Babe Ruth Debuts: Baseball's Greatest Legend Arrives

A nineteen-year-old left-hander from a Baltimore reform school walked onto the mound at Fenway Park and started a career that would reshape American professional sports. George Herman "Babe" Ruth Jr. made his major league debut for the Boston Red Sox on July 11, 1914, pitching seven innings against the Cleveland Naps and earning the win in a 4-3 victory. Few in the sparse weekday crowd could have guessed they were watching the future of baseball. Ruth had spent most of his childhood at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic institution for orphans and delinquents where Brother Matthias Boutlier taught him to hit and pitch. Jack Dunn, owner of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, signed Ruth just five months before his big league debut, and the teenager's teammates started calling him "Jack's newest babe." The nickname stuck permanently. Boston manager Bill Carrigan sent Ruth back to the minors briefly that first season, but by 1915 he was a fixture in the rotation. Ruth won 89 games as a pitcher over his first six seasons, including a record 29.2 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play. His pitching alone would have made him a Hall of Famer. But the Red Sox began using him as an outfielder to keep his bat in the lineup every day, and the experiment produced the most dominant offensive force the game had ever seen. The sale to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season for $100,000 transformed both franchises. Ruth's home run explosion in the 1920s drew millions of new fans to ballparks, rescued baseball from the Black Sox scandal, and established the power game that defines the sport today. The kid from the reform school became the most famous athlete on earth.