Raised partly in a Catholic reform school for troubled boys, Ruth emerged as a dominant pitcher before the Boston Red Sox and then the New York Yankees converted him into the game's first true power hitter. His 714 career home runs and outsized personality transformed baseball's strategy and popularity, making him arguably the sport's most legendary figure.
Ruth's mother struggled with tuberculosis and his father ran a saloon; by age seven the unruly boy was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where a Xaverian brother named Matthias taught him to play baseball. That reform-school education produced the sport's greatest showman.
Sold by the cash-strapped Red Sox to the Yankees in 1919 for $125,000, Ruth became the centerpiece of the so-called 'Curse of the Bambino' — Boston would not win another World Series for 86 years. In New York he hit home runs at a rate no one had approached, single-handedly making the long ball the game's defining thrill and filling the newly built Yankee Stadium, nicknamed 'The House That Ruth Built.'
His appetite for food, drink, and life matched his swing; stories of midnight buffets and all-night carousing were as much a part of his legend as his statistics. When he retired in 1935, his 714 home runs stood as the record for nearly four decades, and his cultural footprint has scarcely diminished since.
Key people: Babe Ruth