12 things you probably don’t know about Babe Ruth

With 2014 being the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame, the shrine naturally has turned to the game’s greatest star to help mark the occasion with its newest exhibit, “Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend.” 2014 also marks the 100th anniversary of the Babe's debut in the major leagues. But if you you can’t make it to Cooperstown, N.Y., here are some lesser-known facts about the sport’s real-life Paul Bunyan.

AP
An undated photo of George Herman 'Babe' Ruth.

1. How he became the Babe

George Herman Ruth acquired the nickname “Babe” while playing for the Baltimore Orioles, a minor league team in 1914, when he was referred to by a team scout as “one of [manager] Jack Dunn’s babes.” Ruth’s big-league career began at midseason that year when the Orioles of the International League sold him and two others players to the Red Sox for $8,000. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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