Presidents Who Knew the Babe

In September 1928, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Babe Ruth refused to pose for a photograph with the Republican candidate for president, Herbert Hoover. “Nothing doing,” the Babe reportedly said. “I’m for Al Smith.” (Later Ruth issued a statement explaining his brushoff as a “misunderstanding” and said posing with Hoover would be an “honor.”)

When baseball’s most famous player publicly endorsed Smith, the governor of New York, that fall, he became one of the first American sports stars to attempt to lend his popularity to a presidential candidate. Nowadays it is commonplace for a president to want to get close to the day’s sports heroes. But Ruth was the first baseball star who dealt with presidents as a celebrity of near-equal magnitude, and, as it happened, his encounters with half a dozen presidents included one of our own time.

A century ago this October, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to attend a World Series game — in Philadelphia, between the Phillies and the Red Sox. Ruth, then a 20-year-old rookie pitcher for Boston, did not take the mound that day. But in 1928, when the poet Carl Sandburg asked him which of all the presidents was “the best model for boys to follow,” Ruth, a self-proclaimed Democrat, who had grown up poor on the Baltimore waterfront, replied, “President Wilson was always a great friend of mine.”

The New York sportswriter Fred Lieb recalled in his 1977 memoir, “Baseball as I Have Known It,” that during the 1920 presidential campaign, he was asked by cronies of the Republican presidential nominee, Warren Harding, to bring Ruth to Harding’s Ohio front porch for a public endorsement. It was a time of looser journalistic ethics. Lieb wrote, “If I could bring it off, there was $4,000 in it for Babe and $1,000 for me.”

According to Lieb, when he raised the matter with Ruth, the Babe said, “I’m a Democrat, but I’ll go to Warren for the money.” But, by Lieb’s account, the scheming for Ruth’s endorsement collapsed when the Black Sox scandal erupted, and the Harding men “cooled off on the whole subject.”

An ardent baseball fan, Harding had played the game while growing up, and was part-owner of his local minor league team in Marion, Ohio. As president, he urged Americans to “strive for production as Babe Ruth strives for home runs” and had Ruth as a guest at the White House. When Harding attended a game one steaming day at Griffith Stadium, the untrammeled Ruth is said to have commiserated, “Hot as hell, ain’t it, Prez?” (In some accounts, he made this comment to Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, with whom his relationship was more distant.)

In April 1923, Harding watched the Babe produce a home run for the Yankees against the Washington Senators during the first shutout in the newly opened Yankee Stadium. When Harding suddenly died that August, Ruth scrawled out to his widow, Florence, a handwritten condolence note, describing himself as “a personal friend” of Harding’s, lauding “his many kind acts toward individual players.”

After helping his team defeat the Cardinals in the 1928 World Series, Ruth praised Al Smith while speaking in Terre Haute, Ind., from the back of the Yankees’ train home from St. Louis. There was mainly silence from the crowd. According to Leigh Montville’s 2006 biography, “The Big Bam,” Ruth responded by calling out, “The hell with you!”

Smith was a fellow Catholic, and his origins on New York’s Lower East Side reminded Ruth of his own. “I wasn’t fed with a gold spoon when I was a kid,” Ruth wrote a Smith campaign official named Franklin D. Roosevelt. “No poor boy can go any too high in this world to suit me.” In a national radio address for Smith, Ruth declared “what a wonderful thing it is” that “there is a chance for every boy to get to the top in America.”

Babe’s candidate lost the election, but Ruth got his small revenge when someone later asked him if it was right for him to be earning more money than President Hoover. “Why not?” he famously responded. “I had a better year than he did.”

During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt, who was running against Hoover, went to Chicago’s Wrigley Field to throw the first pitch for Game 3 of the World Series between the Cubs and the Yankees. There Roosevelt witnessed the scene in which the Babe, at least by legend, pointed at the center-field bleachers and then slugged the ball there for a pivotal home run.

While hosting a White House reception the following year, the victorious Roosevelt threw his arm around Ruth’s shoulders and jovially complained that, in 1920, when he was running for vice president, the Babe’s presence in a hotel lobby had diverted the attention of an audience while he was trying to make a speech.

But in October 1944, nine years after his retirement from major league baseball, with a wartime President Roosevelt seeking a fourth term, Ruth turned his back on the Democrats and said the country needed “a new pitcher” in the White House.

Registering to vote for the first time in many years, he told reporters, “Mr. Roosevelt is a great man, but we have got to have a change,” adding that the president’s opponent, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, had “done a good job” in Albany. At an election-eve Madison Square Garden rally, with Dewey at his side, the Babe hailed his candidate, saying, “Some people put scripts in front of some people to say what they want them to say, but I don’t have to do that.”

In June 1948, the 53-year-old Ruth met one president of the future. It was two months before his death, and he was very sick.

As The New York Times reported, Ruth traveled to New Haven to donate his black-bound manuscript of “The Babe Ruth Story” to the Yale library; the film version, starring William Bendix, was scheduled for release the next month. Ruth went to Yale Field before the Princeton game for a ceremony in which he presented the book to Yale’s 23-year-old baseball captain, whom The Times called “George (Poppy) Bush of Greenwich.”

Clutching a cigar stub with trembling hand, while some of the grown-ups wept, the now gaunt Ruth stepped up to the microphone and addressed “Captain Bush” in a ravaged voice, explaining that his book “has a lot of fun in it, and a lot of laughs, a lot of crying, too.”

As Bush later recalled in his 1987 memoir, “Looking Forward”: “It was obvious that he was dying of cancer; but some of the young, free-spirited ‘Babe’ was still there, very much alive. ‘You know,’ he said, winking, ‘when you write a book like this, you can’t put everything in it.’ ”