Passan: Is baseball capable of making superstars anymore?
From Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports on November 5, 2018:
Early in her seminal Babe Ruth biography, “The Big Fella,” Jane Leavy, the gifted storyteller of bygone ballplayers, perfectly encapsulates his place at the intersection of America’s game, Americana and America today. The forebear of modern politicians and religious figures and actors and businessmen and musicians and authors and activists and scientists and artists – of everyone whose ubiquity saturates our lives – was a baseball player.
“Seventy years after his death,” Leavy writes, “Babe Ruth remains the lodestar of American fame.”
Nearly a century after the story begins – “On Oct. 10, 1927,” she writes, when Ruth “was the most famous man in America” – it’s hard to conceive of a baseball player being the most famous athlete in America, let alone the most famous person. And yet with a clever narrative that tells Ruth’s life story through the lens of his 21-city barnstorming tour with Lou Gehrig, Leavy doesn’t need to do any convincing that it’s true. The facts clearly support the premise.
Read the full article here: https://sports.yahoo.com/baseball-even-capable-making-stars-anymore-181804986.html
Originally published: November 7, 2018. Last Updated: November 7, 2018.