Free Republic

HERE'S Babe Ruth's career — covered the way the mainstream media cover the war in Iraq: A troubled child abandoned by his parents at the age of 7, Ruth was labelled "incorrigible" during his 12 years at St. Mary's Orphanage. His first marriage to waitress Helen Woodford was a failure, compounded by her tragic death in a house fire in 1929. In his final years, Ruth's dreams of becoming a major league manager were dashed over and over again. After his retirement from baseball, he was reduced to giving talks on radio, at orphanges and in hospitals, and shilling U.S....

SUN CITY, Ariz. - Julia Ruth Stevens' two-bedroom house is filled with mementos of a different era, when her father ruled the athletic world. On the walls hang more than a dozen framed photos of Babe Ruth. He's swinging a bat. He's smiling. He's wearing a tuxedo, walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding.

Barry Bonds, the Anti-Ruth December 9, 2004 Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The howling mob is right; I was wrong. At the end of the baseball season, more than two months ago, I marveled at Barry Bonds’s preternatural batting statistics. Since then, countless readers have chidden me for ignoring the obvious role steroids have played in enabling Bonds to rewrite the record book from top to bottom. I can only plead that I was trying to give him the benefit of doubt. I should have saved my sympathy for Scott Peterson. I couldn’t believe that “performance-enhancing substances” could...

NEW YORK - Going, going, gone. The massive 46-ounce Louisville Slugger used by Babe Ruth to drill the first home run in Yankee Stadium history was sold for a record $1.26 million Thursday to an unidentified private collector. The bat, 36 inches of solid ash billed as "The Holy Grail of sports memorabilia," sold after about one minute of high-stakes bidding at Sotheby's auction house, fetching a Ruthian price above its presale estimate of $1 million, said Sotheby's spokeswoman Lauren Gioia. The bat was only the third piece of sports memorabilia to break the $1 million mark at auction, joining...

ONLY 10 DAYS AGO THE RED SOX WERE ON THE BRINK OF BEING SWEPT OUT OF THE PLAYOFFS! AND NOW ARE WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Barry Bonds' 700th home run ball brought a top bid of $804,129 Wednesday after a 10-day online auction. The ball had received 240 offers by the time Overstock.com closed the bidding. The identity of the top bidder, nicknamed "bomasterj," was not immediately made public. Steve Williams of Pacifica got the ball after a scramble in the left-center field bleachers at SBC Park on Sept. 17 - a mad dash that has fattened his wallet but also landed him in court. Timothy Murphy has sued Williams, contending he should get the ball because he locked it behind...

Bronson Arroyo got an extra day to think about the biggest start of his career, and the biggest game of the Boston Red Sox's season. After Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez couldn't get the Red Sox a win against the New York Yankees in the first two games of the AL championship series, Arroyo will take the hill for Game 3 at Fenway Park. Stumbling home in an 0-2 hole and with Schilling possibly done for the series, the Red Sox are hoping the familiar surroundings of Fenway Park help get them back in the ALCS. Arroyo was set to...

Call it the return of the Bambino's bambinos. Two great-grandsons of baseball legend Babe Ruth ran the Boston Marathon yesterday, passing within sight of Fenway Park, where the famous slugger once played for the Sox. ``I was extremely impressed with the crowd. They were phenomenal,'' said Brent Stevens, 26, whose dad was the grandson of Ruth and his second wife. Stevens learned through news reports that a great grandson from Ruth's first marriage was also running the race. He hoped to meet the man, Chris Herrlein, but had no luck. ``If Chris and I could meet it's possible the curse...

(04-05) 14:33 PDT ATLANTA (AP) -- Thirty years later, Hank Aaron is a bit fuzzy on the pitch Al Downing threw that night in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. "Downing was more of a finesse pitcher," Aaron said. "I guess he was trying to throw me a screwball or something. Whatever it was, I got enough of it." As the ball sailed over the left-field fence, the Hammer trotted into history, having passed the Babe as the greatest home-run hitter. No. 715. It's a figure that still resonates as one of sport's magical milestones. Aaron would go on to hit 40...

10/17/2003  3:28 AM ET--They had tears in their eyes as they spoke about friends, not just teammates. Baseball players talk about the family inside the clubhouse all the time, but this is a team that lived it like few others in recent memory, hugging their way deep into October.The band of brothers inside the Red Sox clubhouse was hurting as one, feeling pain they'd never felt before at the end of a baseball season like none they'd ever experienced before.After all they'd been through together through an amazing run in 2003, the Red Sox were one big, sad family in...

The Gate of Heaven Cemetery had just opened Wednesday morning when workers first spotted him. He wore a Boston Red Sox jersey. He clenched a cold beer in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other. He unfolded his lawn chair, sat down and stared in grim-faced silence at the letters chiseled into the towering granite monument: George Herman Ruth. "We had to chase him away," said Bill Lane, assistant superintendent of the 180-acre burial ground in Hawthorne, Westchester County, N.Y., in a telephone interview. "This is a cemetery - you can't just sit here and drink. We're trying...

<p>Heard the one about the motorist lost in upstate New York? He pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant, "How do you get to Cooperstown?"</p> <p>"Hit 500 homers," the pump jockey said, not missing a beat.</p> <p>It's one of baseball's most sacred numbers and, for the moment at least, it's a sure ticket to the Hall of Fame. But now that Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmiero have joined the 500-homer club, let's take a closer look at who else is aiming for it.</p>

I inaugurated this journal earlier this week, after writing and editing one elsewhere but experiencing technical hiccups enough to make it hell's headache rather than heaven's exercise. Finding the incumbent terminal a far less arduous maneuver, wishing enough to continue my tiny stake in our baseball conversation, I opened shop here, with a remake/remodel of an essay I had published through the previous terminal.That was "Missing Among The Memorables?" My purpose was enunciating this case: that Major League Baseball, offering the thirty most memorable moments across the game's memory lanes and asking for an isolation of the five paramount, had been...

<p>MILTON - In June 1932, pitcher Charlie Devens went straight from Harvard Yard to the ''House That Ruth Built.''</p> <p>From Crimson to pinstripes with no stops in between. New York Yankees manager Joe McCarthy was impressed with his young righthanded prospect.</p>