By 1932, Babe Ruth was running on fumes. Nineteen years in the pros had chewed him up. His legs ached. His knees clicked like loose gears. Yet the most famous moment of his career was still waiting in the wings.
The Season of Pain and Power
The 1932 New York Yankees were a mess of injuries. Ruth fought charley horses. He nursed sprains. That old cartilage tear in his knee flared up constantly. In July, he ripped a muscle in the back of his thigh. He sat out for nearly two weeks. The pain was so bad he stopped playing golf. It was his favorite hobby. He couldn’t bear the impact.
In September, doctors thought he had appendicitis. They didn’t cut him open. Instead, they wrapped him in ice for three days. Ten days later, he joked he still hadn’t thawed.
When Ruth was hurt, the Yankees didn’t stop. They just subbed him out. Late in games, they brought in pinch runners. Defensive subs. Sammy Byrd and Myril Hoag got nicknames because of it. They were “Babe Ruth’s legs.”
The team didn’t care. The Yankees scored 1,002 runs. No team had ever done that before. Only two others have since. That is an average of 6.5 runs per game. Ruth hit 41 home runs. Lou Gehrig hit 34.
It wasn’t all glory for Ruth. In June, Gehrig hit four homers in one game. Ruth hit one. The Yankees won 20-13. But Ruth didn’t win the home run title. Jimmie Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics did. It was only the second time since 1917 that Ruth wasn’t the league leader in that category.
The Athletics also led in batting average and slugging percentage. The Yankees had to rely on pitching. Lefty Gomez, only 23, won 20 games for the second year in a row. Red Ruffing won 18. Johnny Allen won 17. George Pipgras won 16. The staff led the league in earned run average.
New York jumped into first place in late May. They finished 13 games ahead of Philadelphia. Leading the league in ERA while scoring a thousand runs makes winning the pennant almost inevitable.
The World Series Rivalry
The opponent was the Chicago Cubs. A weird squad. Joe McCarthy had led them to the 1929 National League flag. He was now managing the Yankees.
In 1930, the Cubs were close to the St. Louis Cardinals. Four games left. McCarthy got fired. Rogers Hornsby took over. “The Rajah” had a slash-and-burn style. The team finished 17 games out of first in 1931. Hornsby kept his job.
August 1932 changed everything. The Cubs were in first place. They were locked in a tight race with Pittsburgh and Chicago. Then they fired Hornsby. They hired “Jolly Cholly” Grimm. Grimm had been traded from the Pirates for playing the banjo too much.
Historian Bill James noted a pattern. When a team hates a strict manager, ownership should give them a fun-loving one. It didn’t work for the Yankees under Shawkey. But for the Cubs, it did. They caught fire. Why? They added former Yankee Mark Koenig. He batted .353 in 31 games for them.
Then came the money fight.
The Cubs voted to give Koenig just a half-share of the World Series profits. Hornsby got nothing. The Yankees thought this was cheap. Stupidly cheap.
The Yankees were generous. They gave their trainer a three-quarter share. They gave rookie Charlie Devens, who pitched only nine innings, a half-share. The Yanks felt bad for McCarthy. They thought the Cubs mistreated him by axing him so suddenly.
The hatred started before Game 1. It never stopped. Yankees called Cubs “penny-pinchers.” “Tightwads.” “Skinflints.” The Cubs yelled back things you can’t print here. One historian said it felt like an Ozark feud. Not a sport. The press joined in too.
The Series Begins
Game 1 started with Guy Bush retiring the Yankees in order. He walked Earle Combs to open the fourth inning. Ruth singled and scored the first run. Gehrig followed with a home run. Bush fell apart in the sixth. He walked four Yankees. New York led 8-2 by the end of the inning. They won 12-6.
Game 2 was worse for the Cubs. Lon Warneke walked the first two Yankees. Two runs. He walked two more in the third. Two more runs. Lefty Gomez shut them out the rest of the way. Yankee Stadium wasn’t sold out. The Depression was hitting hard.
Game 3 was rowdy. It created a legend. The biggest legend. For the biggest player.
The Cubs were happy to go back to Wrigley Field. Their fans were crazy. It was one of those days at Wrigley where the wind blows out. Pitchers feel the doom. The fans were already mocking Ruth and the Yankees during batting practice.
Ruth shut them up.
He hit nine balls out of the park in practice. Gehrig added seven.
The hostility at Wrigley Field during the 1932 World Series wasn’t just about baseball. It was personal. In a move that defined his larger-than-life persona, Babe Ruth turned the Chicago crowd against him almost immediately. Standing near the Cubs bench, he shouted that he would play for half his salary if he could hit in such a “dump” every day. The fans didn’t laugh. They threw lemons. And Ruth, ever the showman, tossed them back.
The Chaos of Game Three
Tensions were already frayed when Billy Jurges, filling in for the injured Everett Scott, wilded a pitch to Joe Sewell. A walk followed. Then came the blast. Ruth casually launched a homer deep into the right-field bleachers, sending the hostile crowd into a frenzy. Lemons rained down as he circled the bases.
The Cubs weren’t done. Kiki Cuyler made a miraculous grab at the wall to rob Ruth of extra bases in the second. George Gehrig answered with a solo shot in the third. But Chicago fought back, scoring twice in the third and once in the fourth to tie the game at four runs apiece.
The stakes were astronomical. A Yankees win meant a three-to-nothing stranglehold on the pennant. A Cubs victory would keep them within striking distance of a tie.
