Why Babe Ruth was denied the opportunity to manage in Major League Baseball

William S. Bike
5 min readJun 12, 2024

The reason was far more sinister than previously believed

Babe Ruth with Black baseball fans.

By William S. Bike

Why didn’t Babe Ruth, baseball’s greatest player in the first half of the 20th Century, ever get the chance to manage in the Major Leagues?

In those days, many of the superstars got the chance to manage. The irascible Ty Cobb did. So did several other Hall of Famers: pitchers Mordecai Brown and Cy Young; first baseman Frank Chance and second baseman Johnny Evers of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame; catcher Mickey Cochrane; shortstop Leo Durocher; and second basemen Eddie Collins, Rogers Hornsby, and Nap Lajoie.

Similar to the Babe, many of these men were not choirboys. Also like Ruth, many of the managers of the era enjoyed a drink or two, a night on the town with a pretty lady, placing a bet on a sporting event, or providing a punch in the nose when goaded.

So why didn’t the Babe get the chance to manage like those other stars did?

He certainly wanted to manage. Like Ty Cobb, he preferred to manage the team for which he played most of his career, in Babe’s case the New York Yankees. The Yankees did not agree, arguing that the Babe was too much of a partier to manage a team that was the class of Major League Baseball.

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William S. Bike

Author of "Winning Political Campaigns," a how-to book on all aspects of political campaigning, and commentator on history and baseball.