The Babe is the Man.

New York Post July 5, 2008
Babe Ruth's family is pushing the Bambino's little-known civil-rights activism in a bid to convince baseball officials to retire the number he wore - No. 3 - across Major League Baseball.
Ruth is more closely associated with popularizing the home run and keeping baseball alive in America's darkest economic days, but his kin say he was a dedicated hater of fascism and racism.
Ruth's family has been lobbying baseball to have all teams retire his number. Only Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Famer who broke baseball's color barrier, has his No. 42 immortalized in all Major League stadiums.
"I'm saying retiring my grandfather's number would not only not water down Jackie's memory, it'd enhance it," granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti told The Post.
Tosetti's push to retire her grandfather's No. 3 has had only moderate success - fewer than 2,000 online-petition signatures.
But the Durham, Conn., homemaker hopes to score more political runs in the new effort to paint Ruth as a champion of human rights long before baseball's
integration in 1947.
Ruth was, in fact, a documented opponent of Hitler's Germany.
He signed a famous public letter in 1942, denouncing the slaughter of Jews in Europe. The letter, filled with names of famous Americans of German descent, is credited with raising US awareness about the Holocaust.
Now Tosetti claims she'll prove that then-baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis threatened to ban Ruth, who hit 714 lifetime home runs, from baseball because he barnstormed with Negro League stars in the off-season.
"Landis wanted him to stop," Tosetti said. "[Major League Baseball officials] didn't want to know how good [black players] were, but my grandfather stood by them."
Tosetti declined to reveal her proof that Landis - who, on the record, opposed barnstorming for economic reasons - didn't want Ruth touring with African-Americans.
The Babe's granddaughter claims she's working with a team of researchers to produce a documentary that will prove Ruth's civil-rights advocacy.
Friends and family of late Pittsburgh Pirates great Roberto Clemente - the Puerto Rican baseball pioneer who died in 1972 while rushing earthquake relief supplies to Nicaragua - want No. 21 retired in all MLB parks, too.


What many people don't know is that bench jockeys in the twenties accused the Babe of being black. Now he grew up in Baltimore at the turn of the last century and had many of the attitudes of that time and place. But unlike other titans of baseball he had relationships and friendships with black people. Unlike Cap Anson who single handedly stopped blacks from playing in the league and Ty Cobb who was famous for beating black men who he claimed "sassed" him. Cobb always called Ruth by his big league nickname of "Nigger Lips." The bench jockeys of the time taunted Ruth that his mother who worked in the family tavern was a whore and that his real father was black. The rumor is that it was taunting along these lines that lead to the famous called shot home run against the Cubs. Ruth was sexually adventurous and often partied in black night clubs and speakeasies and enjoyed the "company" of black women. All in all he was enlightened by the standard of his times.

But I still don't think he would have fucked Madonna.

The Babe had standards, ya know.