The Babe

I've been on a bit of a baseball kick recentley.
There's something about baseball in a sort of Field of Dreams way. Not being from America I can't really appreciate the history of the game fully but even I felt something special last year when the Red Sox came back from 0-3 down to the Yankees to win 4-3 and then break the curse of the bambino by beating St. Louis 4-0 in the world series.
I decided to do a bit of reading and started with David Wells autobiography. This is a bit of a funny place to start as Wells is a 300lb beer swilling, motorbiking pitcher. Wells started life with the Blue Jays, won a world series here and pretty much hated every minute of it. He hated the fans, the city, the press, everything. Eventually he got traded to his boyhood hero Yankees where he pitched a perfect game, won the world series and then got traded back to Toronto (which off course he hated). The book was a great read and Wells makes for a colourful anti-hero. In the book Wells makes alot of references to Babe Ruth, who is his hero, and I was intregued. Off course I'd heard of Ruth but Wells really paints him as this larger than life bad boy of baseball so I decided the next book would be about Ruth.
I'm only about half way through the Ruth book but already I'm amazed. Ruth hit more than 700 home runs in his career and sits 2nd in the all time list. The amazing thing is the guy started out as a pitcher. In fact in his first 4 years in the league he only hit 6 home runs total. He did win the world series in each of his first 2 years in the league with the Boston Red Sox and was in fact one of the best pitchers in the league. In1915 he won 24 games and pitched 35 complete games out of 38 starts. That is incredible. The current leader for complete games in the American league is Roy Halliday of the Blue jays and he has 5.
You might think that things have changed alot and baseball is a very different game today than it was then but really it's not the case. Apart from a few steroids here and there it's the same game, the same stadiums (at least the Red Sox are still at Fenway) and the same rules.
I'm just on the brink of the famous trade that sent Ruth to the Yankees and cursed the Red Sox to 80 years without a world series. Ruth is about to quit pitching (which seems astonishing considering how good he was) and become a home run machine. I can't wait.