Word: ruth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This Babe was one of a flurry of Ruth accounts spawned by Henry Aaron's home run chase. Baseball writers supplemented the wave of biographies with a deluge of column tonnage comparing the merits of the two sluggers. But when the season wound down, taking the coverage with it, Babe remained as one of the few pieces of baseball writing able to sustain the autumn sports onslaught...
Creamer, senior editor of Sports Illustrated, lets his concise magazine style explode over 400 pages of detailed but swift writing. He records Ruth's on-the-field endeavors with precision and color. He carefully avoids studding his sentences with cliched codewords like four-ply and three bagger. In an uncharacteristic feat of sportswriting, he makes heavy use of the English language...
...Ruth's full free swing was being copied more and more, and so was his type of bat, thinner in the handle and whippier, in principle something like a golf club. (Early in his career Ruth used a massive 52-ounce bat, but this slimmed down as Ruth himself ballooned.) Strategy and tactics changed. A strikeout heretofore had been something of a disgrace--reread "Casey at the Bat." A batter was supposed to protect the plate, get a piece of the ball, as in the cognate game of cricket. In Ruth's case, however, a strikeout was only a momentary...
CREAMER ALSO excels in capturing the lore of Ruth out-of-uniform. In "Kaleidoscope: Personality of the Babe," Creamer delves into a few feats which make the 714 and 60 homerun marks pall. He dredged up some of Babe's stunning epicurean exploits, including the mandatory "couple of hotdogs and a bicarb" immediately preceding every game. And several locker room observers, provide the definitive statement on Ruth's famed sexual prowess. Creamer dwells on the theme of Ruth's distorted sexuality throughout the book, in his usual lucid style...
With a man as unbridled as Ruth and a legacy as clouded as the sensationalistic scribes of the day could make it, documentation becomes as important as imaginative writing. Creamer has compiled every scrap of information available, from the early Baltimore days to the Babe Ruth Days held for him as his retirement, dispelling a slew of misconceptions as he goes along. He has gotten comment from many of Ruth's mates from the bush leagues up through the majors and there are times when you think he had the whole 1927 Yankee team wired for sound...