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Why Babe Ruth was denied the opportunity to manage in Major League Baseball
The reason was far more sinister than previously believed
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.
That’s OK. There should have been plenty of opportunities for Depression-era teams with losing records to try to bolster interest and attendance by putting the media-friendly Babe at the helm.
The Boston Red Sox, after a 43–111 record in 1932, considered hiring the Babe as manager, but suddenly ownership changed their minds. The 1935 Boston Braves, who would finish 38–115, lured Babe to Boston by dangling the possibility of the manager’s job to him, but Ruth ended up quitting the team by June 2 when he saw that wasn’t going to happen. After the St. Louis Browns finished 46–108 in 1937, Babe called up team owner Bill DeWitt and pitched himself for the manager’s job. DeWitt hired lifetime .208 hitter Gabby Street instead.
Oscar Melillo, a Browns coach, told the New York Daily News, “Whatever the Browns paid Ruth would be back in the till the first time they played the Yankees in New York.”
