The summer of 1946 was supposed to be sweet. Babe Ruth had built a post-baseball life that worked. He traveled. He played. He enjoyed himself. Then the pain started. It began as a throb over his left eye. Simple enough. A toothache. Maybe a sinus infection. He ignored it. He kept going.
By November, the discomfort had become unbearable. Ruth couldn’t eat solid food. The left side of his face was swollen shut. His left eye was closed. On November 26, 1946, doctors admitted him to a New York hospital. They pulled three bad teeth. They pumped him full of penicillin and other drugs. Nothing worked. A month later, he was still there. Still in pain. Still stuck.
“They weren’t really sure at first what it was,” his daughter Julia Ruth Stevens would later say. “They kept trying all kinds of different things. None of them worked.”
Doctors figured it out eventually. They just didn’t tell him. Or his wife, Claire. Or Julia. But the family had suspicions. The suspicion was cancer.
The Malignant Growth and Surgery
Babe Ruth’s cancer diagnosis was grim. Doctors found a malignant growth wrapped around a major artery in the left side of his neck. The origin was in the naso-pharynx. That part of the air passage behind the nose was surgically unreachable. They couldn’t get it all.
The operation happened on January 5, 1947. Surgeons cut nerves. They tied off the artery. It was a brutal attempt to stop a disease that had already taken root in places they couldn’t touch. Claire was told the truth later. Ruth remained in the dark until the end. At least that’s what everyone believed.
The month after surgery was hell. He stayed in the hospital. In constant pain. Depression set in. His hair began to fall out. He lost between 80 to 128 pounds. He expected to die.
But the world had other ideas.
Telegrams poured in. Connie Mack sent one. Jack Dempsey sent another. Thousands of letters arrived weekly. Claire read them to him. One seventh-grader from New Jersey sent a religious medal. The note read: “I know this will be your 61 homer. You will hit it.”
Ruth wore that medal pinned to his pajamas for the rest of his life.
Babe Ruth Day and the Farewell Speech
On February 6, he turned 52. He celebrated in the hospital. Claire was there. Julia was there. Their dog, Pal, was there. They listened to recorded greetings from Eddie Collins and Ted Williams. The outpouring of support helped. His spirits lifted. There were four birthday cakes.
On February 15, Ruth left the hospital. He wept. Hundreds of admirers were waiting outside. They led him to a waiting car. His camel’s hair overcoat and cap couldn’t hide the physical toll. It was obvious. Time was running out.
Baseball commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler declared April 27, 1947, as “Babe Ruth Day.” It happened at Yankee Stadium. It happened in every other park in the league. Even in war-torn Japan, there were monetary rewards for every homer hit that afternoon. The Japanese fans called him “Beibu Rusu.”
History has a way of simplifying things. Many fans think April 27, 1947, was his last appearance at Yankee Stadium. It wasn’t. But he looked so poorly. His voice was cracking and hoarse. The words he spoke have been replayed so many times, it has become his farewell speech. It might as well be.
He was stooped. Shaky. His eyes were tired and drawn. His hair was grayer than ever. But he was sincere.
“Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” Ruth began. He coughed. “You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad.”
He talked about baseball being the only real game in the world. He told kids to start playing at age six or seven. “You’ve got to let it grow up with you,” he said. “If you’re successful and you try hard enough, you’re bound to come out on top.”
58,000 people were in the stadium. Thousands more listened over loudspeakers in other parks. He tipped his cap. He smiled. Julia remembered him feeling awful throughout the afternoon.
The Final Reprieve
The remaining tumor piece kept growing. Morphine became necessary. Ruth tried to live normally. He went to golf outings. He ate steaks. But his drives fell short off the tee. The meat had to be chopped up for him. Biting into the white of an egg caused excruciating pain.
Then came a turn. Late June brought treatment with an experimental drug. The results were tremendous. Ruth’s health improved. He gained back much of his weight. He traveled 50,000 miles across the country. He represented Ford Motor Company. He worked with American Legion youth baseball.
