Song Lyric of the Day (Joe Jackson, on Babe Ruth as Spur to Optimism)

“Think of Babe Ruth

And you think of hot dogs and beer

But if he could hit a home run so could you

And your weight is just nowhere near.”—“Go for It,” written and performed by Joe Jackson, on his Body and Soul LP (1984)

Released in March 1984, Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul represents, along with his earlier Night and Day, the pinnacle of the singer-songwriter’s achievement. It displays the fascination he had developed with the polyglot culture of America—from its heroes to its multiple styles of music—after he had moved from the U.K. to the U.S. following his divorce.

Though other songs on the album were more celebrated—notably the hit “You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want”)—“Go for It” is my favorite. As much as “Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)”, it celebrates the underdog. In moments of battling the odds over the years, when called upon to draw on reserves of encouragement, I recall the lyrics of this song and its propulsive, driving rhythmic pulse.

From reading an online biography of Jackson, I found that he was a sickly youngster who didn’t play sports. I wonder, then, if he developed his interest in Babe Ruth at this point in England or after he had moved to the U.S. In any case, it only demonstrates what a near-universal symbol the “Sultan of Swat” remains, decades after his heyday.

That line about “hot dogs and beer” interests me, too. As more than a few people have pointed out over the last few years, those dietary preferences, not steroids, fueled his astonishing home run binges.

But this lyric from Jackson, fun as it is, bears only some relevance to why I’m using it today. It’s a hook, if you will (a word that a musician like Jackson would appreciate), to tell you about an event in the life of the Babe. And the Babe in this event had little to do with homers—and, at least at this point, “hot dogs and beer” wasn’t such a huge part of his persona, either.

On July 11, 1914, 19-year-old George Herman Ruth, Jr. made his major-league debut with the Boston Red Sox. He’d only arrived at “the hub of the universe” at 10 am that morning for his pitching start at Fenway Park against the Cleveland Indians, because his contract had only just been purchased from the Baltimore Orioles of the minor league International League.

Remember how the Robert Redford film The Natural showed the temptations that could await a young, unsuspecting player on the train up to “The Show”? Ruth knew all about those temptations. Actually, there’s an excellent chance he’d yielded to one or two of them already.

You have to remember this about Ruth: he was on his own for the first time as an adult. For the prior 12 years, he’d lived in what was, in effect, a Catholic reform school.

Ruth’s sickly mother and his bartender father were in no position to keep an eye on their boy. This left George Jr. free to get into all kinds of mischief in Baltimore: truancy, chewing tobacco, stealing, drinking whisky. His parents, deciding he was completely ungovernable, put him at age seven into St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, with the proviso that he was to remain there until he was 21.

A friend of mine whose work has given him access to many oldtime players over the years told me once how a Yankee of the Ruth-Gehrig era called the latter a gentleman, while Ruth was
“an animal.” In his heyday, the Sultan of Swat was guilty of boozing, whoremongering, and jealousy (he badly wanted the manager’s job that went instead to Joe McCarthy).

But as a boy, young George must have been positively feral. Sometimes even St. Mary’s couldn’t take him anymore, so they sent him back to his parents. The sad thing was not only that they never kept him for long, but that even when he returned to St. Mary's they never came to see him.

Nowadays, especially when you read about abuses in many of the religiously operated institutions that have caused such an uproar in Ireland, you figure that the worst thing that could have happened to Ruth was to be stuck in St. Mary’s.

But Ruth was lucky. The person in charge of discipline, Brother Matthias, made sure to correct his errant ways, yes, but also helped foster his interest in baseball. Ruth gave due credit to this towering (six-foot-six, 250 pounds) figure in his life in his autobiography: “It was at St. Mary’s that I met and learned to love the greatest man I’ve ever known…He was the father I needed. He taught me to read and write, and the difference between right and wrong.”

I’ve always been curious about this Brother Matthias. He appears to have been a Canadian-born Catholic convert originally named Martin Boutlier, who passed along to Ruth and his other charges at the school the baseball skills he’d learned in his small mining town. Brother Matthias recognized young Ruth’s aptitude for the sport. I’m sure he must have told Ruth that developing this skill would mean he wouldn’t have to be stuck making shirts (the trade he learned in St. Mary’s) for the rest of his life.

More important, the Xaverian brother got the minor-league Orioles interested in Ruth. But to get him out of St. Mary’s, a way had to be found to get him around the custody issue.

The solution: Orioles manager Jack Dunn had to legally adopt the young man. When Dunn brought his new talented but callow recruit around to the park, some veterans snickered about “Jack’s newest babe.” The name stuck.

Ruth didn’t stay long with Dunn and the Orioles. Not that it was his fault: it was just that a competing team was right across the street. The Orioles, forced to sell their best players to stay solvent, sent Ruth packing up to the Red Sox.

So: What was Ruth like when he came to the Bosox, and how did he do?

In answer to the first question: Not great, but not bad. In baseball parlance, he found a way to win. He didn’t overpower his opponents, the Cleveland Indians, but he kept them off balance and helped himself – in the field, anyway.

Though he allowed two singles in the first inning, Ruth snuffed out a potential breakout inning for Cleveland by picking Shoeless Joe Jackson off first. The Red Sox gave the young southpaw a 3-1 lead going into the seventh inning. He might have had another at-bat coming up in that frame, but Boston manager Bill Carrigan wasn’t going to take any chances—especially when Cleveland rallied to tie the score that inning.

And now, here’s where you have to blink twice: Carrigan removed The Babe for a pinch-hitter.

What?

Unbelievable, in hindsight, but true. Actually, the manager’s move was one that nobody at the time would ever have second-guessed. Not only had Ruth batted only .200 in Baltimore, but he would have been batting against a lefty pitcher.

Carrigan had no compunction, then, about sending in a pinch-hitter for the future Hall of Famer. The pinch-hitter eked out a single, then came around to score—the last run of the game. Afterward, Carrigan looked like a genius and Ruth had himself his first victory.

Ruth still didn’t have a rocket-like rise to the top, however. Despite the vast improvements wrought by Brother Matthias, he was still what might be charitably be called “a work in progress” as a person. Teammates—not an Ivy League or prep school bunch of guys themselves—were soon shaking their heads over his gargantuan eating capacity, his uncouth manner, and incidents that veterans like Smokey Joe Wood labeled lackadaisical.

The Red Sox soon sent Ruth down to the minors, but he didn’t stay there long. They recalled him for the final week of the season, when he won—and got his first major-league hit—against a truly sad-sack team that nobody ever dreamed would be a match for the Red Sox: the New York Yankees.

(By the way, as you can tell from the image accompanying this post, Ruth might have been a big kid physically at this point in his life, but he had not yet reached the 250 pounds that settled on his frame by the end of his career.)

Release from St. Mary’s meant, in a real sense, freedom for Ruth, with all its concomitant promise and peril, symbolized by this fact: he got his driver’s license—and got into his first car accident. His teammates thought he was an undisciplined brat, but he had proved he could win.

In one sense, I don’t think he ever completely got over being an unloved, unwanted child. But maybe at least a few of Brother Matthias’ lessons had been absorbed by now. In any case, he was ready to go for it. In another six years, after he’d worn out his welcome in Beantown, he welcomed a trade to the Bronx—an occurrence that my college friend Mike and I, Yankee fans both, believe to be the central event of the 20th century.

After all, as Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy says in Bull Durham: “I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

Come to think of it, as his waistline grew with his fame, Ruth did come to have this Buddha-like look to him, don’t you think?