Ask Babe Ruth to Teach Your Kids How to Pitch
Even if you don’t know anything else about baseball, you probably know that Babe Ruth is one of the most famous baseball players. Of course, if you grew up in the 1990s, then there’s a chance you met The Kid – aka Sultan of the Matchmaker, Titan of Terror, Colossus of Influence, King of Accident, Great Bambino – in The Sandlot, but that matters.
Born George Herman Ruth in 1895, he is best known for his home runs as an outfielder for the New York Yankees, but began his career in Major League Baseball as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Whether you want to see it in action for yourself or you have your own Little League members and want them to learn from the best, here’s how to access instructional videos created for kids by The Babe himself.
How to get Babe Ruth to teach your child how to pitch
This tutorial does not require a time machine – access to YouTube is enough. There you will find a roughlyeight-minute video titled “Perfect Control”. It was one of five shorts in the Play Ball with Babe Ruth series , released by Universal Pictures in 1932 (and subsequently reissued in the 1950s after Ruth’s death).
“Perfect Control” tells the story of a boy who falls asleep during a boring arithmetic class and dreams of Ruth coming to his school to teach his class how to play in a nearby sandbox. The King of Swat (as he is called at the beginning of the film) then proceeds to teach the boys how to throw a fastball, a spinball, and a knuckleball:
And that wasn’t Ruth’s only experience as an artist. Like many baseball players of the day, he spent the off-season at vaudeville stadiums , performing numbers such as this little ditty:
Brosky, no?