Free Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets

This, of course, was technically true; there had been no trial. (In the Black Sox case—which had gone to trial—Joe Jackson was acquitted, but that didn’t stop Landis from banning him for life.) In the Cobb–Speaker case, Cobb and Speaker were reinstated in time for Connie Mack to sign them for the 1927 season.
    Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were both in Cooperstown in 1939 for the grand opening of the Hall. So was Babe Ruth.
    Ruth was, of course, the greatest role model in baseball history. He visited sick kids in the hospital, the legend said. He handed out autographs to waifs outside the ballpark. He cautioned little children to stay in school and obey their parents and teachers. Some of this actually happened. Some was the creation of a pack of journalists and PR men whose job it was to keep Ruth’s less-virtuous acts out of the newspaper. Almost the entire corps of baseball writers was complicit in this. Some of the scribes even took part in Ruth’s orgies, joined his wild (and, during Prohibition, illegal) pub crawls, accepted his money, and even became his silent partners in business deals or his employees as ghost writers. Ford Frick himself worked for Ruth, when Frick was still on the payroll of the New York American . *
    So did Marshall Hunt, a sportswriter for the New York Daily News who sometimes did Ruth the favor of forging his signature on baseballs, accompanied him on binges, introduced him to women, and generally covered up for his bad behavior. Once he was asked why he didn’t write a book on Ruth. “I just have to wait a while and let nature do a few things before I’d write that book because I might run into a suit,” he replied. “Several things happened up in the Babe’s farmhouse outside of Boston that are worth a couple of thousand words. That’s never been touched, never been used. But I want to wait until that female is out of the way.”
    Even with all this protection, the public was not unaware that Ruth was a bad boy off the field and even on it. In 1923, he got caught using a corked bat. He was suspended from baseball for seven weeks by Commissioner Landis in 1922 for going on an illegal barnstorming tour after the previous World Series (why this should have been illegal is an open question). He was sometimes absent from games with “bellyaches” which his pals the beat writers knew perfectly well were alcohol-related. His behavior became so erratic that the mayor of New York, James J. Walker, staged a public (and highly humiliating) intervention. Speaking at an Elks Club dinner in Manhattan in November 1922, with Ruth sitting nearby on the dais, Walker said:
Babe Ruth is not only a great athlete, but also a great fool. His employer, Col. Jacob Ruppert, makes millions of gallons of beer, and Ruth is of the opinion that he can drink it faster than the Col o nel and his large corps of brew masters can make it. Well . . . you can’t. Nobody can.
You are making a bigger salary than anyone ever received as a ballplayer. But the bigger the salary, the bigger the fool you have become. Here sit some forty sportswriters and big officials of baseball, our national sport. These men, your friends, know what you have done, even if you don’t . . . You have let them down.
But worst of all, you have let down the kids of America . . . You carouse and abuse your great body and it is exactly as though Santa Claus himself suddenly were to take off his beard to reveal the features of a villain. *
    Alas, it was not to be. That very night, Ruth was served with a paternity suit filed by a nineteen-year-old Bronx waitress named Dolores Dixon. “He said he didn’t know the girl, but the way he said it, you knew he was lying,” said Marshall Hunt. “He knew that girl. I said, ‘Okay, Babe, that what’s you say. That’s what I’ll put in the paper.’ ” Ruth’s lawyers made the lawsuit go away, and nothing more was heard about the matter.
    “Ruth was not unique,” observed Bill Veeck. “Wake up