Retire Ruth's #3?

Via King Kaufman and Rick Maese, I discovered that Babe Ruth's granddaughter wants major league baseball to permanently retire Ruth's jersey #3 throughout baseball. Linda Ruth Tosetti wants people to sign an online petition to encourage the commissioner to get on board with the idea:

Babe Ruth is the man who saved baseball and launched a major league revolution in hitting! Join our effort to honor the Babe by having his famous number 3 retired throughout Major League Baseball.

Give me a break.

Tosetti is referring to the fact that baseball was reeling from the 1919 Black Sox scandal at the same time that Ruth was electrifying crowds with his home runs.

But Tosetti has the timeline wrong. The public didn't hear about the World Series fix until midway through the 1920 season. By that point, Ruth was already a phenomenon. He had already been traded to the Yankees, his home runs were already being tracked in daily papers across the country, and crowds were already flocking to his games.

He didn't "save" baseball in the sense that he came on the scene when baseball needed saving and then singlehandedly revived interest in the game. He came along at just the right moment -- WWI had just ended, the Roaring 20s were just beginning -- and helped fuel a mini-boom in popularity for the game.

If baseball needed saving in the wake of the scandal, it was more likely that the new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis,
is the one who provided it by dealing sternly with the accused.

And we're not going to retire Landis's jersey number.

So while I understand Ruth's granddaughter wanting to honor the greatest player in the history of baseball by retiring his jersey number in perpetuity, I think it's overkill. He changed baseball, but he didn't change society the way Jackie Robinson did.

And come on: isn't Ruth honored enough? Aren't the countless biographies and movies and everything else enough for Ruth's granddaughter?

Best Ever: Boston Braves

Yesterday, I selected the greatest Atlanta/Milwaukee Braves players ever, and today I'm going to focus on the Boston Braves. (Surely you know that the Braves played in Boston from 1876 to 1952). 

Let's start with the easiest choice:

Pitcher

Contenders: Warren Spahn and... Johnny Sain maybe?

The winner: This is really no contest. Sain had a good run for a few years as the Braves' number two starter, but Spahn was an all-time great. He won 363 games in the majors, all but seven with the Braves. Most of his best years occurred in Milwaukee, but he came up with Boston and so I consider him a Boston Brave for this feature.

Batter

Contenders: Rabbit Maranville, Tommy Holmes, Wally Berger

The winner: If I really wanted to cheat, I'd choose Babe Ruth, who played his final season as a Boston Brave. But I'm going to stick with players who legitimately played many years with the Braves.

The three contenders are the top three players in terms of career hits as a Brave. Maranville is in the Hall of Fame, mainly for his shortstop defense, and he played a key role on Boston's surprise World Series championship in 1914. But his hitting was mostly woeful, even when you adjust for the Dead Ball Era.

Tommy Holmes played from 1942 to 1952, but he really had only one good season, and that came in 1945 when most of the best players were serving in the military. Holmes got an exemption from service.

Wally Berger is a forgotten star who put together one of the best rookie seasons ever: .310, 38 homers, 119 RBIs as a 24-year-old. The slugging outfielder smacked 30 homers two more times, and finished his career with 242. However, he played in the peak years of the Lively Ball Era, so the numbers aren't as impressive as they seem. Still, he was an All-Star four times and finished in the to 10 in MVP voting twice even though his Braves never seriously contended for any pennants.

The choice comes down to Maranville vs. Berger. I'm inclined to select Berger because I think sluggers are more valuable than defensive specialists. But Maranville won a championship, is in the Hall of Fame, and leads the franchise in a number of categories (including Games, Hits, Runs, and more). It's close, but I think those criteria push Maranville over the top.

Rabbit Maranville is the greatest position player in Boston Braves history.

This Day in Baseball... Yankee Stadium

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the opening of Yankee Stadium. In the opening game, none other than Babe Ruth hit a 2-run home run off the Red Sox's Howard Ehmke in a 4-1 Yankee victory. Here's a little background on the stadium, which will close after this year.

Today we take for granted the big concrete and steel, 60,000-seat sports facilities. We call them stadiums, of course. But in the 1920s, they didn’t exist. There were 30,000-seat ballparks, yes, but no gigantic stadiums as we know them today. Think of the old-time ballparks: Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, the Polo Grounds, and so on... not a stadium among them (back then, Tiger Stadium was known as Navin Field).

Yankee Stadium—the “House that Ruth Built”—changed all that. It was fitting that the nation’s largest city should serve as home for the most innovative entertainment facility of its time, and even more fitting that the country’s most larger-than-life sports figure should have something to do with it. For it was Ruth who put the Yankees on the baseball map by making them a good enough team to draw more fans than the rival Giants, to whom the Yankees had always played second fiddle. As a reward, the Yankees designed the Stadium for him, building a right field fence just 294 feet down the line so his clouts wouldn’t have to travel too far to go out of the park. Meanwhile, left-center and center field were cavernous—490 to dead center, 395 to left center—dimensions that cost the right-handed-hitting Joe DiMaggio countless home runs.

Yankee Stadium seated more than 70,000 fans when it opened, around twice as much as any other existing ballpark, and enabled the team to become the first club to draw more than two million fans. Like all great ballparks, the Stadium had some pretty amazing quirks. From the 1930s until the extensive remodeling in 1974–75, three marble monuments honoring Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and legendary manager Miller Huggins stood in deep center field—in play. Once, while watching a long fly bounce around out of reach of his fielders, an exasperated Casey Stengel is purported to have shouted, “Ruth, Gehrig, Huggins, someone throw that ball in here NOW!” During the $100 million renovation, builders placed an inner fence in front of the monuments, shortening the outfield distance but also removing one of baseball’s coolest quirks.

The new Yankee Stadium is set to open next year.