The Final 48 Hours of Babe Ruth

On the evening of August 16, 1948, in a hospital room in Manhattan, the biggest man in baseball history weighed less than 140 pounds. His arms, the arms that had hit 714 home runs, were nothing but bone under the hospital sheets. He had lost eighty pounds. Babe Ruth was dying. Everyone in the country knew it. Except Babe Ruth. His wife Claire and his doctors had decided not to tell him he had cancer. But when they transferred him to Memorial Hospital, the hospital everyone in New York knew was the cancer hospital, he never asked again. This documentary chronicles the final forty-eight hours of the most famous athlete who ever lived. Discover how Ruth was abandoned at seven, declared incorrigible, and sent to St. Mary's Industrial School where Brother Matthias, a six-foot-six monk, became the father he never had and taught him to play baseball. How he signed with the Baltimore Orioles at nineteen and earned the nickname Babe because the veterans thought the wide-eyed kid from the reform school looked like a baby. How he entered the majors as a pitcher, won 89 games with a 2.28 ERA, then became the greatest hitter who ever lived. How he hit 54 home runs in 1920 when the entire Browns hit 37. How he hit 60 in 1927. 714 career home runs. A .342 average. The highest OPS in baseball history. He built Yankee Stadium and saved baseball after the Black Sox scandal. The film examines the bitter retirement. How Ruth wanted to manage the Yankees and was rejected. How no team in baseball would hire him. How the man who had been the center of attention for twenty years became a celebrity without a stage. How he played golf and bowled and waited for a phone call that never came. This documentary chronicles the diagnosis in November 1946. A tumor on the left side of his neck. Nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Surgeons operated but the cancer had spread too far. Ruth became one of the first patients in history to receive both radiation and chemotherapy simultaneously, an experimental drug called teropterin that would become the foundation of modern oncology. He did not know he was a pioneer. He just knew he was sick and the treatments made him sicker. Learn how the Yankees held Babe Ruth Day on April 27, 1947, before 58,339 fans, broadcast simultaneously to every ballpark in America. How Ruth stood at home plate in his camel hair coat, his voice reduced to a hoarse rasp, and thanked the game that had given a reform school kid everything. How the crowd roared but the man at the microphone was not the Babe they remembered. The film chronicles Ruth's final appearance at Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1948, for the stadium's twenty-fifth anniversary. How he wore his old uniform with number three on his back and used a borrowed bat as a cane. How photographer Nat Fein slipped behind him and captured the most iconic sports photograph ever taken, The Babe Bows Out, showing Ruth from behind, leaning on the bat, his cap in his hand, his head slightly bowed. The image won the Pulitzer Prize. Discover the final forty-eight hours beginning August 14. Ruth bedridden at Memorial Hospital. Claire at his side, reading to him, screening visitors, managing his death the way she had managed his life. Ford Frick visiting on August 15 and finding a skeleton where his friend had been. Ruth was so thin it was unbelievable, Frick said. His arms were just skinny little bones. Learn how on the morning of August 16, Ruth seemed to improve. His temperature dropped. His breathing steadied. For a few hours, there was cautious optimism. Then his condition reversed. His breathing became labored. His fever spiked. Reverend Thomas Kaufmann administered the last sacrament. At 8:01 in the evening, Babe Ruth closed his eyes and died in his sleep. He was fifty-three years old. This documentary chronicles what happened next. His casket placed in the main entrance of Yankee Stadium, the House That Ruth Built. Over 100,000 mourners filing past in two days in brutal August heat. The line stretching blocks down River Avenue. Men in suits beside boys in dungarees. Nobody complained. Nobody left. This was Babe Ruth. You waited. The funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Cardinal Spellman presiding. Six thousand inside. Seventy-five thousand outside on the sidewalks listening on loudspeakers. Pallbearers Joe Dugan and Waite Hoyt carrying the casket in the blazing sun, Dugan whispering he would give a hundred dollars for a beer, and Hoyt whispering back: so would the Babe. The most perfect eulogy anyone could have delivered. He died the way nobody expected. Quietly. In his sleep. The man who had lived louder than anyone slipped away in the dark of an August evening. Then a hundred thousand people came to say goodbye. Then a nation mourned a man who made them feel that anything was possible. The Babe died a beautiful death, the Reverend said. He lived a louder one.