No single review can do justice to Randall Sullivan’s new book, “The First All-Star Game, Babe Ruth, FDR, and America at the Crossroads.”
While the book’s central focus is the first-ever 1933 All-Star Game — or the “Game of the Century,” as its originator and chief booster, Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, referred to it — the tome includes rich insights into American and baseball history.
Many heroes helped America out of the Great Depression era. Among them was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, whose hard-nosed adherence to baseball’s anti-gambling rules gradually pushed the fixed 1919 World Series scandal into the deep recesses of fans’ memories.
Baseball owners plucked Landis from his position as a United States District Court judge for the Northern District of Illinois, a role to which President Theodore Roosevelt had appointed him in 1905. Landis received national attention in 1907 when he fined Standard Oil of Indiana more than $29 million (approximately $980 million in 2025 dollars) for violating federal laws forbidding rebates on railroad freight tariffs. Although Landis’s action was reversed on appeal, he was hailed as a judge determined to rein in big business.
No one, however, did more to get financially struggling Americans into ballpark seats than Babe Ruth, still today the sport’s most revered player.
Before Ruth became the New York Yankees’ home-run king in 1927, he was the American League’s best left-handed pitcher. In 1916, Ruth’s Boston Red Sox record was 23-12 with a 1.75 ERA — lower than Walter Johnson’s. In addition to his stellar regular-season performance, Ruth threw 13 consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series against the Brooklyn Robins and added another 16⅔ scoreless innings in the 1918 postseason against the Chicago Cubs.
Ruth’s record for most consecutive scoreless innings pitched in the World Series stood until 1961, when the Yankees’ Whitey Ford broke it. When advised that he had broken Ruth’s record, Ford remarked, “I thought Ruth was a lousy pitcher who they made an outfielder.” Ford was badly under-informed. Ruth’s lifetime winning percentage of .671 is higher than those of either Roger Clemens or Sandy Koufax.
Sullivan introduces — or perhaps reintroduces — readers to some of baseball’s greatest figures, their on-field successes, and their off-field challenges. Most avid fans still recognize the Cubs’ Hack Wilson, whose 191 RBIs in a season remains a record. But the Detroit Tigers’ Mickey Cochrane — considered the diamond’s best-ever backstop — and the Philadelphia Athletics’ fire-balling “Lefty” Grove, who led the American League in strikeouts in each of his first seven seasons, won 20 or more games seven times, reached 300 career wins, and finished with a WAR twice as high as Koufax’s.
On Thursday, July 7, 1933, before 49,000 excited fans at Comiskey Park, Grove came on in the seventh inning to toss three scoreless innings and earn the save for the victorious American League, 4-2. Fittingly, and to the fans’ uncontained delight, Ruth’s two-run third-inning home run provided the victory margin.
“The First All-Star Game” is meticulously researched, with more than 50 pages of sources and bibliography that also gives readers insights into the period’s other prominent figures, including Ruth’s teammate Lou Gehrig, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde.
