Learn From The Greats

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back. My earliest recollections center about the dirty, traffic-crowded streets of Baltimore’s river front. Crowded streets they were too, noisy with the roar of heavy trucks whose drivers cursed and swore and aimed blows with their driving whips, at the legs of kids who made the streets their playground. And the youngsters, running wild, struck back and echoed the curses. Truck-drivers were our enemies: so were the coppers patrolling their beats, and so too were the shopkeepers who took bruising payment from our skins for the apples and the fruit we “snitched” from their stands and counters. A rough, tough neighborhood, but I liked it. There in those crooked winding streets I staged my first fight, and lost it, I think. There too I played my first baseball. There I learned to fear and to hate the coppers. Perhaps it was there, too, that I learned to control my pitches. For tossing over-ripe apples, or aged eggs at a truck driver’s head is mighty good practice—although I don’t recommend it to the boys of today. Many people thought I was an orphan. I wasn’t. My folks lived in Baltimore and my father worked in the district where I was raised. We were poor. Very poor. And there were times when we never knew where the next meal

Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball