They called me the King of Swat. It was great while it lasted. And it lasted quite a while, at that.

But these seem to be bad days for kings. Like that Alfonso of Spain, I'm out of a job now. He's playing polo over in Cannes or one of those other places on the Riviera. I've got my golf — in Florida in the winter, on Long Island in the summer.

His public quit on him. My legs went back on me. But it all comes to the same thing. We're both out of jobs and having a little trouble convincing ourselves that we're getting the kick out of life that we used to get.

I'm not complaining. Coming out of that orphanage down in Baltimore, where twenty-five cents of spending money was the week's reward for good behavior, I had my full twenty years in the great game that I gave a lot to but which also gave me more money, more fun, more comfort than the rough-and-tumble kid I was had any right to expect. Now maybe I'm through with baseball, maybe not. Sometimes I hope not, although it would take a swell job to bring me back.

But I'll admit that it gave me a funny feeling earlier this spring, playing golf down at St. Petersburg and around in Florida, not to be trying out the old legs and then jumping into the workouts with the gang, getting ready for the American League grind with the Yankees. Remember how everybody used to worry about whether I could get that waistline down and what my weight would be when the bell rang? Those tourists from the Middle West used to worry more about my legs than I did. I'm being honest now. I miss that stuff. This year's was the first training season since 1915 that I didn't go South with a major-league ball club.

That opening day in New York always brought a tingle. And I don't mean only because they had bands there and the mayor threw out the first ball. I got a real kick even last year when for the first time I wore a National League uniform. I didn't feel very much at home up there in Boston's Braves' field, and it was colder than an umpire's heart. But I busted one that day just the same, just to make the opener official for the Boston fans. Funny how you can rise to the occasion when the crowd that has faith in you expects you to. Even a king who is on the way out manages to do that once in a while.

Even an old ex-king is entitled to his memories. I've got mine. Of all the 723 homers I hit during my twenty years in the American League with the Boston Red Sox and the Yankees, that homer off Charley Root of the Cubs in the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field in Chicago stands out as the most satisfactory. Remember how I pointed to the outfield stands, showing the fans where I was going to put the ball and, on the third strike, did park it there? I've often thought since how bad I would have looked if I hadn't connected. By that time I was old enough to know better than to gamble that way. But that's the chance you take in the pinch.

I suppose you think I am proud of my home-run records. You know I have played in ten World Series and have hit fifteen home runs in World Series contests — three in a single game on two eccasions. But, now that I'm reminiscing. I'll admit I'm prouder of the fact that I was a pretty fair pitcher as a youngster and that I have a record of having pitched twenty-nine consecutive scoreless innings in World Series games.

Back in 1916 I pitched a fourteen-inning battle for the Red Sox against the Brooklyn Dodgers and held them scoreless after the first inning. Then in 1918. still with the Red Sox, I shut out the Cubs to win a nine-inning game, and blanked them again to the seventh inning of a later game before they scored. Twenty-nine consecutive innings out there on the mound under World Series pressure. Yes, I'm a little proud of that.

But I get a little tired of talking about nothing but records. Mine have meant a tidy bit of money to me, of course. And after I outgrew the boyish stuff, I managed to put a good bit of it away, too.

However, when you get to be an "ex," you start counting things up aside from records and money. We were doing that the other evening at the dinner table. A writer with whom I had been out playing golf said: "Babe, you've played a lot of baseball. You've been seen and cheered by millions. Your name is about as well known as any one's in the world. What does it all add up to? What do you think you have accomplished?" That stopped me. I had never thought about that before. Maybe it doesn't seem as if I have exerted any vital influence on the country. At any rate, I haven't made the grade in Who's Who in America, although among the names in it that begin with RU there are some college professors that. I never heard of before and I'll bet you never did either.

That's O.K. with me. I was hitting home runs while they were hitting the books. But I'm wondering, at that — and I'm serious now — whether those academic gentlemen have had a much more definite or constructive influence on the life and thought of this country in the past twenty years than I have. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to go intellectual. And no one has ever accused me of being swelled-headed.

I'll try to explain what I mean.

Remember those kids in that Passaic orphan asylum over in New Jersey three years ago? Looking out of their windows early on that May evening, the flashes of lightning showed them that, with rain falling in torrents, the railroad was washing away. Then one of them remembered that the express out of Jersey City was due any minute. It didn't take Johnny Murdock and his pals more than a second to figure out that there would be a real wreck if that express came through. But there was no trackwalker around and there wasn't time to phone ahead to stop the train. And there was the roadbed washed away from underneath the rails.

You remember the story. While the lady in charge telephoned for help, the six kids — Johnny Murdock, Jacob Melnizek, Rudolph Borsche, Douglas Fleming, Frank Mazzola and his brother Michael — ran down the track a quarter mile waving their raincoats, refusing to budge from the track, risking their lives to convince the engineer that he either had to stop or run over them.

It was a real act of quick-thinking heroism. Without question, they saved lives. Remember what Johnny Murdock and his pals said that night when the railroad officials told them they could have almost anything they wanted as a reward?

They said, "We don't want anything special as a reward. But could you please let Babe Ruth know what we did? That's what we'd rather have than anything. We have a ball team here and we'd like him to know that we did something worth while, even if we're not great ballplayers. Perhaps we could even meet him."

The Yankees, as I recall it, were out in Cleveland. A telegram telling me about the boys and their great stunt woke me up early in the morning out there. I sent them a telegram and wrote them letters, and when we got back into New York, they came over to the Yankee Stadium. I posed for pictures with them and autographed balls and we became real friends. If you could have seen what that meant to them, you'd have a little idea of what I mean. And don't forget that kids all over the country read that story in the newspapers.

During my last couple of years with the Yankees, my legs were giving me some bother. In 1934 I couldn't get in there every day. I used to sit on the bench and hear the kids out in the left-field stands, where they were admitted free a couple of afternoons a week, yell, "We want Ruth! We want Ruth!" Maybe you think it doesn't mean much to an old guy to hear a couple of thousand kids proving in that way what they think of him! If you don't think it means a whole lot, you're crazier than any left-handed pitcher I ever knew.

On trains, in hotels, everywhere I went. I saw evidence during those years of what the American boy thought of the Babe. I'm not going to tell you now about some of those trips I made to hospitals. I didn't use to publicize them, unless it was for some good cause, and I'm not going to start now. And, as the kids themselves know, I never put myself away with them as a lecturer.

But I am beginning to realize that I accomplished something during those twenty years beyond hitting into the outfield stands, throwing to the right base, and giving the best I could as a team competitor.

I have shown a lot of American boys in my time how to bear down when the count is three and two and there are a couple on the bags, with two out. I've shown them that a real man stands up under competition and comes through when the going is tough. I think they have liked me, thousands of them, maybe millions of them, and have taken hints from me that they might not take from a teacher or a scoutmaster or some one like that. The lessons of competition, which a boy will take from one who has been through that competition, won't do him any harm in later life, if you ask me.

Publication Date: May 9, 1936