The Real Ruth: 60 Stories of Playing Ball and Raising Hell with the Babe
by Waite Hoyt, Tim Manners
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.
About the Author
Tim Manners is a writer, editor, communications consultant, and lifelong baseball fan based in Westport, Connecticut. He assembled and edited Schoolboy from Hoyt’s extensive unpublished archive and has returned to that material to shape Hoyt’s stories of Ruth into this new book.
Waite Hoyt (1899-1984) pitched twenty-one seasons in the major leagues, winning 237 games and helping the New York Yankees capture three World Series championships during the club’s first dynasty. Babe Ruth’s teammate from 1921 through 1929, Hoyt later became the beloved radio voice of the Cincinnati Reds, a post he held from 1942 to 1965. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969. His posthumous memoir, Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero, was published in 2024.