Still Seeing Things In Black or White

This isn't new information; it's just been forgotten. Ruth has been dead since 1948. It's not like there was any "Sunday Night Conversation" with the Babe on videotape for the historical record. But while Ruth's maternal grandparents were German immigrants, his father's family lived in 19th-century Baltimore and there's no exact record of lineage.

In recent years, as Ruth has been more prominently in the news because of Bonds's pursuit, there's been increased back-and-forth. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page even reexamined an old story alleged by Fred Lieb, a sportswriter of the 1920s. Lieb reported that Ty Cobb refused to share a cabin with Ruth at a Georgia hunting lodge because he thought Ruth was black.

There are a few people still alive who had actual interaction with Ruth, and Buck O'Neil, the Negro leagues star and perhaps baseball's greatest living resource, is one of them. O'Neil, now 94, was 10 years old when he first met Ruth outside of a spring training stadium in Sarasota, Fla., where O'Neil grew up. Ruth gave O'Neil a cracked bat that afternoon. He and his buddies put a nail through the crack and used it. "We wore that bat out," O'Neil said the other day.

In 1936, the year after Ruth retired, he brought the Babe Ruth All-Stars to play the Satchel Paige All-Stars on the far South Side of Chicago at a company ballpark. O'Neil, then 24 and a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, played in that game against Ruth. "The ballpark was packed," O'Neil said. "Tall cedar trees lined the outfield, and on Satchel's first pitch to Ruth, he hit it completely over those outfield trees. Satchel greeted Ruth at the plate, and they stopped the game. . . . Satchel and Ruth talked at home plate for 15 minutes."

So did Negro leaguers talk about Ruth's race? Did they think he was, well, one of them, another light-skinned Negro passing for white, which is something 99 percent of white folks know absolutely nothing about?

"We heard the rumors," O'Neil said, "but we didn't think anything of them. . . . There were a lot of Ruth haters. But did we believe that stuff? No. . . . To us, Ruth was a white man. He wasn't the only white man with a flat nose and full lips."

O'Neil, stupidly passed over by the Hall of Fame voters recently, is one of the few links between Ruth and Aaron and Bonds, someone who has met all three, someone who played long before the word "steroids" was uttered, yet has lived long enough to see the game affected by its use.

"If he is . . . if he is," O'Neil said of Bonds and steroids, "he's not the only one. Any athlete wants that extra lift. Ruth liked a little drink when he played. . . . The only reason we didn't use [steroids] is that we didn't have it."

It almost guarantees that every home run Bonds hits until he retires will bring the kind of scrutiny Ruth and Aaron never had in their final days.