This article was originally intended to be included in the New Historical Baseball Abstract, the 2001 edition of the book.   As I was completing the book, however, I hired a friend, Mike Kopf, to read the book and give me his comments about it.   Mike said that I should cut this article.  

            “Oh, no,” I said.   “That’s one of my favorite articles in the book.”   I kept the article in the book, and I sent it to New York, to be edited by Bill Rosen.  Rosen read the book, and said that I should cut the article.

            Well, at this point, two people other than me had read the book, and both of them said that I should kill this article.   I’m stubborn, but I’m not that stubborn, and anyway the book was too big.   I agreed to delete the piece.

            Despite this, there was always something about the article that I liked.   I wrote the article in 1994 or 1995, soon after the movie it discusses first appeared, and I sat on it for several years before I tried to publish it anywhere. Rosen and Kopf both read the article as being about the movie, and their thinking was, “It was a lousy movie and it was a long time ago, who cares?”

            But in my mind, this was never an article about the movie.   The point of the article, more than that, was a) to call into question something which we all assume to be true:  that there must be a good movie in Babe Ruth’s biography, if somebody just takes the time and trouble to do it well, and b) to argue that the common and popular notion that Babe Ruth should have been allowed to manage the Yankees at the end of his career is an evil and destructive idea.   Obviously, if people didn’t read it that way then I failed to make myself clear; writers are not allowed to complain that we have been misunderstood, since it is our job to make ourselves understood.    But I still wanted to give the article (however flawed) an audience (however modest.) 

            Pardon my asking, but how frigging stupid do you have to be to set out to make a movie about Babe Ruth, and wind up making a whiney movie about how Babe Ruth wanted to be a manager, and they never let him? 

            There is a richness to Babe Ruth's life which creates the assumption that there must be a great movie in there somewhere. Amazing things happened to him--bawdy, exciting, profound, unique. . .everything that can happen to a man must have happened to Babe Ruth at least twice.  You read anything about him, you have to have the thought that there is a really cool movie in there somewhere.

            We've tried it three times now, including the made-for-TV one, and we're 0-for-3.  The made-for-TV version was the best of the three.  It had the limitations which are endemic to the form, the stagey feel and spoon-fed dialogue of all TV movies.  But the other two. . .man, for forty years it was an article of faith that nobody could make a worse movie about Babe Ruth than the William Bendix version.  What is there now to believe in?

            Part of the failure of John Goodman's The Babe can be explained by simple laziness and bad judgment.  John Goodman is not credible as an athlete.  If they'd taken him to a gym for about a year, maybe they could have gotten by with that, but it gets worse.  The makers of this moronic movie chose not only to have John Goodman portray the mature Babe Ruth, which was a reach, but to have him portray the 18-year-old Babe Ruth, which was a hoot.  And, in order to sell John Goodman as the 18-year-old Ruth, they had to make Ruth fat from adolescence, which of course he was not, which meant they had to bring in a bogus story line about Ruth as a fat kid, which causes his personality to come from entirely the wrong place, and incidentally doesn't do anything to make the obese 40-year-old Goodman believable as an 18-year-old athlete.  All of this results from simple laziness:  they were too lazy to find another actor to portray Ruth at that stage of his life, and too lazy to get Goodman in a gymnasium and burn 40 pounds off his butt, which would still leave him a hundred pounds heavier than Babe Ruth. 

            But setting aside the idiosyncratic failings of the moviemaker who happened to get the rights to Bob Creamer's wonderful biography, there is an issue which is raised by the repeated failures to make a watchable movie out of Ruth's life.  Is there, in fact, a good movie to be made here? 

            The problem is, it seems to me, that while the things that happened to Babe Ruth are unusual, exciting, varied and phenomenal, they are not much like the things that happen in good movies.  The problem is:

            1)  A movie has to go somewhere, and   

            2)  All the good stuff that happened to Ruth happened after he was already there. 

            The protagonist of a movie needs to be doing something; he needs to have a goal, or a purpose, or a challenge, or a threat.  He needs something that he can fight toward or fight against.  And, in the case of Babe Ruth, what is that?

            The Babe chose to set as that object Babe Ruth's quest to become manager of the New York Yankees.  This was an inexplicable and disastrous choice, rather like making a movie about the life of Gandhi, only centering the movie around a failed college romance.  There are three reasons that this decision is irritating:

            1.  Babe Ruth's life is not a failure.  It's a success.    

            2.  For the Yankees to have fired Joe McCarthy and hired Babe Ruth as their manager would have been incredibly stupid. 

            3.  The idea that the Yankees "owed" Babe Ruth an opportunity to manage the team is profoundly offensive.

            Would Babe Ruth have been a good manager?  Maybe.  Babe Ruth was smart, and he knew baseball.  That's 10% of the battle, I guess.  Would he be able to judge players?  Would he be able to relate to guys who couldn't do the things that he could do?  Would he be able to reign in a superstar with a big ego, without alienating him?  Would he be able to handle the locker room after a big defeat?  Could he teach?  Could he organize?  Could he manipulate people, the way that all the good managers can?  Could he keep the five guys who hated him away from the ten guys who were on the fence?  Could he avert panic in the locker room after a losing streak?  Could he think ahead of the game?  Could he handle criticism from the press?

