The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created by Jane Leavy

The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created Reviews

• 
  Lori

  A phenomenal amount of research went into this one, but it's a little scattered. I enjoyed the parts about Ruth's childhood and the Baltimore that he grew up in most of all. Leavy picked a tough task trying to parse the man and myth.
• 
  Brina

  It is Super Bowl prep week and I find myself reading about baseball because I know that the seven weeks between the Super Bowl’s final whistle and baseball’s opening day is my gloomiest time of the year. This time around I wanted to be prepared in advance. I had previously read Jane Leavy’s biography on Sandy Koufax, Jewish pitcher extraordinaire for the Dodgers and was excited by the fact that she would be coming out with the first new biography on Babe Ruth in quite some time. The book had received mixed reviews but presented enough new information and intrigue that we have made it one of our upcoming group reads at the baseball book club. Leavy presents the Babe as a cultural phenomenon, the first modern athlete who placed himself within a larger societal context. In the next ten days as the sports world marvels at the current greatest to play the game (football) and the media circus descending on him and his team, I thought it would be appropriate to go back in time and focus on the first athlete who became a cultural icon.
  
  The man, the myth, and the legend all receive print in this biography that is largely not presented in chronological order. Facts are facts, however. George Herman Ruth, Jr was born to George H Ruth, Sr and Katie Ruth on February 6, 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland. In time, young George would be one of two surviving children of his parents who it appears were not equipped to care for children. The Ruths ran a saloon, and the family lived in an apartment over the bar. Part of a large German immigrant community, George always had a bevy of cousins and friends nearby, and the gang played a myriad of sports and games. Yet, with his father increasingly drunk and his mother increasingly ill, by age eight young George had seen brushes with the law and was sent to live at St. Mary’s Catholic Orphanage. So the legend goes, one Brother Matthias, a father figure to Ruth, saw in him a natural talent and taught him the game of baseball. Always big for his age, Georgie played on teams with boys older than him, first catching or playing the outfield but eventually proving his mettle as a pitcher. With impeccable control as well as bat power, he caught the attention of a local Baltimore Orioles scout, who questioned his baby face but could not deny his baseball acumen. By 1913, the new moniker Babe Ruth set in, and by 1914, he was pitching for the Boston Red Sox, who would go on to the World Series. A legend had been born.
  
  The myth continues, Babe Ruth was sold to the rival New York Yankees following the Red Sox 1918 World Series victory because the owner was struggling financially. The Sox would not win again until 2004 due to the perpetuated curse of the Bambino. Ruth rescued baseball from its darkest days and did so on its biggest stage, New York City. He hit home runs with prowess when most years the entire major leagues averaged only 235 homers for an entire season. Ruth’s majestic blasts made him the talk of the town and the Yankees must see theater. By 1923 Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert foresaw the Babe’s selling power and constructed a modern stadium that would endure until 2008. The Yankee Stadium could only be known as The House that Ruth Built, and the Babe obliged by hitting a home run in the stadium’s inaugural game.
  
  Rather than focus on the Babe’s playing career, Leavy pinpoints a 1927 barnstorming tour where Ruth and teammate Lou Gehrig played organized games against local teams in parts of the country where the major leagues had not yet arrived. Each stop was the event of year complete with civic appearances, banquets, and visits to orphanages. The Babe underneath all the glitz and glamor never forgot his origins and continued to give back to orphanages all over the country during his entire life. He was a marketing machine, perpetuated by his agent Christy Walsh, the first sports agent and an interesting character who deserves his own biography. The Babe’s name was on countless products, and he earned more in endorsement deals than from his Yankee salary. Thanks to radio waves, the Babe was a national hero, and boys all over the country were eager to see him in action. The tour stopped at out of the way places like Sioux City, Iowa and Fresno, California as well as the bright lights of Los Angeles. For the most part the Babe did not disappoint, hitting homers with clout and signing countless autographs at each stop on the tour. These appearances were so meaningful to many people that many of the boys the Babe encountered on this trip enjoyed a relationship with baseball for their entire lives.
  
