Today, he would’ve been 130. Friday is the 90th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s last game. He died 77 years ago. Yet after all these years it’s amazing there are still stories about him, particularly when the stories are new to people like me, who have read extensively about baseball’s most mythical figure.
Major League Baseball has in its own cache of Distant Replay stories, and last week’s from 1933 was too good for me not to re-tell. Besides, I’ve been around for most of the ensuing 92 years, and this is one I’d never read.
It’s really the story of six teenage boys. I suspect teenage boys were viewed with the same suspicion in 1933 as they are today, especially if they all live together, as these six did, in an orphanage.
Their “home” was in Passaic, New Jersey, not far from where Ruth was playing his final season with the New York Yankees. It was a spring night, near dusk but darker. It was raining. Big time. The boys were concerned about damage to their ball field and the orphanage’s matron gave them permission to check. What they saw was it had rained so hard for so long that the earth under a nearby railway bridge had washed away.
And a train was coming. No, Babe Ruth wasn’t on the train, but stay tuned.
The boys ran onto the track, took off their raincoats and started waving them, to get the train engineer’s attention. The engineer stopped the train, jumped off and began berating the boys for their prank… see what I mean about teenage boys? Then he saw the enormous ditch that would have swallowed most of his commuter train, taking passengers home after work.
The boys were credited with saving perhaps 400 lives. Asked about a reward, one of them said:
“Would you let Babe Ruth know what we did?”
Not “Could we meet Babe Ruth?”…just let him know. You don’t have to be a baseball historian to know that The Babe, like them, spent his teenage years in an orphanage — which the six boys knew — nor that Ruth wasn’t always this nice to people, but he cared deeply about kids.
Naturally, their request was granted. The Yankees were in Detroit. Ruth immediately sent them a telegram — the 1930s version of texting. He applauded them for their heroics, invited them to be his guests at Yankee Stadium, sent them six autographed baseballs and promised to stop by to visit them at the Passaic Orphan Asylum.
Two weeks later, Ruth was true to his word. He spent an hour at the “asylum” and gave the boys a private lesson on hitting and pitching (Ruth had been an All-Star pitcher), leaving only because he had a game to play. He said he’d see them tomorrow, before the game at Yankee Stadium. That meant more photos, more interviews, more gifts and more instruction, this time fielding balls hit by the man who invited them, Ruth, and fellow Yankees legend Lou Gehrig.
Now step out of your time capsule. Can you imagine a professional athlete, today, going to such lengths to reward six teenagers living a troubled life because they had done “the right thing?”
