Before him, baseball meant singles and stolen bases. After him, big swings and home run trots. To this day, every player who aims for the bleachers pays his respects to the memory of the great Babe Ruth.
"He was the first real slugger and the guy other home-run hitters could follow," says the Dodgers' Darryl Strawberry. "He made the biggest impact on the game of anyone I can think of.""Babe? Babe was it; he's baseball," adds Reggie Jackson, who hit 563 homers lifetime. "The name has just carried through to the 1990s from the 1920s. It goes to show you that the most important part of the game, the most attractive and most exciting part of the game, was the home run."
Ruth, whose story is told in the new John Goodman movie, "The Babe," defined the game and perhaps the country as well, his fame such that Japanese troops shouted "The hell with Babe Ruth!" as they attacked the Allies during World War II.
Hank Aaron hit more homers lifetime and Roger Maris topped his record for one season, but Ruth's numbers remain magic: 60 home runs in 1927, 714 in all. While Aaron and Maris were quiet, methodical men who simply did their jobs well, Ruth was the model for every brash athlete who boasted he could do the impossible.
He told a dying boy he'd hit a home run and then delivered. He made more money than the President of the United States and insisted he deserved it. He may even have pointed to the stands during the World Series and hit the ball to the exact spot.
All of this appears in the film, a highly romanticized account of the Babe's life that begins with his father leaving him at a boy's school and ends with his final season as a player. Like the 1948 movie, "The Babe Ruth Story," dates and events are jumbled and compressed, although "The Babe" does acknowledge Ruth's drinking and womanizing.
Goodman, who has joked he had to lose weight to play the part, does resemble the actual man: the moon-shaped face and flat nose, the broad grin and floppy ears - all set on top that ungainly looking body, the skinny legs and round belly that recalled an ice cream cone on drumsticks.
Ruth was not only one of baseball's greatest players, but perhaps its most underrated. It's easy to imagine him as just another slow-footed slugger, lumbering around the bases and watching balls skip past him in the field.
But the Babe could do everything. He was an excellent outfielder with a powerful arm. He was an aggressive base runner who stole home 10 times. He struck out often, but could adjust his style to a particular pitcher. Batting against a knuckle-baller, he swung mightily twice and missed both times. He then choked up slightly and connected for a towering home run.
George Herman Ruth was born in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore in 1895, and lived above his father's bar until age 7. Wild and fearless, Ruth was sent by his parents to St. Mary's Industrial School, where he spent much of the next 12 years.
He dabbled in music and shirt-making and then joined the school's baseball team, starting as a catcher and becoming the star pitcher.
Professional baseball soon came calling. In the winter of 1914, he joined a minor-league team in Baltimore, where he picked up the nickname "Babe." (Teammates called him "Dunn's Baby," a reference to owner Jack Dunn.)
The Boston Red Sox purchased him that summer and he became part of the American League's best pitching staff. With a hard fastball and a sharp-breaking curve, Ruth won 23 games in 1916 with nine shutouts and a league-leading 1.75 earned-run average. The following year he won 24 games. He also threw 29 2-3 consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series, a record that held up more than 40 years.
Always a good hitter, Ruth began playing in the outfield in 1918, tying for the league high with 11 home runs. The next year, he hit a record 29 homers and soon made fans forget the infamous 1919 World Series, when the Chicago White Sox allegedly took money to throw the games.
"I used to get a kick out of watching the Movietone News and seeing Babe Ruth with a bunch of kids," Mickey Mantle recalled. "He didn't mind being in the public eye and I always admired the way he handled himself. He did a lot of wild things off the field, but he was really good for the game."
In January 1920, the cash-strapped Red Sox sold him to the Yankees for the then-astonishing price of $125,000.