  Leavy spent nearly a decade researching for this book, and it appeared that in the end she could not decide which direction she ultimately wanted to go in with the Babe’s life. The text jumps from the tour to his childhood in Baltimore to his Yankee playing days and back to the tour. In some parts it almost reads like a tabloid as Leavy discusses the Babe’s parents’ marital infidelities with descendants speaking out on their opinion in the matter. The text would not be complete without talk of the Babe’s own after hours carousing and how he went through cars and women like water. Leavy discusses the tumultuous marriage to Helen Woodford Ruth when the Babe was just out of St. Mary’s and contrasts it to his relationship with second wife Claire Hodgson Ruth and daughter Julia. The Babe was not a family man, but he doted on his adopted daughters Dorothy and Julia; however, each woman later in life viewed their father’s relationship with them differently and spoke out on it. Dorothy detested Claire and Julia, creating a rift in the family that endured past their father’s death. Between the carousing and Christy Walsh lending the Babe’s name to everything imaginable creating this cultural phenomenon, much of the text did read like a tabloid. Perhaps this was Leavy’s aim, showing the Babe in a larger scope, making it difficult to focus on one aspect of his life. As one who appreciates a meaty, chronological biography and enjoyed Leavy’s work about Koufax, this format did not work for me.
  
  Babe Ruth finished his baseball career with 714 home runs and succumbed to cancer on August 18, 1948. He had risen from being an orphan to being an American hero at a time when Americans desperately needed one. A true rags to riches story, the Babe endures to this day as sports pundits continue to debate who the greatest team athlete of all time is. In terms of placing himself in a larger cultural context, I still place the Babe in my top three, regardless of who my sports allegiances lie with today. Despite the jumpy text and the at times tabloids that jumped out at me, I had fun being transported to the 1927 barnstorming tour. While not a definitive work on the Babe, The Big Fella is still a fun, invoking read and should be sure to generate intriguing discussions in the baseball book club next month.
  
  3.5 stars
• 
  Michael Finocchiaro

  Really having a hard time with the fragmented narrative in this one. I know she put a lot of work into it, but it is so incoherent and with no focus on baseball and the Babe, it is hard to stay engaged. I am going to put this aside because it is just too annoying :-/
• 
  Christopher Febles

  The author of a wonderful Mickey Mantle biography,
  The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, tries her hand at describing a sports icon and arguably the true GOAT, and not the kind with horns.
  
  What characterizes this best is the loose commitment to chronology. If there’s a structure, it centers around the barnstorming tour the Babe and Lou Gehrig took in 1927, just after sweeping the Pirates in the World Series. That was also the year the Babe hit sixty home runs, daring some other SOB to do that. (Took a while, but other SOBs did.)
  
  It can be frustrating at first. Sometimes I wished we could just hear a direct story about the tour, sometimes I wanted to hear about St. Mary’s, sometimes I wanted to hear about Helen, or Claire, or Dorothy. It all seemed a bit thrown at me, all at once, like facing a pitcher and having no idea what’s coming next (yes, I made a baseball reference: you’re welcome).
  
  That said, I actually learned a few things. I’d read the more dated version by Kal Wagenheim
  Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend, which by contrast is conventional and good with detail if a little glossy. This gave me a wondrous amount of information about all phases of his life, particularly the early years, and his social and emotional turmoil with the Yankees. There were some descriptions of people in the towns in which he played that were just magical, so heartfelt and earthy. I felt like I was part of his homelife, and sometimes I wished I wasn’t. I had a little more sympathy and understanding. The whole thing smacked of Ron Chernow-like description. Not as long as you might think, although again, the jumping around can seem a little iffy.
  
  Another birthday gift from my friend Bryan Robinson. Big step up from a wrestling champion!
  
  Overall a very good biography of The Babe, just the fresh and up-to-date version we needed.
• 
  Rob Neyer

  Leavy set for herself an almost impossible task: Tell the story of Babe Ruth's life as it's never been told before.
  
