Excerpt from Babe Ruth in Florida



After Ruth retired from the Boston Braves in June 1935, he returned to New York City with Claire, played some golf, did some hunting, attended a few baseball games, and took more interest in the raising of his two daughters. One Florida team, the Palatka nine in the Florida State League, offered him the managership of their team, but he declined. He still hoped for a call from a major-league team, offering him a manager's job, but it would not come.

He and Claire continued going to Florida for golf when the weather turned cold in New York, and they took some interest in spring training there. In February 1936, while they were watching a game between the Reds and Athletics in Fort Myers, Larry MacPhail of the Reds offered him a job as a pinch-hitter and spare outfielder, but he declined, citing his burgeoning weight and weak legs.

When MacPhail joined the Brooklyn Dodgers as general manager in 1938, realizing that he needed to increase attendance at the Dodgers' games, he convinced Ruth to join the team as a coach that same year. Many years later, Dolph Camilli, who joined the Dodgers that season, talked about Ruth: "'He was the most likable of guys. He was just himself, the Babe, the one and only. The best ever. Take my word for it; he would have been a successful manager had he been given the chance.'" Attendance increased by more than 20,000 at Ruth's return, but, at the end of the season, when the Dodgers hired Leo Durocher to manage the team, Ruth resigned, marking the end of his direct association with baseball.

The two teams that Ruth had been most closely associated with in his last active years, the Yankees and Braves, were both training in St. Petersburg, but, because he felt hurt by both teams, he did not feel comfortable on either bench. Also, Ruth and manager Joe McCarthy did not like each other, although Babe was friendly with the other Yankees.

Ruth still played golf, but not consistently well. His name continued to attract spectators, but he struggled with the game, losing at one point when he teamed up with Glenna Collett Vare against Lloyd Gullickson (a pro) and Babe Didrickson Zaharias (wonder girl of the 1932 Olympics). As Ruth played more and more golf in his retirement, he did improve and even considered turning professional, especially when he began to consistently score in the high seventies, sometimes dropping into the low seventies. However, as an indication of how much he was out of the public eye, a headline in the 1947 St. Petersburg Times, "BABE IN BENEFIT PLAY AT DUNEDIN LINKS TODAY," which would have referred to Ruth in the twenties, then referred to Babe Didrickson Zaharias.

One of the activities that Ruth enjoyed in Florida was that of hitting instructor for the Ray Doan Baseball School. In 1940 and 1941 he spent several weeks in Palatka, instructing young men in the art of hitting. To this day, residents from those days remember in vivid detail what Ruth said and did. Don Cameron, for example, was then a nine-year-old who had just saved enough quarters to buy a new baseball bat. In March 1941, when Ruth was there, the great batsman went up to Cameron and asked, "Is that a pretty good bat, kid?" "I think it's a pretty good bat, Mr. Ruth," the youngster responded. "Well, let me see," answered the Bambino. He then took it to the plate and proceeded to knock six balls out of the Azalea Bowl near Ravine Gardens, the place where baseball was played in Palatka. When he returned the bat to Cameron, Ruth said, "Kid, that's a pretty good bat." Cameron would later appear on the 1998 HBO special commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Ruth's death.

In "Babe Ruth Day" in Palatka and elsewhere, dignitaries turned out, as well as hundreds of fans from nearby communities. Film producers shot hundreds of feet of film for showing later in movie theaters around the country. Ruth also liked to hunt rabbits at night in Florida, sitting on the fender of a car and taking aim at the rabbits lit up in the car's headlights.

In 1947, the Ruths returned to South Florida to fish and bask in the sun, away from the cold and rainy weather of New York City in March. They returned to Miami the following year, after his third cancer operation for one last visit. When they arrived in Miami, despite the fact that it had been thirteen years since he had last played major-league baseball, 150 fans turned out to greet their great sports hero on his way to Golden Beach near the Broward County line. There at the Golden Strand Hotel and Villas, in the appropriately numbered Villa No. 3, he told those waiting for him how he felt: "'My neck and ear still pain me from the operation. But I think I'll feel better after I get some of this sun.'"

Among the activities he engaged in that spring was attending a dinner in his honor (although Joe DiMaggio had to accept an award for Ruth when the Bambino tired and had to leave early). Ruth also crowned a Tomato Queen at Dania's eighteenth annual Tomato Days Festival.

The sun and relaxation seemed to work a miracle in him as he regained his strength. He noted as much when he told friends, "'I haven't felt this well in two years. This weather is wonderful. You can't beat the Florida climate when you're sick, and I've been taking the sun daily.'" He toured the training camps on the west coast and in Central Florida one last time and relived the many springs he had spent there. He could recall, for those who asked, just what he had accomplished in each particular Florida ballpark, whether a long home run or a great catch or even an error. When he died on August 16, 1948, the nation mourned his loss.

Although the Ruthian era ended in 1935, when he retired from baseball, his influence and aura have permeated the game ever since, whether in the successful attempt to break the 61-homers-in-a-year record that Roger Maris made in 1961 and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa accomplished in 1998 and Barry Bonds in 2001, or the 714-homers-in-a-career record that Hank Aaron broke in the 1970s, or in the celebration of the centenary of his birthday in 1995 or the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1998.

Now, fifty-plus years after his death, Ruth remains arguably the best-known deceased American athlete of all time. Why is that? Why would a man who drank too much, ate too much, partied too much be the epitome of a hero? Perhaps he represented the individual ruggedness that we associate with an earlier time in our history. Or he epitomized a truly skilled athlete in much the same way that Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan have done since then. For whatever reason, Babe Ruth left an indelible mark on the game of baseball, a mark that may never be equaled.