![]() ![]() But this is an unrepresentative image of the Babe, formed largely because of his reputation for having a prodigious appetite (for food and everything else), and because most of the existing films of him date from the last years of his career, when he was considerably overweight. Likewise, the popular image of Babe Ruth is that of a paunchy, roly-poly ballplayer who was lucky he could hit home runs, because otherwise he would have had a heck of a time trying to drag that spare tire around the basepaths. And Abraham Lincoln is forever enshrined in American memory as the bearded figure in a stovepipe hat, even though he bore facial hair only for the last four years of his life. Walt Disney will forever be the avuncular, slightly paunchy middle-aged man with the gray moustache, because that's how he looked when most of us first saw him regularly (as the host of his own TV show) that he was quite successful while still in his boyish 20s is easy to overlook, because he wasn't very visible in those pre-television days. Mark Twain is nearly always depicted as an elderly, white-haired man in a white suit, even though Twain was famous long before he was elderly, and he adopted the habit of wearing white suits all year around only in the last few years of his life. We tend to create specific, fixed images of people (particularly famous ones) and remember them always as conforming to those images. This legend collides headlong with a few facts when we try to run it down history's highway, however, and the first obstacle in the road has something to do with memory and image. Yankees owner Jake Ruppert thought he would look slimmer that way. The Bambino didn't merely wear Yankee pinstripes he was the reason why all Yankees wear pinstripes, then and now:īabe Ruth's girth, incidentally, is the reason the Yankees wear pinstripes. We might expect that someone would try to link these symbols in folkloric fashion, to establish a connection between the two that was not merely coincidental but causal. Ruth's most notable home run records may have been broken, and other teams may have adopted the pinstriped look, but baseball still has no more potent symbols of sustained excellence than the Babe and Yankee pinstripes. ![]() There is no more memorable figure in baseball history than Babe Ruth, and no more famously distinctive a uniform than the New York Yankees' pinstriped home jerseys. ![]()
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