Sports are reaching that point of maturity when we will now regularly be celebrating centennials. This year, for example, brings us the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Open Golf. Next year in Atlanta will mark the Olympic centennial.
Right now, we are marking an even more special personal date. Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the single most significant athlete in American history. And perhaps, too, if there is anything to the stars and the planets, baseball, at this dark moment, might draw strength from the fact that it is Babe Ruth's centennial. After all, in the flesh, the man restored the national pastime once before, after it had been rocked by the Black Sox World Series scandal of 1919.
It wasn't simply that Ruth was so incredible a slugger. He could hit for average; he could even run fast -- yes, he could. And he was almost the best pitcher in the game. He was amazing -- a creature like no other we've ever seen.
Would baseball have overcome and prospered even if there had been no George Herman Ruth to hit home runs and change the game? Well, almost surely. But it would have been so much more different, so much more restrained a recovery. I have always felt, in fact, that it shortchanges Ruth merely to posit that he saved baseball. I think that somehow in his exuberant hugeness, he enhanced the whole sports boom of post World War I America that in a way has never declined.
Just as suddenly there are schools of great painters or musicians that grow up remarkably in one place at one time, so in Ruth's prime did sports boom everywhere. And really, in fact, this is a double anniversary we celebrate. For hardly less important than the birth of the Babe was the selling of the Babe. And that was exactly three quarters of a century, 75 years ago, when Harry Frazee, the hard-pressed Red Sox owner peddled Ruth to the Yankees. It was these coordinates -- the greatest, most exciting player ever, crossing into the greatest city, New York, that lifted baseball and interest in sport to the heavens.
No, Ruth cannot be credited for inventing Jack Dempsey, who took the title six months before, or for producing Bill Tilden who won his first tennis championship in 1920, or for Man o' War, who was an undefeated 3-year-old that year, or for Knute Rockne and George Gipp, who created Notre Dame football then.
But I do believe that because of the fascination with Ruth, interest spilled over into all the other games and made sport a passion for the first time in this land and made sports stars into heroes. No, Babe Ruth was not just baseball; he was a seminal American figure. A man, for whatever his flaws of excess, who mattered, who had an impact of great consequence upon this American culture.
It is odd that although we call Yankee Stadium the "house that Ruth built," there is nothing substantive to remember the man by. Why do we always name all our streets and buildings after those damn politicians? Here it is, his 100th birthday, and there's not even a stamp for Babe Ruth.
So we note him now, honor how he has changed us, and also pray that maybe the angel in pinstripes can use his centennial to save baseball once again.
Frank DeFord is a commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," from which this commentary is reprinted.
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