  And guess what: She pulls it off, with hardly a glitch along the way. Leavy chose to use a 1927 barnstorming tour - the Bustin' Babes vs. the Larrupin' Lous - as the framework for her narrative, and travels back and forth between the cross-country tour and a (generally) chronological account of Ruth's life. In the hands of almost any author, this simply would not have worked. But in Leavy's hands, it does work. And despite having read innumerable books about the Babe, some of them quite good, I learned all sorts of things I never knew before.
• 
  Fred

  Jane Leavy, one of our greatest sports biographers, has taken on the greatest baseball player of them all, Babe Ruth, the Big Fella. Note the subtitle of the book: "Babe Ruth and the World He Created." This is not really a book about baseball. It is a book about baseball as part of the popular culture of the 1920 and 30s and about how the greatest ballplayer of all helped create and dominate celebrity culture. If you are looking for a chronological accounting of Ruth's great baseball deeds, read another book. If you want details about Ruth the pitcher or how he made the decision to play every day look elsewhere. You will find discussions about how Ruth stacks up against the players of today and there is a wonderful chapter about Ruth's hitting philosophy and swing. But overall this is about Ruth the man. It starts with Ruth the boy. Leavy has gone farther into how being abandoned to St Mary's must have affected Ruth. She digs deeper into his psyche, his loneliness, his struggles with authority and shows convincingly that this fact of his personality allowed him to be both a celebrity and a slugger. Leavy's book is only generally chronological. She follows Ruth and Gehrig through October 1927, the best year of Babe's life as his wins the World Series and barnstorms through the United States. He is the biggest star of his generation at the height of his power. Each town in the barnstorming trip becomes a chapter and some story from each town allows Leavy to expound on the many facets of the Big Fella's life or personality. She examines his wealth, his race, his marriages, his desire to please the crowds, his relationships to kids, to authority, to media, to food. All of it is woven throughout the book. For that reason the more you know about Ruth's life the easier it will be to follow. This is truly a new biography. It has a new format, new information, new insights and thus gives us new appreciation for a man who never stops amazing us.
• 
  Robert Sparrenberger

  What a huge disappointment this book was. I love a good baseball biography and was looking forward to this one especially since this author wrote a great one on Mickey mantle.
  
  It never really focused on his baseball at all. How can you write a bio in babe Ruth that doesn’t include baseball? The author wanted to focus on this celebrity which was fine but that’s secondary to his skills in the field.
  
  It’s also disjointed and has no flow. It jumps around all
  Over the place for no rhyme or reason.
  
  Stay away.
• 
  Jeffrey

  Enjoyed the new anecdotes about Babe, but did not like the organization of the book.
• 
  Frank Paul

  This is a fantastic book. Babe Ruth is a tough subject for biography for a few reasons, including the difficulty of separating myth from fact. This is at least the fifth book about Babe Ruth that I've read as an adult and I was continually impressed by the stories that Leavy uncovered and by her willingness to separate what we know about the man from the record and what we have been told about him through folklore.
  
  Babe's origins are a lot murkier than most superstars. We know when he was born, although Babe himself was off on that point by a year and a day for most of his life. We know that he lived most of his childhood in an orphanage, even though his parents lived just a mile from the institution. Babe was very reluctant to share the details of that childhood and a lot of the documentary evidence was lost in a fire. But Ms. Leavy does a tremendous job of spelling out what she can and leaving the reader to fill in the crucial blanks.
  
  Ruth was not a complicated or profound man. But his influence on sport and on celebrity is without parallel. He was a rock star two generations before that term existed. And his performance on the baseball field will never be matched, mostly because he was so far ahead of his contemporaries. As of this writing, he is still the all time leader in OPS, a statistic that wasn't even dreamed up until decades after his passing. For good measure, his pitching feats include being 17th on the all-time Earned Run Average and 12th in winning percentage.
  
  The book is a perfect balance of historical rigor, amusing anecdotes and relevant anallysis of what the protagnist means for our time, including detailed analysis of his earnings and investments. That might sound dry but consider that Babe's 1927 income was $26 million dollars in today's dollars, if you adjust for inflation and current tax laws.
  
