Babe Ruth 1948 Farewell Speech

[Snapolit1]

While Ruth's farewell photo by Fein is so well know, I can't say I've seen his comments that day reproduced very often. He was obviously a very very sick man at the time. Ruth is not usually portrayed as a deep thinker kind of guy, but his comments were not what I would have expected. Very low key and kind of quaint. Not exactly Gehrig's speech but seems heartfelt.


“Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad."

“You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you’re a boy and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in your national pastime, the only real game, I think, in the world, baseball. As a rule, some people think if you give them a football, or a baseball, or something like that — naturally they’re athletes right away. But you can’t do that in baseball.

“You’ve gotta start from way down [at] the bottom, when you’re six or seven years of age. You can’t wait until you’re fifteen or sixteen. You gotta let it grow up with you. And if you’re successful, and you try hard enough, you’re bound to come out on top — just like these boys have come to the top now. There’s been so many lovely things said about me, and I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity to thank everybody. Thank you.”

[EddieP]

Two weeks ago was the 75th Anniversary of Babe Ruth’s Farewell. The Washington Post had a nice article about it:

“ On his way to Yale Field to meet a 24-year-old future president, Babe Ruth was worried about the rainy weather. Would it ruin the day’s festivities, when he was going to donate the black-bound manuscript of his new autobiography to the university library?
“In coming here this afternoon, on the way out it looked terribly damp and I was very disappointed,” Ruth said, referring to the rain that had cleared just in time for the Saturday afternoon college baseball game, 75 years ago this month.
Ruth, 53, both physically and audibly diminished, made the remarks during a pregame ceremony June 5, 1948, to 5,000 people in New Haven, Conn., as he delivered the manuscript to Yale’s first baseman and team captain, George H.W. Bush.
Eight days later, Ruth made his final appearance at Yankee Stadium, a ballpark so indelibly linked to him that it was known as “The House That Ruth Built.” Those two visits, on consecutive weekends about 75 miles apart, would be baseball’s poignant send-off to its most dominant figure, a man who had revolutionized the game with prodigious home runs and outsize personality. He died that August of cancer.”

[EddieP]

“ I am here to present the original manuscript of ‘The Babe Ruth Story’ to Captain Bush of Yale,” Ruth said on the Yale baseball field. “It has lots of fun and a lot of laughs and a lot of crying, too.” (The book was written with journalist Bob Considine.)
“You know,” the former New York Yankees star added with a smile, “in a story you can’t put everything in, so I left out a few things.”
The Associated Press reported that “grown-ups in the crowd, familiar with some of the episodes in Babe’s youthful days, smiled with him. A few wiped tears from their eyes.” Ruth spoke in a “husky whisper,” added the AP story, which The Washington Post ran under the headline, “Author Ruth Makes Comeback at Yale Field — With Original Manuscript for Eli Library.”
Baseball’s oddest arms race featured balls thrown from the Washington Monument
A photo of Ruth and Bush shows their starkly different stages of life — Ruth, hunched over and dying of cancer, standing next to the strapping Bush, in the prime of his life and a baseball uniform.”

[EddieP]

‘Some 40 years later, Bush recalled the meeting with sadness.
“He was hoarse and could hardly talk,” he told Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe in 1989, his first year as president. “He kind of croaked when they set up the mic by the pitcher’s mound. It was tragic. He was hollow. His whole great shape was gaunt and hollowed out. I remember he complimented the Yale ballfield. It was like a putting green, it was so beautiful.”
Yale was a baseball powerhouse at the time, making it to the inaugural College World Series in 1947 and again in 1948, although the school lost both times.
Bush had been accepted by Yale in 1942, but he put off college to serve in World War II as a Navy pilot, enrolling after the war. By the time he met Ruth, Bush had a young son (and another future president), George W., born in 1946. Bush’s wife, Barbara, would take the baby to baseball games to watch his father, a good-fielding, light-hitting player who batted right and threw left. He finished with a career .983 fielding percentage and .224 batting average, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.

[EddieP]

Ruth had retired 13 years earlier, in 1935. In the interim, the United States fought and won World War II, helping to pull the country out of the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, replaced by Harry S. Truman, who would win an upset reelection a few months after Ruth’s farewell appearances. In 1947, Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier, although the Yankees still hadn’t signed a Black player and wouldn’t for several more years.
Even though Ruth had been out of baseball for more than a dozen years, his presence still loomed large in American society, said John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball.
“He gave the manuscript to Bush, who would become a president. Well, Ruth was bigger than any president, except maybe FDR,” Thorn said, adding, “Ruth was a god.”
Ruth wore a double-breasted tan suit and white-and-tan shoes and held a cigar in his hand. He referenced the many exhibition games he had played at Yale over the years, starting when he was a dominant Boston Red Sox pitcher.
As Watergate simmered, Nixon buckled down on a sportswriting project
“I have been to New Haven many, many times over the years, but this is one of the best,” he said to raucous cheers from the crowd. When the game started, Ruth put on a cream-colored cap and watched five innings before heading home to New York. Yale thrashed Princeton, 14-2. Bush went 1 for 4 with a double.
The following Sunday, June 13, was also a rainy day, when the Yankees retired Ruth’s No. 3 and commemorated the 25th anniversary of Yankee Stadium. In addition to Ruth, the other living members of the 1923 team were there, along with stars from other Yankees squads such as Bill Dickey, Lefty Gomez and Joe Gordon. Mel Allen announced the players.

[EddieP]

“ The fans nearly raised the stadium roof with a tremendous cheer when the Babe was introduced,” the AP reported. Banners for the Yankees’ 15 pennants and 11 World Series titles were draped around the ballpark.
A newsreel shows Ruth walking from the dugout to home plate, surrounded by cameramen and photographers, where he takes a swing in the batter’s box.
Using a bat as a cane, with tears in his eyes, Ruth briefly addressed the 50,000 fans.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to say one thing. I am proud I hit the first home run here against Boston in 1923,” he said, referring to the ballpark’s inaugural home run on Opening Day of that season. “It is marvelous to see these 13 or 14 players who were my teammates going back 25 years. I’m telling you, it makes me proud and happy to be here. Thank you.”

[EddieP]

At the Ruth send-off, a photo of him standing on the third base line, his back to the camera, a baseball cap in one hand and his bat in the other, planted in the ground, won the Pulitzer Prize for news photography. The photo shows players lined up across from Ruth on the first base line, caps on their chests, alongside kneeling photographers; in the distance are tens of thousands of fans filling all three decks of the ballpark, below a fittingly gray sky. It appeared on the front page of the next day’s New York Herald Tribune, Ruth’s number surrounded by pinstripes — with no last name on the jersey, a Yankees tradition that survives to this day. It’s called “The Babe Bows Out.”
“He looked tired, very tired,” photographer Nat Fein recalled in “Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs.”
“The power that had been his in his youth and manhood was slowly ebbing away. … It was a dull day, and most photographers were using flash bulbs, but I slowed the shutter and took the picture without a flash.”

[EddieP]

Babe Ruth and George H.W. Bush

[jakebeckleyoldeagleeye]

But for the greatest of all time no Babe Ruth Day or retiring #3 across the league.

[ALBB]

yea, that Ruth speech..I realize he was very ill and frail...but it sounds like he had nothing written. And just winged it

[MVSNYC]

I think the old HBO documentary (When it was a Game) had the video/audio of the entire speech. Moving for sure.

This thread needs some more Ruth stuff...

Here's my Kreindler...