The Real Ruth: 60 Stories of Playing Ball and Raising Hell with the Babe

For readers of Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball and Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, The Real Ruth draws on the late Waite Hoyt’s long-hidden archives to reveal an intimate, irreverent portrait of his longtime friend and fellow Hall of Famer Babe Ruth. Its sixty stories celebrate the centennial of Ruth’s record-setting 1927 season.

Babe Ruth and Waite Hoyt are trading punches in the Yankees clubhouse. “Sock ’im, Waite! Sock ’im!” And when Manager Miller Huggins tries to stop the fight . . . the gets his peacemaker face punched.

Later, Ruth invites Hoyt to join him for ribs and beer. Just like that, the feud is over.

In The Real Ruth, the late Hall of Famer Waite Hoyt takes readers inside the life of his teammate, drinking companion, and friend for thirty years. Drawn from Hoyt’s long-hidden archives by Tim Manners, these sixty stories—one for every home run Ruth hit in his record-setting 1927 season—give us the Babe teammates called “Gidge.”

Ruth fights. Drinks. Breaks curfew. Butchers the English language. He battles Huggins and resents Lou Gehrig’s growing fame. He visits sick children, gives away money, and turns baseball into a national spectacle. Sixty stories. Sixty home runs.

And Hoyt was there for all of it.

He takes readers into the clubhouse and on the road with Ruth’s fellow Yankees—including Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, and Herb Pennock—and into confrontations with rivals like Ty Cobb. He witnesses the rise of the 1927 Yankees’ fearsome “Murderers’ Row,” Ruth’s greatest feats, his long retreat from glory, and their final lunch together as cancer closes in.

Timed to the centennial of Ruth’s sixty-home-run season and the legendary 1927 Yankees, The Real Ruth is the Babe as only a man who fought with him, drank with him, played beside him, and mourned him could remember him.