  The books is more than the biography of one great figure and it covers many subjects beyond old-timey baseball. It was a joy to read.
• 
  Jim Swike

  Returned by Library. A great read not just have Baseball or Yankee fans. As the title Babe Ruth created a new world during his era. Great resource about the era for research and and / or term paper. Enjoy!
• 
  SoulSurvivor

  For the serious Babe Ruth fan . Leavy takes a unique route in memorializing the Bambino . She follows a barnstorming railway tour featuring Babe and Lou Gehrig after their 1927 battle for the
  Home Run King title . Also provides in-depth background on the relationship between Ruth and his sports agent / promoter/ attorney and friend .
• 
  Valerie

  This is one of the rare instances in which I wish I had read the reviews before checking this book out of the library. I don't want to be spoiled or be influenced by others biases before I read something which is why I try to avoid reading reviews until after I have either finished or abandoned the book. But if I had read the reviews first, I would have seen that this was a book to skip.
  
  You'd think that a book about Babe Ruth would be fantastic. But this one isn't. It's not a straight forward bio of Babe Ruth, which was what I was looking for. Instead she tries to examine the celebrity impact of Babe Ruth and the world he helped to create. And boy did Jane Leavy create a mess.
  
  I think her goal was to construct a biography that was fun to read based up on the tone she used and the constant inclusions of trivia and gossip. So this was not a book designed for the serious sports fan or historian. But her efforts fell flat because she included so much mindless information. As a result, this turned into a very tedious read. A book that was supposed to be about Babe Ruth really comes off as a book about 1927 America. And you know what? Bill Bryson wrote a much better book exploring the year 1927.
  
  So skip this poorly edited montrosity and read Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927. It's a much shorter read filled with much of the same information Leavy provides here and is more entertaining.
  
• 
  Steve Majerus-Collins

  This unconventional biography of baseball's most legendary player soars sometimes in ways that make a reader wish every word of it reached those heights. But, hey, even the Babe struck out a lot. It's part and parcel of swinging for the fences.
  I admired Leavy's deep research. She came up with some revelations and found truth buried in a landslide of lies.
  I also loved that she tried to arrange all of it around a 1927 barnstorming tour that Ruth and Lou Gehrig took after the Yankees won the World Series. It didn't always work, but it was a valiant effort to break the chronological style of nearly every biography.
  Mostly, though, I found her book gave me a deeper appreciation for Ruth's place in the American psyche and the era he helped to create, a period that is recognizably our own. I'm still not sure I truly get why it sometimes seems that modern America started somewhere in the Roaring Twenties, but Leavy's book makes it all the more obvious that it did.
  We're still living in the Country That Ruth Built. So it helps to understand how we got here a little better.
• 
  Steve Leshin

  Babe Ruth changed baseball and the meaning of celebrity and did it in a time known as the Roaring Twenties. Jane Leavy, who has penned acclaimed biographies on Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax takes on the Babe and his impact on the world. With thorough research over a span of years and a flair for writing about the big fella, the reader is treated to a revelation about a more complex George Herman "Babe" Ruth than we are used to, worts and all. He lived life to the fullest even as his actions caused trouble for those closest around him. Using a barnstorming trip out west with Lou Gerhig after the 1927 world Series, and the year the Big Fella hit 60 homeruns, Leavy introduces us to fans who participated in the exhibition games with the two sluggers as well as Ruth's early background in Baltimore and his later years when a terrible disease ended his life prematurely. Ruth's financial impact on baseball and celebrity is thoroughly covered as well. A must read for Babe Ruth fans of all ages.
• 
  Casey Wheeler

  I had high hopes for this book based on the author's previous one on Mickey Mantle. Unfortunately, I found this one to be disappointing. The book revolves around the barn storming trip that Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig took after the 1927 World Series. Part of each chapter was about one or more of the stops across the country and then some about George Herman Ruth, Jr.  and Chris Walsh, his public relations agent. The part about the Babe was not always in chronological order. 
  
