The baseball the papers built

**The season the man and the persona arrived together.** Ruth's 1927 season - sixty home runs in a 154-game schedule, a single-season record that stood until Roger Maris hit sixty-one in 1961, with the Yankees' Murderers' Row around him - is the on-field anchor this entry leans on without being about. The subject is the parallel figure the press built, because most of the people who loved him never saw him play. **The printed voice was another man's.** Through the 1920s Ruth's byline ran across the country in syndicated columns and serials, and much of that copy was ghostwritten - the 'Babe Ruth' column was substantially the work of Christy Walsh, his agent, who organised the ghosted pieces under Ruth's name. A reader opening the sports page met a voice signed 'Babe Ruth' that Babe Ruth had not written, which is the manufactured reply end of a one-sided tie arriving in sports journalism: the attention felt answered, and the answer was an agency. **Radio and the syndicated page made the tie work at distance.** Baseball went on the air in the 1920s, and Ruth's name travelled ahead of him by broadcast and by print - this entry records the 1920 film 'Headin' Home' as the star's celluloid echo of the same reach. The deeper claim, read from the thesis this entry draws on, is that the newspapers of the 1920s manufactured what one account calls a 'hot romance between sport and the public'. The counter-argument - that Ruth's fame was earned by a bat, not by columns - is real and kept on the entry; the point is narrower, that the relationship hundreds of thousands had with him ran through contributed copy and broadcast names rather than through a seat in a ballpark.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.