The bellyache heard ’round the world

On April 9, 1925, Irish newspaper The Belfast Telegraph ran a shocking headline: "Babe Ruth, American baseball champion and national hero of every schoolboy, is reported to have died in a train whilst en route to New York." Similar headlines appeared in newspapers in London and Scotland.

It was fake news. The New York Times was quick to debunk the story, reporting that the rumor had mysteriously begun in Canada and had "spread with almost incredible rapidity." Ruth was alive--though he wasn't well.

For months, Ruth had been struggling with his health. His weight had ballooned since the end of the 1924 season, prompting Yankee owner Ed Barrow to send him to Hot Springs in February--the month Ruth turned 30--for a pre-spring training regimen of exercise and steam baths. When he reported to spring training in March, he weighed between 255 and 270 pounds and suffered from chills and fever. Sluggish on the field, he played through the discomfort.

In those days, teams played exhibition games for two weeks between spring training and opening day. The Yankees and the Brooklyn Robins (they would become the Dodgers in 1931) had trained in Florida, then chartered a train back to New York with stops in Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Asheville. These games were profitable, and Babe Ruth was the Taylor Swift of his time.

Despite his worsening condition, Ruth participated. Too sick for batting practice in Chattanooga, he still played and hit two home runs. On April 6 in Knoxville, he hit another home run and posed for a photograph with a group of local Shriners. According to legend, he indulged in a heavy meal and a night of drinking in Knoxville.

Then came Asheville, where the teams were set to play April 8 and 9.

Shortly before the train reached Asheville on April 7, Ruth told his teammates he felt unwell--"indisposed." As he stepped onto the platform, he collapsed into the arms of teammates Joe Dugan and Steve O'Neill. Unconscious, he was rushed by taxi to Battery Park Hotel in downtown Asheville, where he was attended by Dr. Charles Jordan, a local general practitioner who initially suspected severe flu or food poisoning. A photograph of a dazed-looking Ruth in bed appeared in the April 9 edition of the Asheville Citizen.

Dick Wasson, a reporter for the Citizen, was skeptical of the official explanation. "Ruth does not observe a strict diet ... and this, more than anything else, was given as a probable cause for his illness," he wrote.

W.O. McGeehan of the New York Herald Tribune famously blamed a "hot dogs and soda binge," perhaps a kid-friendly diversion. Other rumors included "moonshine poisoning" and "venereal disease." Ruth's teammate Joe Dugan offered his own diagnosis: "Day and night, broads and booze."

Yankees manager Miller Huggins pushed back: "Ruth's recent ailment was due to acute indigestion. His present condition is not serious."

In her 2018 biography "The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created," Jane Leavy observed that the incident initiated "a season-long feeding frenzy, a steady diet of column inches about Ruthian excess." She argued that a backlash against

Ruth was "inevitable because everything about him had become overstated: the meals, beer, pounds, spending, and even the linguistic entitlements."

Ruth "had begun speaking of himself in the third person," she wrote, "a disease that has become endemic to the modern locker room. 'The Babe can't disappoint his fans,' he declaimed the day before he passed out in Asheville."

Ruth left Asheville while his teammates played the Robins. On the afternoon of April 8, Yankee scout Paul Krichell and New York Evening World reporter Robert Boyd dressed him and helped him to a cab.

"Ruth, as he left the hotel, showed the signs of being very sick," Wasson wrote. "The lines in his face were drawn, while his strength, powerful as it is when he is in condition, failed him almost to a helpless point. Throwing practically his entire weight of 230 pounds upon Krichell and Boyd, he shuffled to the cab. Here, the men needed to aid him in entering. After seating himself, Ruth put his hand to his face. ... He said nothing."

Krichell and Boyd accompanied Ruth on the train to Penn Station, where Ruth briefly spoke to reporters, attributing his illness to a bad reaction to the flu. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in New York where, on April 17, he underwent the first of several operations for what doctors termed an "intestinal abscess."

He was hospitalized for six weeks and wasn't allowed out of bed until May 21, when he took a stroll around the hospital roof with a 10-year-old fan who had broken his arm playing baseball.

That stroll was a rare photo op. Once Ruth arrived at St. Vincent's, no one besides the medical staff and his family could access him. The Yankees' secrecy infuriated the press, who were accustomed to unfettered access to Ruth.

Remarkably, Ruth returned to the Yankees on June 1, having missed the first 40 games of the season. Coincidentally, that was the same game in which his teammate Lou Gehrig began his streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood for 56 years until Cal Ripken Jr. surpassed it.

Ruth's 1925 season was a disaster by his standards--though only by his standards. He still hit 25 home runs, an impressive number for most players but a steep drop for the man who had redefined baseball. The Yankees finished seventh, a rare stumble for a team that would soon dominate the sport.

The most enduring lesson from Ruth's near-death episode isn't about baseball. It's about how spectacle obscures reality. He collapsed publicly, was carried away unconscious, and spent weeks in the hospital undergoing surgery. Yet much of the coverage reduced his suffering to a joke--hot dogs and soda, broads and booze, moonshine and excess. Little serious consideration was given to the fact that Ruth, for all his bravado, had likely been in real danger.

Then there were the rumors. Before Ruth could even reach a hospital, false reports of his death had spread across the Atlantic, demonstrating how quickly people seize on dramatic stories--especially those that fit a pre-existing narrative. The public had long delighted in Ruth's excesses. Now, they were just as eager to believe he had met a lurid or ironic end.

Nearly a century later, the machinery of speculation moves faster than ever. A rumor can travel the world before the truth can catch up, just as it did in 1925. Babe Ruth was able to step off the train that year and prove he was still alive. Not everyone is so lucky.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com