  This book will work for the casual baseball fan, but serious students of the game will find it somewhat unfulfilling.
• 
  Robert J Oefinger

  Leavy hits another one out of the park!
  
  After reading her fabulous books about Koufax and Mantle, I was eagerly awaiting "The Big Fella", and Leavy did not disappoint. An incredible piece of both research and writing style, the book perfectly captured the Babe's era, career, and personal life. I can only hope that Jane continues writing more baseball biographies....maybe Snider, Hodges, Campy, Reese, Durocher next?
• 
  B W Radley

  While the use of the 1927 post-season tour of America was an interesting framing device, the book contained numerous lazy editorial errors which I personally found off-putting and a detraction from the narrative.
• 
  Tim

  Disjointed and confusing narrative of Babe's youth, barnstorming with Gehrig, the times etc. Poor choice of structure. Disappointing effort from great author of Mantle and Koufax lives. Who was the Editor here ?
• 
  Bob

  Summary: A biography of Babe Ruth, with the narrative of his life connected with a day by day account of a barnstorming tour of the country after his home run record-breaking 1927 season.
  
  He was big in so many ways. He could probably have been a Hall of Fame pitcher. He not only held one season and lifetime home run records for decades, but his day in, day out hitting and slugging percentages and many other statistics place him at the very top of all time hitters. He was physically big, in height and girth, in hands. He not only hit a lot of home runs, but hit with a much heavier bat than most players used, and with a swing studied for its efficiency. He had huge appetites, for food, for women, for clothes, for adulation. He not only negotiated record salaries (and Leavy suggests he could have received more) but earned record amounts on appearances and endorsements.
  
  Leavy tells this whole story from the loveless marriage of his parents that ended in divorce, with George, Jr. at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, and later St. James home, where he met Brother Matthias, who was probably the closest thing he really had to a father, and who taught him baseball. It is even thought that Babe modeled his swing on Brother Matthias. Leavy traces his career from the minors, his time in Boston and transformation from a pitcher to a hitter who played every day, his trade to New York.
  
  She shows us a Ruth who tried to have a different life in his first marriage to Helen, yet whose appetites led to carousing and many women, and an increasingly distant relationship with Helen, who spent more and more time hospitalized or as an invalid, while Babe developed an extra-marital relationship with Claire who he married after Helen's death.
  
  One of the most fascinating aspects of the book was the role Christy Walsh played in making Ruth "big." Long before agents became commonplace, Walsh worked tirelessly with Ruth to get him to amend his ways enough to stay out of trouble, play the game, endorse products, and make a fortune on post-season appearances. Walsh was the one who understood, in a way Ruth never quite grasped, how much Ruth was worth to the Yankees, and the limited time he had to capitalize on it.
  
  Ruth, having not found love in his family, seems to never have been content with a family. He tried to keep playing when his body no longer could sustain it. Traded by the Yankees back to Boston, he hoped to manage a team, but was never given a chance. He got involved in a movie project that produced an inferior "B" movie. Then the cancer came. Ruth's last years were hard and the "big fella" was reduced to 150 pounds by his tottering farewell appearance at an Old-Timers game at Yankee Stadium. A few months later, he was dead.
  
  Leavy uses the device of a 21 day barnstorming tour across the country with Lou Gehrig following his 1927 season, the peak of his career. Each chapter covers one day of the tour and advances Leavy's narrative of his life. The tour captures in miniature the story of his life from the game to the crowds including the kids, the after hours, and the adulation.
  
  This was the one aspect of the book about which I was ambivalent. It captured an aspect of Babe's life often overlooked in the accounts. But it also seemed distracting and one had to pay attention to when Leavy was writing about the tour, or moving forward the larger narrative of his life. It was an interesting device, but I'm not sure it worked for me.
  
  However, Leavy gives us a portrait of both the power and pathos that were part of the Babe's story. She helped me realize how extensive his accomplishments were long before today's technology enhanced game, and how his presence changed the game. Christy Walsh anticipated the role agents would have in looking out for players' interests, changing a game where the owners held all the power. It also raises the fascinating question of whether any of this would happen without the mentoring of Brother Matthias. One thing was sure. Ruth never forgot. And perhaps neither should we.
• 
  Matt Glaviano

  I have no idea why I read this.
  