Ruth's stomach swelled like the stock prices on Wall Street, and the numbers he put up remain astounding. In 1920, he hit 54 home runs, more than any player in the league and more than any team as well. He followed with 59 homers, 16 triples and 44 doubles in 1921, driving in 171 runs and scoring 177. There had been nothing like it before and writers described him as if he were a freak from the traveling circus. He was the Sultan of Swat, the Wondrous Walloper, the Caliph of Crash, the Mastodonic Mauler. If nicknames are the measure of a player's greatness, the Babe was surely king of them all.
He peaked in 1927 with his unforgettable 60 home runs, a milestone but as silly as adding another floor to the Empire State Building. It was, after all, his own record he was beating, and the home run meant nothing to the pennant race; the Yankees won 110 games that year and had long clinched the title when the Babe launched his historic shot.
But the record captured the spirit of the man and sums up why he mattered to so many people. He did it because he said he could. He raised the stakes himself and met them, living by his own motto: "I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big."
"That's one of the special things about playing at Yankee Stadium," said the Yankees' Don Mattingly. "It's the same field, the same clubhouse and the same dugout that Babe Ruth used. It's one of the things you think about when you put on a Yankee uniform."
Crude and stubborn, loud and uninhibited, he could also be his own worst enemy. He fought with managers and umpires, teammates and opponents. He was suspended in 1922 for playing during the off-season after the commissioner warned him not to. He missed several weeks of the 1925 season after collapsing during spring training, an incident known as "the bellyache heard 'round the world."
Off the field, he also swung for the fences. He loved steaks and booze, fast cars and, of course, beautiful women. Stories about his appetites: sexual and gastronomic, kept old-timers talking for years.
"Lord, he ate too much," his Red Sox teammate, Harry Hooper, recalled. "He'd stop along the road when we were traveling and order a half dozen hot dogs and as many bottles of soda pop, stuff them in, one after the other, give a few big belches, and roar, `OK, boys, let's go.' "
"We used to have a clubhouse guy named Pete Sheehy and me and Whitey (Ford) and the guys would sit around and have beers and listen to Babe Ruth stories," Mantle said. "He was kind of like our idol, too. I would have loved to have played on the same team as him just to see what he was really like."
Ruth continued to star for the Yankees through the 1920s and enjoyed his last great moment during the 1932 World Series, when he hit a home run no one knows if he predicted or not.
The Yankees were playing the Chicago Cubs and feelings were hard on both sides. Cubs fans spat on both the Babe and his wife and threw lemons from the stands. The players cursed at him from the dugout.
When Ruth came up to bat in the fifth inning of Game 3, he took a called strike and raised one finger. Two pitches later, he took another strike and raised two fingers. He then hit a tremendous homer deep into the bleachers in center field, laughing to himself as he ran down the first base line.
"RUTH CALLS SHOT AS HE PUTS HOMER NO. 2 IN SIDE POCKET," was the headline of the New York World-Telegram. But did he call it? Many say the raised fingers merely reflected how many strikes were on him. Some say he pointed his bat towards center, but no one can prove it. When the Babe was asked if he really did it, he shrugged and said, "It's in the papers, isn't it?" (The Universal Pictures movie leaves no doubt he predicted the homer.)
After that, it was all downhill. Ruth, in his late 30s and increasingly injury-prone, tailed off badly the next two years, his feud with manager Joe McCarthy pushing him to quit the Yankees. He signed with the Boston Braves in the winter of 1935, batted just .181, and left for good in June.
Unable to convince any major-league owner he deserved a shot at managing, Ruth spent his remaining years golfing, hunting and appearing at exhibition games. He died Aug. 16, 1948, a two-year bout with cancer sapping much of the bulk from his body and turning his brown hair white.
For four days, Ruth's death kept him on the front page of The New York Times. First, his body lay in state at Yankee Stadium, with vendors pushing hot dogs outside and weeping fans lining up as if to say farewell to a departed head of state.
The funeral followed. A procession moved up Fifth Avenue and stopped at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It was raining that day, but more than 100,000 people stood outside, bareheaded and silent. Among the pallbearers were two former Yankees. When one told the other he'd give anything to have a beer, his old teammate observed the Babe would have liked one, too.