This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we return to our American stories.

Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all time. Yet time has also proven to be

his greatest enemy. Carter McNish presents the story of Bay Ruth's hectic final years as a baseball

professional, as told by Mike Gibbons, who's the executive director of the Bay Ruth's Birthplace

and Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our story begins in the 1932 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs.

The Babe came up in game three, and in the fifth inning, pointed to where he was going to hit the next pitch,

and hit it for the longest home run in Wrigley Field history.

It was, it was became known as the called shot, one of the most dramatic World Series moments of all time. Now what happened, though, was the series which was won by the Yankees, was shortened.

Not all the games were played, including the last two,

which were scheduled for Yankee Stadium, and the Yankees had to refund $100,000 to ticket holders

for the games that were not played. This was during the Great Depression. The Yankees, although

they were making money, did not have a lot of extra income from the World Series that year, and went into 1933 having to cut salaries, including a bunch of money from Babe Ruth's contract.

So Babe takes a cut.

He's not happy about that, but it goes off and performs pretty well that season. He beat Lou Gehrig in the home run

count that year, but was a distant second to slugger Jimmy Fox from the Philadelphia Athletics.

In his last game of 1933, Babe Ruth was asked to pitch at Yankee Stadium by the Yankees,

and he said, okay, I'm going to do that.

He had only pitched once in the previous 12 years,

but anyway, he got himself in shape to pitch

...