Frenzy: Babe Ruth’s Much Ballyhooed Premier Season with the New York Yankees

FrenzyBabe Ruth’s Much Ballyhooed Premier Season with the New York Yankees Edmund F. Wehrle (bio) “Not in the memory of the oldest local fan was such a sight enacted as that which transpired in the game,” recounted William Randolph Hearst’s sensationalistic New York Evening World, chronicling an April 11, 1920, Ebbets Field exhibition game between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The game, in fact, proved to be of secondary interest to the assembled sixteen thousand spectators. Babe Ruth—the pitcher turned home run hitter, who was recently sold to New York by the Boston Red Sox for a record sum—was the real attraction. Fans enthusiastically “rode” Ruth when the hitter struck out and then celebrated wildly after the triple he smacked in “revenge.” By the ninth inning, the crowd “took things into its own hands [and] decided it could wait no longer for a close-up of Babe Ruth.” Fans poured from the stands and surrounded Ruth. The umpire briefly tried to corral the throngs off the field; but facing odds of “8000 to 1,” he relented and called the game.1 Throughout Ruth’s 1920 debut season with the New York Yankees, hysteria intensified, fed and fashioned by sportswriters eagerly embracing the Ruthian phenomenon. As the season wound down, for instance, Ruth again found himself the object of a frenzied mob—this time in Chicago. After delivering a talk for charity, a crowd of both children and adults surrounded him. Sixteen-year-old James T. Farrell, future novelist who often wrote about baseball, watched in wonder as the crowd “pushed, shoved, scrambled, and yelled so that Ruth could scarcely move. . . . There was an expression of bewilderment on his moon face.”2 Ruth fought for air and took refuge in a shoeshine stand to await a police escort.3 Babe Ruth morphed from baseball player to popular craze in 1920—both in New York City and around the country. By year’s end, his name was “on the tips of more tongues than any living American,” according to Current Opinion magazine—this despite a presidential election and dramatic news brewing both at home and abroad.4 In his premier season in New York, Ruth emerged [End Page 68] a towering and transcending figure—bridging the many societal and cultural divides plaguing the country. He proffered a transfixing distraction and antidote to difficult times, regarding both broader challenges facing the nation and trials more specific to major-league baseball. From the start, with little encouragement, the public instinctively seized on Ruth. But as the year progressed, sportswriters began constructing a broad heroic identity for the home run hitter—a persona that little resembled the Ruth of the later 1920s (a more problematic hero associated with vice and personal failings as much as with power hitting). This brief exploration investigates the frenzy surrounding Ruth in 1920, situating the public fascination with the home run hitter in terms of societal tensions and the ambitions of sportswriters to create a marketable, alluring antidote to challenges facing baseball. As such, this piece seeks to contribute to a burgeoning literature exploring sports and culture. Recently, influenced by larger historiographical trends, sports historians have begun borrowing analytical tools wielded by cultural historians; race and gender theory and even postmodernism increasingly inform sports-history scholarship.5 This study aims to build on this trend by exploring how commercialism, celebrity, and sports can create a combustible mixture under the right timing and conditions. 1920: dread and reds On the surface, the hysteria surrounding Ruth—which began as early as the 1920 preseason, before he even proved himself as a Yankee—defies rationality. To some extent, the social sciences can help make comprehensible such collective behavioral intangibles as fame, group hysteria, and idol worship. Sociologist Neil Smelser, for instance, suggests that a popular “craze” is indicative of deeper unstated social, economic, or political strains and tensions. Preconditions create “structural conductivity” that can lead to a craze.6 Indeed such conditions—insoluble domestic and international tensions—festered in abundance in 1920. Foremost, the bitter wounds of a world war remained fresh. Ruth’s mobbing at Ebbets Field took place a mere sixteen months after the armistice...

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