            Maybe he could; who the hell knows?  Nobody knows.  Joe McCarthy was perhaps the greatest manager who ever lived.  To have fired McCarthy to find out whether Ruth had any ability as a manager could have been considered a Kamikaze mission.

            Ah, but the Yankees OWED it to him.

            This is the reason I had to write this article.  I find this idea, that the Yankees "owed" Babe Ruth the opportunity to manage, to be just immensely offensive.  First, the Yankees did not owe Babe Ruth one God Damned thing.  Babe Ruth did NOT save baseball.  Baseball was going to survive the Black Sox scandal one way or another.  Making a mega-star out of Babe Ruth was the way that baseball found to save itself--but without Babe Ruth, baseball would have come out of that scandal stronger than it went in.

            And even if we assume that Babe Ruth had done a great service for Baseball, it isn't as if Baseball had given nothing back to the Babe.  Baseball took Babe Ruth off the streets as a ragged youth.  It gave him wealth and fame beyond imagination.  Baseball enabled Babe Ruth to meet the President of the United States--and raised Ruth to such an exalted state that, when the two men met, it was the President who was in awe of Ruth. If Babe Ruth really was greedy enough and petty enough to say "Oh, no, that's not adequate; in addition to all of these riches you have showered upon me, you must also let me manage the Yankees, otherwise you have not paid your debt to me". . .well, that's just despicable.

            Of course, people are like that.  I, myself, have been given by Baseball a wonderful life, the opportunity to make a good living doing things that I genuinely love--and yet I know that often I am not wise enough to appreciate this from hour to hour.  That's human nature; I wouldn't fault Babe Ruth for having those feelings, however rapacious and ungrateful they might be.  That's not exactly why this line of thought irritates me.

            Let's get at it this way:  What does a baseball team owe to its members?  Nobody said it better than Ted Williams.  Among the things Williams said in his memorable Hall of Fame speech, paraphrasing slightly, was, "Out there somewhere is a young kid who is going to wipe all of my records out of the books, and what I want to say to him is, go to it.  Baseball does not offer you the chance to be as good as anybody else; it offers you the chance to be better."  In other words, the rules are the same for everybody.  It's not "Ted Williams gets to do this, Babe Ruth gets to do this, you don't."  If you can do it, you've got the right to do it.

            A baseball team is supposed to consist of 25 guys who are doing their absolute best to win.  That's what it is; it's not homage to Babe Ruth, it's not homage to Ted Williams, it's not a favor to the manager's son.   If you're better than the other guy, you get to play.  Babe Ruth plays as long as Babe Ruth can play.  The day that he is no longer a better player than the kid on the bench, it's the kid's turn to play.

            That’s why the sports world has always been 25 years ahead of society on issues of race:  because nothing counts in sports except winning and making money.   If you’re better than the other guy, you play. Competition squashes racism. 

            And whenever you back away from that, whenever you start using the roster or the manager's job or any other critical job to pay off perceived debts, you are pissing on everybody in the organization who is trying to win. 

            Baseball teams deal with this all the time.  Every baseball team each year has somebody who is "owed" another chance, because of what he has done for the team.  But if you put that veteran on the roster, because of what he has done in the past, then what about the guy who has hit .300 three years in a row at Triple-A?  What about his chance?  What about being fair to him?

            Baseball has hundreds of guys who have put in ten years in the minor leagues, waiting for their chance.  To deny a young man his chance to play in the major leagues because you “owe” something to a veteran, even if that veteran is Babe Ruth, is just flat wrong.  It is worse than wrong; it is evil.  There is one way and only one way that a major league team can be “fair” to everybody, and that is to do what you say you are trying to do:

            1.  Play the best players,

            2.  Hire the best manager,

            3.  Demand the best effort.

            What did baseball owe to Babe Ruth?  If he wanted to manage, it owed him a chance to go to the minor leagues and prove that he could manage.  That’s all.  He starts out even with Roy Elsh and Maurice Archdeacon and Myril Hoag and Don Heffner and every other journeyman outfielder who wants to manage in the major leagues.  If he wants to manage in the majors, he earns his shot by hard work just like everybody else.  If you go down the other road, then “fairness” to Babe Ruth comes out of the hide of Joe McCarthy.  And that’s not fairness; that’s privilege.

            I hear there is a new sports movie in the works; John Goodman is going to play Michael Jordan.  He’s a fine actor, and I’m looking forward to it.   The script, I am told, revolves around Jordan’s efforts to play baseball. . .