  OK, well, a little bit of an idea. I'm doing a reading challenge for work, and I needed a book about sports, and a book recommended by a coworker. When I opened an email from a coworker, and saw this title as their "Currently Reading," it seemed like a natural choice. Two balls with one bat, if you will.
  
  For someone who hasn't read a book about baseball in a decade, who has never read a biography of Ruth, it may not have been the best choice.
  
  This book is not a chronological biography of the Babe. Taking a 1927 barnstorming tour of the US with Lou Gehrig as her primary setting, Leavy weaves a tale that focuses less on the events of Ruth's life than it does on the out sized, nearly hyperbolic role that Ruth played in the life of American culture.
  
  Adjusting to this led to a great deal of friction while reading. It took me a long time to get my bearings and get in to what Leavy was doing. So, maybe, if you haven't read a biography of Babe Ruth before, another book might be a better read.
  
  That said, what this book does, it does extremely well. It would be hard to underestimate what a gigantic role Babe Ruth played in America's psyche nearly a century ago. Leavy's book is extremely well documented and chock full of fascinating tidbits -- great choices moments of time and well-extracted quotations.
  
  By the time the Babe retires and deals with mortality, I'd spent enough time with her subject that I was deeply moved by Leavy's descriptions of the aftermath of his career. Like so many over sized, mythic icons, being reminded that they die -- that we all do -- can be bittersweet and endearing.
  
  I was won over in spite of myself. A long journey down a different road than I expected -- one that was well worth the time.
• 
  Buck Edwards

  Sometimes less is more. Yes, it was a chiseled look at the Babe, right down to the shine of his shoes and his ability to spit tobacco. But What Jane Leavy gives us in 'The Big Fella' is, at times, over the top. The number of characters, major, minor and a slew of ultra-minors, is at times both overwhelming and irrelevant. Even the layout of the book resembles an experience in time-travel.
  Having pointed out those negatives, I highly appreciated the human aspect of a national hero, not much different than any hero--both angelic and devilish--that Leavy gives her readers. For someone like myself, who was born the year the Babe died, his very ghostly presence was very much there growing up with a steady eye on baseball. Even moving through the years, with my own heroes--Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and later Reggie Jackson--the shadow of Babe Ruth was still ever-present.
  And so he remains, thanks to Jane Leavy.
• 
  Alan

  Let me preface my review by saying, without hesitation, I love baseball books. There's a wide range out there - some focusing on very specific games and players and then there's this book. Sure it's about Babe Ruth (and Moby Dick is about a whale), but it's about the rise of the celebrity, the ascendency of pop culture, the cult of personality, abandonment, and yes, baseball. Specifically the evolution of the game from the Ty Cobb slap hitters to the Babe's gargantuan home runs. The writing is spectacular and the book is framed within the context of Babe and Lou Geherig's barnstorming tour after the 1927 World Series. Each chapter focuses on a stop and an aspect of the Babe's life. Myths were debunked (I always thought he really was an orphan - he wasn't) and the author brought a larger than life character literally to life. I've already read Jane Leavy's Koufax biography, and despite my loathing of the Yankees, it seems I'll need to read her Mantle biography next!
• 
  Richard Canale

  Leavy's work is more tome and tribute than book. She does a ton of homework here and clearly has affection and admiration for 'The Big Fella'.
  She never embellishes his heroics and takes you to the ball park and on his barnstorming tour.
  Leavy tells Ruth's story through the lens of his tour with Gehrig which is a new angle for the slugger, but for what it gives it also takes away.
  When Leavy tells of Ruth's cancer, you see him. You feel for him. Her descriptions are eerie.
  But as you prepare yourself for his death, Leavy takes us back to the barnstorming tour. The emotional roller coaster for the reader is hard.
  Having read, Leigh Montville's The Big Bam and enjoyed it; I can't think of any Ruth fan who would not love this book.