I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can. –Babe Ruth
A bat that the legendary George Herman “Babe” Ruth swung nearly a century ago went on the online auction block yesterday, where the winning bid is expected to be in the neighborhood of $500,000.
So how did a hunk of wood come to be valued at a half-million dollars? We need to take a look at how Ruth shook up a tradition-bound game.
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run,” Ruth once quipped. But few people today appreciate how radical that notion seemed in its day—how reckless, how irresponsible, how counter-productive.
“A strikeout heretofore had been something of a disgrace,” biographer Robert Creamer wrote. Ruth willed his way past the disgrace.
While “inside baseball” is today a term for shop-talk within a profession, it first referred to a cautious, risk-averse style that characterized baseball for decades. This “small ball” counted on a succession of intricate, chess-like moves—bunts, base-stealing and so on—that could over the course of the game supply victory.
The Original Disrupter: How Ruth Redefined Success
Into this tradition, Ruth injected a brash new style. His innovation was the home run. The lightning strike. The ability to suddenly turn the game, to topple in one swing what the opposition had meticulously and methodically built over several innings.
He was the original disruptive force.
Others had hit home runs before him, but not with much frequency and rarely with even a trace of glory. The home run was seen as an outlier, a freak accident. It was even seen as a failure of sorts, since the “perfect” hit would be a line drive.
Statistician Henry Chadwick, who invented the box score and batting average and other stats, argued decades before Ruth that the home run represented a corrosion of the game, one that needed to be discouraged.
“All this changed after the [first world] war, after Ruth’s breakthrough in 1919,” Creamer wrote. “It was not a gradual evolution, but sudden and cataclysmic.”
By the time Ruth stepped away from the game in 1935, his 714 had home runs had redefined the national pastime—against the wishes and better judgment of the purists.
How Ruth Redefined Failure
As Ruth went about redefining the means of success in baseball, he also redefined failure.
With his reputation as the King of Home Runs came the title of the King of Strikeouts. Alongside his 714 career home runs stood a legacy of 1,330 strikeouts—a figure a purist of the time would find appalling.
“A batter was supposed to protect the plate, get a piece of the ball, as in the cognate game of cricket,” Creamer wrote. “In Ruth’s case, however, a strikeout was only a momentary, if melodramatic, setback. Protecting the plate declined in importance, along with the sacrifice and the steal.”
As a result, Creamer noted, Ruth changed the entire sport. Lou Gehrig and the other icons who came in Ruth’s wake would approach the game in the aggressive way that Ruth did. Small ball would never have the same influence again.
Ruth’s strikeout record would stand for almost three decades, until Mickey Mantle exceeded it. Since then, it has been exceeded … usually by Hall of Fame legends, not by anyone who could be considered a failure. In other words, it’s quite literally true that the batters who fail the most spectacularly also tend to be among the most spectacular successes.
Ruth struck out a record 94 times in one season. Today, more than a hundred major-league players reach that total, writer Gary Kauffman has noted.
This isn’t because baseball players are getting worse. It’s because Ruth gave those who came after him permission to fail in bigger ways than before … and to succeed in bigger ways than before.
Rob Asghar is the author of Leadership Is Hell: How to Manage Well and Escape with Your Soul (2014, Figueroa Press).
