In the fifth inning of game 3 of the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate. The Chicago Cubs picked up their heckling from their dugout. The Cubs fans had been also relentless in their jeering. The verbal assaults were enough to garner Ruth’s retorts, which means they were probably depraved enough to make woke culture’s collective brain explode. He took a strike and then he pointed a finger towards centerfield. Pitcher Charlie Root threw another strike. Ruth pointed again to centerfield. The next pitch, a curveball, Ruth hit so far into the centerfield stands that it charged a fee for extra luggage and served a subpar chicken meal. Everyone – the Cubs and their fans – was silent; the legendary Babe Ruth had just called his shot.
Thing is, it probably didn’t happen. A videographer happened to catch grainy film of the “called shot” and while Ruth does indeed point, it’s not 100% clear that he does so towards centerfield. Indeed, Ruth may have been pointing tiredly at the pitcher, angrily at the dugout of aggressive Cubs players, or cheerfully at a nearby vendor reserving a post-game six-pack. The story grew wings on the back of a reporter’s story and people believed it. After a while it became just another legend in Babe Ruth lore.
Babe Ruth is definitively situated in American folklore. In the first place, he arguably saved baseball, which was seriously damaged after the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which eight members of the World Series team were suspended for life for throwing the Series. Attendance dissipated, America’s heart was broken, the love affair between it and baseball seemed to be at an end. Enter George Herman Ruth, a potbellied, frog-lipped dude who ran the bases like a pigeon with hemorrhoids. On the field, he changed baseball by introducing the epic homerun. Before Ruth, homeruns were rare and baseball offence had mostly relied on singles and doubles, ground balls, and stealing. Throughout most of his career he hit more homeruns each season than other teams. When Ruth hit 60 homeruns in 1927, it was more than twelve other American League teams and ten more than the team average. He played baseball like a kid. Off the field, he ate hotdogs with a dedication unseen again until I had my first one in 1978 and he drank alcohol as if the next day’s hangover would never be delivered.
Baseball had (and arguably, has) long had a drinking problem. The very nature of baseball – a lot of standing around, usually no physical contact, surrounded on all sides by asshole fans – certainly lends it an aura of “A beer? Sure, why the hell not?” And for a long time baseball players have taken part. In the late 19th century, King Kelly was known to drink before, during, and after a game. He probably didn’t help his career by opening a bar. Ed Delahanty, who put up hall of fame numbers while maintaining a heavy drinking habit, did little to keep his name respectable for future posterity when he drunkenly threatened people with a razor before falling over Niagara Falls. Alcohol was such a problem that the Spalding Baseball Guide and Official League book in 1895 called for complete alcohol abstinence for players. Those who broke the rules could be suspended, fined, or blacklisted. Some teams paid detectives (called pinkertons) to tail ballplayers to catch them in “the great elbow act,” a euphemism applicable to other activities nobody wants to be caught doing. Drinking hard was nothing new in baseball when Babe Ruth came around.
But the epic proportions and legendary circumstances of Ruth’s drinking were unmatched. The common elements of a Babe Ruth drinking story are huge amounts of alcohol and food followed by huge amounts of sex followed by playing baseball better than anyone else in the world. Repeat. The stories take place in speakeasies, brothels, hotel rooms, and feature hookers, whiskey, bathtubs of beer, and more hotdogs than have been consumed throughout the entire history of Portugal. One story goes that the Chicago White Sox took him out drinking the night before their game in order to take advantage of his boozy appetites. The barkeep poured the Babe a heavy alcohol punch, which he drank all night. He reported to the game still drunk and having had no sleep, but not only did the night’s shenanigans not hurt his performance, he killed the Sox with homeruns, and then asked them where they were going that night.
Many of these stories can’t be verified and we must assume that over many retellings they have crossed from fact into apocryphal legend. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest that Babe Ruth was the biggest progenitor of his own myths. According to his teammate Paul Derringer, the Babe felt that he needed to live up to his legend and would try to impress people by ordering extravagantly and drinking absurdly. Ruth claimed that his daily breakfast was a pitcher of whiskey and ginger ale, a porterhouse steak, four fried eggs, fried potatoes, and a pitcher of coffee. He showed off in front of friends by eating and drinking like a Roman emperor. He had to keep up the legend. There’s a good chance that the called shot stems from a similar motivation. Ruth didn’t even claim the called shot until it had become a big story. When it had, he built on it until it had become a full-fledged deed, even claiming it in his autobiography. The called shot was created in the same way as myths and legends; something impossible done by someone immortal.
But he was mortal. In 1925, Babe Ruth spent his offseason playing barnstorming tours through the south and eating and drinking. He came to spring training shaped like a zeppelin, sick, and sweating like a beer on a hot day. He was most likely suffering from an abscess in his stomach, which caused him to miss a great deal of the season. After 1932, Ruth had two years of baseball left in him, but his hitting numbers declined into those great for a mere mortal. By 1935, he was done. The called shot was one last tale for a legend.
So, what to drink? You could enjoy the Babe’s breakfast drink and mix up a pitcher of rye whiskey and ginger ale or scotch (but no bourbon because this is evidently the one alcohol on earth he didn’t like). The Babe’s prime boozing years took place over prohibition. Now, he had as much trouble finding alcohol as Brad Pitt does of finding a date on a Saturday night, but a lot of his drinking took place in speakeasies. So you could follow suit with a choice from this list of speakeasy cocktails. While many of the stories surrounding the Babe’s alcohol intake seem to be legend, he was certainly a devotee to beer and hotdogs. If you can believe the roughly 823 billion eyewitness accounts, that is. To celebrate the great Babe Ruth, fill your fridge with beer and hotdogs and have at it. But please stop when you feel full, because you are not the Babe, you are a mere mortal and mere mortals have to get their stomachs pumped when they eat and drink too much.