Babe Ruth

I chose Babe Ruth. I chose Babe Ruth because he was a great sports figure. He was an amazing baseball player and he revolutionized professional baseball. He is the greatest baseball player ever. The 1920's were an era were culture thrived. Jazz was the most popular music. The 1920's was a time were everyone was content.

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He was born in a poor waterfront neighbourhood and at age eight was sent by his saloon-keeper father to St Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where a priest encouraged his interest in baseball. As a teenager, his baseball exploits caught the attention of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, where he starred as a left-handed pitcher in 1914. Later that year, he was promoted to the major-league Boston Red Sox, where he remained until 1919, becoming one of the best pitchers of the time. But he was also demonstrating his power with the bat, and when he was sold (1920) to the New York Yankees for a record $100 000, he was made a full-time outfielder. With the Yankees (1920–34), he became the game's pre-eminent player, and such a drawing card that the new Yankee Stadium (1923) was dubbed ‘the house that Ruth built’.

http://link.biography.com/services/link/bcpid1740031457/bclid1745181330/bctid1713774578

During the 1920s he was legendary for his large appetite and high living, and even appeared in several films, and in the following decades he came to assume almost mythical status. In 1927 he slammed 60 home runs, a record that stood until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. Ruth holds most of baseball's important slugging records, including most years leading a league in home runs (12), and most total bases in a season (457) and highest slugging percentage for a season (·847), both set in 1920. He retired from the Boston Braves (Jun 1935) with 714 career home runs, a record that was broken by Hank Aaron in 1974. He was a coach with the Brooklyn Dodgers (1938) but never achieved his goal of managing a major-league team. He gave much of his time in his last years to charitable events. He was one of the first five players elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. He died of cancer in 1948, leaving much of his estate to the Babe Ruth Foundation for underprivileged children.

Babe_20Ruth.jpg