Breaking Babe Ruth
Baseball's Campaign against Its Biggest Star
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Missouri Press
Published:30th May '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Rather than as a Falstaffian figure of limited intellect, Edmund Wehrle reveals Babe Ruth as an ambitious, independent operator, one not afraid to challenge baseball’s draconian labor system. To the baseball establishment, Ruth’s immense popularity represented opportunity, but his rebelliousness and potential to overturn the status quo presented a threat. After a decades-long campaign waged by baseball to contain and discredit him, the Babe, frustrated and struggling with injuries and illness, grew more acquiescent, but the image of Ruth that baseball perpetuated still informs how many people remember Babe Ruth to this day. This new perspective, approaching Ruth more seriously and placing his life in fuller context, is long overdue.
For nearly two decades, Major League Baseball waged a war, primarily through the press, against its greatest hero—on one hand using Ruth to save the game from its most tainted era, while on the other ‘infantilizing' Ruth and feeding the myth of a naïve, wayward adolescent in order to control their savior's more dangerous impulses."" - Nathan Michael Corzine, Instructor in History, Coastal Carolina Community College; author of Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball
""This is a well-researched work rooted in the periodical literature of its period; it also engages and adjusts the voluminous literature on Ruth."" - Ryan K. Anderson, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina - Pembroke; author of Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creations of the Schoolboy Sports Story.
ISBN: 9780826221605
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 600g
288 pages