It was a momentary reprieve.
The pain returned that fall. Today, the closing lines of his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, written with Bob Considine in the hopeful summer of 1947, read like a prophecy.
“I’ve got to stick around a long, long time,” he wrote. “For above everything else, I want to be a part of and help the development of the greatest game God ever saw fit to let men invent — Baseball.”
He attended the Dodgers-Yankees World Series that fall. In December, he dressed as Santa Claus to entertain young polio victims. The messages of his mortality kept coming. Brother Gilbert died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Walter Johnson succumbed to a brain tumor.
Babe may not have known. He may not have wanted to believe it. But his own time was growing short.
The Final Chapter of the Bambino
He looked terrible. That’s the only way to describe him. In the spring of 1948, George Herman Ruth Jr. flew to Florida for Yankees spring training. He met with Joe McCarthy and Ted Williams, but he was wasting away. He was 53 years old but felt closer to 90. He lasted a few weeks in the sun before heading back to New York, sick and shivering.
His next stop was Hollywood. The studio was rushing The Babe Ruth Story into production. They needed to beat reality. They needed to cash in before the inevitable happened. But the Ruths never saw the footage. The “technical advising” consisted of Babe posing for photos, showing star William Bendix how to hold a bat. It was a cliché-ridden travesty. Bendix didn’t learn much. It didn’t matter. The movie would be bad. The man was dying.
A Fitting Farewell
On June 6, 1948, he handed a copy of his autobiography manuscript to George Bush. Bush was the captain of the Yale baseball team. He had no idea that forty years later, photos of that moment would launch him into the White House. It was a small moment in a life that had been huge for fifty years.
The next Sunday was the big one. The 25th anniversary of Yankee Stadium. The weather was cold. Rain kept falling. Ruth caught a chill that wouldn’t leave him. But he went.
He arrived after his old teammates. They stood in silence as he was helped into fresh pinstripes. His locker was there. It hadn’t been used since he retired. His number three was gone from the board, but his presence filled the space.
“He walked out into the cauldron of sound he must have known better than any other man.”
— W.C. Heinz
The announcer called his name. The roar was deafening. He stood at home plate. Photographers gathered. Former teammates watched. In the distance, championship pennants fluttered in the wind. He took his cap off. He rested his right hand on his bat. It wasn’t a weapon anymore. It was a cane.
The End of an Era
By July 26, they were at the New York premiere. Julia Ruth remembered it clearly. He was so medicated, so sick, that he didn’t know where he was. They left early. He never left Memorial Hospital again.
He answered letters. He met visitors. He kept going until August 15, 1948. Then he slept. He died at 8:01 p.m. on August 16. His last conscious act? Autographing his own autobiography for a nurse.
The news broke instantly. For the first time, the public linked his name to throat cancer. The truth couldn’t be hidden anymore.
Over 100,000 people filed past his open casket at Yankee Stadium. It took two days. They were everyone. Little leaguers. Old men in derbies. Black and white. Rich and poor. Vendors sold hot dogs and photos to the long lines. It was a public wake for a public figure.
Another 75,000 showed up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was raining. Cardinal Spellman led the mass. It was a state funeral for a baseball king. The only larger funeral he had attended was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s three years prior. It fit.
Julia Ruth Stevens later said the crowds were amazing. One man told her he carried his toddler son to the stadium viewing. The boy had to be carried because he was too young. The father said he wanted his son to grow up and say he saw Babe Ruth.
Today, that young boy is gone. But the statue remains. In Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the life-size wooden sculpture stands near the entrance. Kids walk past it every day. They don’t always know who the strange man in pinstripes is. Their parents take photos beside the Sultan of Swat.
But by the time they walk out, they know. They know the name. They know the myth. The fans remain legion. And the bat rests quietly in the museum, just like it did in that final, rainy afternoon at the Stadium.
