Baseball :: How Did Babe Ruth Become the Original Home Run King? A Legend's Stor

Hi there.
 
Today I want to talk about baseball's original legend, the man who became known as the Home Run King: Babe Ruth.
 
Last time, we covered Shohei Ohtani and how he's rewriting what a two-way player can do. Today, we're going back almost a century earlier, to the player many credit with turning baseball into a truly national pastime.
 
What's striking is that some of his numbers still hold up by today's standards, even though he set them a hundred years ago. Once you hear the full story, it's easy to see why his name still comes up so often.
 
How did one player hit 714 home runs in an era before modern training, video analysis, or even night games?
 
Let's walk through how Babe Ruth became a legend, starting with where he came from.
 

Origins

Babe Ruth was born George Herman Ruth Jr. in 1895 in Baltimore, Maryland.
 
He grew up in a difficult family situation and spent much of his childhood at a Catholic reform school, where he reportedly learned to play baseball and developed the raw talent that would later define his career.
 
When Ruth first broke into professional baseball, he wasn't a hitter at all — he was a pitcher. He signed with the Boston Red Sox in 1914 and pitched as a left-hander, helping the team win a World Series title.
 
But Ruth also showed unusual power at the plate, and the team gradually started using him more as a hitter. That early dual role as both pitcher and batter is part of why he's still remembered as the standard for two-way talent.
 
In 1919, one of the most famous transactions in sports history took place. The financially strained Red Sox ownership sold Ruth to the New York Yankees. That sale became known as the "Curse of the Bambino," a storyline often cited as the reason Boston went 86 years without another World Series title.
 

Key Facts

Once he joined the Yankees, Ruth shifted almost entirely to hitting, and that's when his career truly took off.
 
Throughout the 1920s, Ruth repeatedly led the American League in home runs, and in 1927 he set a single-season record of 60 home runs — a mark that stood for the next 34 years.
 
By the time he retired in 1935, Ruth had hit 714 career home runs, a record that stood for nearly four decades until Hank Aaron finally surpassed it in 1974.
 
During his 15 years with the Yankees, Ruth helped the team win seven American League pennants and four World Series titles, cementing the franchise's reputation as one of the sport's greatest dynasties.
 

Good to Know

In 1936, Ruth was named one of the five inaugural inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, alongside Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.
 
His career overlapped with the end of the so-called "dead-ball era," right as power hitting was starting to capture fans' attention. That timing is a big part of why he's often credited with turning baseball into more of a slugging sport than a pitching duel.
 
Even today, players who excel at both pitching and hitting are sometimes described as following the "Babe Ruth rule," and Shohei Ohtani has frequently been compared to Ruth in exactly this way — a sign of just how far his name still carries.
 
It's worth remembering that these records come from a very different era. League conditions, equipment, travel schedules, and the level of competition were all quite different a hundred years ago, so direct statistical comparisons have real limits.