Babe Ruth Biography

Athlete, baseball player. Born on February 6, 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Babe Ruth was born in a poor waterfront neighbourhood and at age eight was sent by his saloon-keeper father to St Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where a priest encouraged his interest in baseball.

As a teenager, his baseball exploits caught the attention of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, where he starred as a left-handed pitcher in 1914. Later that year, he was promoted to the major-league Boston Red Sox, where he remained until 1919, becoming one of the best pitchers of the time.

But he was also demonstrating his power with the bat, and when he was sold (1920) to the New York Yankees for a record $100,000, he was made a full-time outfielder. With the Yankees (192034), he became the game's pre-eminent player, and such a drawing card that the new Yankee Stadium (1923) was dubbed "the house that Ruth built."

During the 1920s he was legendary for his large appetite and high living, and even appeared in several films, and in the following decades he came to assume almost mythical status. In 1927 he slammed 60 home runs, a record that stood until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. Ruth holds most of baseball's important slugging records, including most years leading a league in home runs (12), and most total bases in a season (457) and highest slugging percentage for a season (·847), both set in 1920.

Babe Ruth retired from the Boston Braves in June 1935 with 714 career home runs, a record that was broken by Hank Aaron in 1974. He was a coach with the Brooklyn Dodgers (1938) but never achieved his goal of managing a major-league team. He gave much of his time in his last years to charitable events. He was one of the first five players elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. He died of cancer on August 16, 1948, leaving much of his estate to the Babe Ruth Foundation for underprivileged children.

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