The Fifth-Inning Explosion
The bottom of the fifth was where history blurred into myth. Ruth came up with one out. The verbal abuse from the Cubs bench and the stands was deafening. Charlie Root, the pitcher, threw a strike.
Ruth held up one finger. Sarcastic. Loud. He was telling the world he knew the count. Two balls later, Root threw another strike. Ruth held up two fingers. The old adage: It only takes one.
The benches were screaming. Guy Bush, the Cubs reliever, nearly stormed out of the dugout, his face twisted in rage. The ballpark was on the verge of a riot.
Then came the gesture.
The Shot Heard ‘Round the World
What happened next remains the most debated moment in baseball lore. Ruth waved his bat and hand toward center field, toward the Cubs bench, or perhaps toward Root himself. Some said he was signaling he’d lay down a foul ball. Others argued he was daring Root to throw him a pitch he couldn’t handle.
Root tried to fool him with a slow curve inside.
Ruth cracked it. Deep. Into the center-field bleachers. It was the longest home run ever recorded at Wrigley at that time. His 15th and final World Series homer. Gehrig followed with another shot on the very next pitch.
The Yankees had reasserted their dominance. But the story wasn’t just about the power. It was about the prediction.
A reporter claimed Ruth had “called his shot,” pointing to the bleachers before hitting the ball there. Gehrig later said, “Did you see what that big monkey did? He said he’d hit a homer, and he did.”
Ruth never shied away from embellishment. Years later, at the Hall of Fame, he admitted on tape: “I told him I was going to hit the next pitched ball right into centerfield for a home run.”
The Verdict on the Myth
Was it real? We’ll never know for sure. Ruth had a flair for drama that bordered on the supernatural. From his 1914 debut catch in Baltimore to his 1928 Series-ending grab, he owned the center stage.
“I never had so much fun in my whole life,” he said after the Series.
A 1992 film discovery seemed to show him pointing. But he made broad gestures everywhere. The truth lies with the participants. Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett denied it outright. Pitcher Charlie Root was unequivocal: “Anyone who knows me knows he would have ended up on his backside.”
Root, an intense battler, refused to re-enact the scene for a Ruth biography 15 years later. He wouldn’t lie.
The battle over that one moment may never be settled. But one thing is clear: whatever happened, it was “slightly colossal,” as biographer Tom Meany put it. It was positively Ruthian.
Game Four and the Injury
The drama didn’t end in Game Three. Game Four began with more tension for the Cubs. The Yankees loaded the bases early. Then Ruth got hit.
Guy Bush, the same pitcher who had nearly stormed out of the dugout in the previous game, threw a wicked fastball that caught Ruth on the arm. The injury was serious. His arm swelled painfully. He wouldn’t play Game Five.
Despite the injury, Ruth managed a sarcastic, “Was that your fastball? I thought it was a gnat.”
The Yankees scored once, on a Gehrig sacrifice fly. Chicago answered with four runs in the bottom of the inning to tie it. The Yankees fought back with a Tony Lazzeri homer and more runs in the sixth. The Cubs tied it again in the seventh.
Then came the lightning. Not literally. But “Five O’Clock Lightning” struck in all its fury.
The series was far from over. But the legend of the call had already taken root. And in Chicago, the lemons were still on the ground.
The New York Yankees didn’t just win; they obliterated the opposition in a 13-6 rout that felt less like a game and more like a coronation. The offensive explosion started in the fourth inning. Four runs poured across the plate. One came on a single by Babe Ruth. He was hitting through a pained arm, clearly uncomfortable, but he still managed to drive in a run. It was a small moment in a massive game, but it set the tone.
Then came the ninth.
The Yankees did it all over again. Lazzeri launched his second two-run homer of the series, putting the final touches on a lopsided scoreline. The final line read 13-6, but the margin barely tells the story. The Yankees had won twelve straight World Series games. No team had ever done that. No team has done it since. It stands as an isolated peak in baseball history, a streak of dominance so complete it feels almost mythical.
Ruth’s last stand and Gehrig’s ascent
Ruth provided the most dramatic moment of the Series. Perhaps the most dramatic of his entire career. It’s a moment that will always be etched into the fabric of baseball lore. But looking back, you can see the cracks forming. The Yankees were entering a new era, and Ruth’s time was waning.
Lou Gehrig was taking over.
Gehrig didn’t just match Ruth’s slugging mantle; he eclipsed it. He was the real star of the Series. While Ruth batted .333, Gehrig hit .529. That is a absurdly high average, especially in a high-pressure environment. He drove in eight runs. He recorded nine hits. He hit three home runs. He led all batters in every major offensive category.
Ruth was still far above average. You don’t become Babe Ruth by being mediocre. But the decline was there. It wasn’t sudden. It was a slow erosion of the physical tools that had made him a god on the diamond.
The end of an era
This Series marked a turning point. The Ruth era was coming to an end. Not with a bang, but with a slow fade. Gehrig was the future. Ruth was the past, albeit a glorious, unrepentant past.
The stats don’t lie. Gehrig’s .529 average in the World Series is a number that likely will never be touched. Ruth’s performance, while still excellent by modern standards, was a shadow of what he had been just a few years prior. The arm pain wasn’t a one-time thing. It was a symptom of things to come.
The Yankees had won twelve straight games. They had swept the series. They had crowned Gehrig as the new king. And Ruth, swinging through pain, knew his days of dominance were numbered.
The next chapter was already being written. And it didn’t feature the Bombing Babe.
