Babe Ruth

George Herman "Babe" Ruth changed how baseball was played and how Americans watched it. Beginning as a star pitcher, he became the game's defining power hitter, and his towering home runs transformed a low-scoring game of strategy into a spectacle of slugging that filled the new ballparks of the 1920s.

Ruth's sale from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees in 1920 reshaped the sport. He led the Yankees to a dynasty, and "the House That Ruth Built" — Yankee Stadium — rose on the popularity he generated. His single-season and career home-run records stood for decades.

He was also the first athlete to become a national celebrity in the modern sense. In the media boom of the Roaring Twenties, Ruth's outsized personality and appetite made him famous far beyond the sport, a household name carried by newspapers, newsreels, and radio.

Ruth's career marked the moment sport became mass entertainment and the athlete became a star. He set the template for every sports celebrity who followed, and his name remains shorthand for greatness nearly a century later.