It was a picture every American boy could see, in his mind’s eye: the ball park packed with people suddenly gone mad as a large man wearing the number 3 on his striped uniform selects a big, heavy bat, steps from the dugout, and makes his way to the plate. In the batter’s box he stands with feet close together, his body erect, peering at the pitcher; the bat, cocked over his left shoulder, is held so far down that his little finger curls over the bottom of the knob. The pitcher goes into his windup, the ball streaks toward the plate, and at the last instant the big man takes a long stride and whips the bat around with his powerful wrists. There is a sharp crack of wood against leather and the ball rockets high into the air, up and up until it is no more than a tiny white dot, soaring from sight over the top tier of the grandstand. In the bleacher seats boys jump up and down, howling deliriously, and grown strangers embrace, thumping each other on the back, for the mighty Babe Ruth has just hit another home run.

In all of America there was no spectacle quite like it. In truth, there was no one like the Babe. Even when he missed, the crowd roared approval, for the misses were on such a Gargantuan scale, performed with such murderous intent, that failure could be as spectacular as success. The Babe swung at a pitch with everything he had, the force of the magnificent effort whirling him around until his body and legs were twisted like a wrung washcloth.

The contradiction of his name was in the American tradition—the word “Babe” to describe a big-boned man, six feet two inches tall, with a torso that looked like a barrel, awkwardly supported by spindly legs that might have belonged to a woman; the nickname “Bambino” to depict a homely man with outsize head and broad, wide-nostrilled nose. His success was in keeping with tradition, too. The son of a Baltimore saloonkeeper, he was sent at the age of seven (“I was a bad kid,” he said, bluntly) to St. Mary’s Industrial School to learn shirtmaking. What he learned superbly was to play baseball, first as a left-handed catcher (playing with a right-hander’s glove), then as a pitcher. When he was nineteen, the Baltimore Orioles signed him; within months he was traded to the Boston Red Sox, where, in his first full year, he won eighteen games and lost six. In each of the next two seasons he won twenty-three games, but it was becoming apparent that he was too valuable a hitter to play only every fourth game or so, and the Red Sox manager began using him as an outfielder on days he didn’t pitch. In 1919, his last year with the Sox, Babe responded by smashing twenty-nine home runs—more than any major leaguer had