It was already hard to imagine George Ruth before Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth before the Babe, the Yankees, and even New York or the game of baseball before the Babe. He and the sport were now synonymous, the game’s history cleaved in two, the Dead Ball Era and the present. Ruth was also synonymous with one more thing—money. And since organized baseball would not authorize a city series, Ruth did the next best thing and went barnstorming, putting a team together with his old Boston teammate Wally Schang and Carl Mays, the inclusion of the pitcher a macabre attraction in the wake of Chapman’s death. At the same time, while he toured the Northeast and New England, he was “writing” an account of the World Series between the Indians and Brooklyn for the newspapers. A minor scandal broke out when one reporter had the audacity to reveal that Ruth, in fact, was nowhere near the World Series, hadn’t seen an inning, and was barely following it at all. “Babe is apparently as good a long distance reporter as he is a long distance hitter,”
