Abstract:
This is the story of the development of Babe Ruth as a baseball player in each of the twenty-plus springs he spent as a major-leaguer in Florida: how he usually negotiated a new salary, how he attracted thousands to his spring training and thus to Florida, and how he built on his spring trainings for the regular season. This work studies the interaction of Ruth and Florida; how he affected the state (in terms of enthusiasm for baseball C his own and that which he inspired in others, numbers of visitors to spring training, and economic impact on certain cities) and how the state attracted him during and after his baseball career. This is also a study of how two relatively young entities, a naive, twenty-three-year-old ballplayer and a state just beginning to be discovered by Americans, matured quickly in the first part of the twentieth century into arguably the finest all-around ballplayer of all time and the fourth most-populous state in this country respectively.