This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is our American stories, and as you know, we tell stories about everything.

Very few athletes, let alone celebrities,

have achieved the legendary status

that has been given to George Herbert Babe Ruth Jr.

Here's Mike Gibbons, Director Emeritus and curator

of the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, Maryland

to tell us just a little bit about what made the babe a legend.

Well, today I'd like to talk to you about one of my favorite topics,

and that would be Babe Ruth, the guy that I've spent most of my lifetime studying and celebrating.

He is arguably the most celebrated athlete ever and certainly the greatest baseball player

of all time.

Now people ask me all the time, they say, well, how can you say that? How can you say he's the

greatest? And it's an easy answer.

He is the only player who starred both as a pitcher and then as a position player,

not to mention being the major's all-time slugger with a 342 batting average.

When he retired in 1935, he held 206 Major League pitching and batting records. His talent certainly puts him on the Mount Rushmore

of sports, but his bigger-than-life personality and the timing of his move from Boston to New York

in 1920, the beginning of the roaring 20s in America, helped make him into an American cultural icon, right up there with the likes of the roaring 20s in America helped make him into an American cultural icon.

Right up there with the likes of JFK, Martin Luther King, Merlea Monroe, Honest Abe Lincoln.

So all these years after his death, 72 to be exact, virtually every American,

...