspension in 1922 for barnstorming that did little to slow him down. The middle arc (1923–1926) was the construction of a dynasty: the opening of Yankee Stadium in April 1923, the franchise’s first World Series title that fall, a World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1926 that hinged on a relief appearance by Grover Cleveland Alexander, and the simultaneous rise of Lou Gehrig as Ruth’s most formidable teammate. The final arc (1927–1928) was the apex — the 1927 “Murderers’ Row” Yankees, widely regarded as the greatest baseball team ever assembled, with Ruth’s 60-home-run season and a four-game World Series sweep of the Pirates. The 1928 Yankees matched them, sweeping the Cardinals behind Ruth’s .625 series. The full year-by-year detail is in Babe Ruth’s Home Run Record: 1920 to 1927 and The New York Yankees’ 1920s Dynasty.

The Salary that Made History

Ruth’s salary was as revolutionary as his bat. When he joined the Yankees in 1920, he was paid $20,000 — twice what any other player in baseball was making. In 1921, he negotiated a raise to $30,000, and in 1922, the Yankees gave him a three-year contract worth $52,000 per year — the highest salary in team sports history to that point. By 1927, he was making $70,000, and in 1930, his salary reached $80,000, an enormous sum at a time when the average American worker earned around $1,500 a year. Ruth was the highest-paid team athlete in the world, a status he would retain until well into the 1930s, and his salary set the template for the modern sports star as a wealthy celebrity rather than a working-class player.

The Decline and the Myth

The early 1930s saw Ruth’s powers wane. He hit .181 in the 1932 World Series, and his days as an everyday player were numbered. On October 1, 1932, in Game 3 of the World Series at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Ruth hit the famous “Called Shot” — a home run to center field that he allegedly pointed to before hitting. The 1935 season was his last as a Yankee; he played briefly for the Boston Braves in 1935 before retiring. He was one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936.

Ruth’s impact on baseball cannot be overstated. He changed the way the game was played, the way players were paid, the way fans consumed the sport, and the way athletes were perceived in American culture. The home run — a play that had been almost incidental to baseball before Ruth — became the central spectacle of the game, the moment every fan came to see, the metaphor for individual achievement in a team sport. The Yankees — a struggling franchise when Ruth arrived — became the most valuable and recognizable sports brand in the world during his tenure, a position they have never relinquished. The live-ball era — the technical and tactical revolution that produced the high-offense, high-scoring game we know today — began with Ruth’s bat. And the athlete as celebrity — the modern idea that a sports star could be a cultural icon, a marketing brand, a symbol of American possibility — was invented, in large part, by Babe Ruth.