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Babe Ruth rose to superstardom decades before performance-enhancing drugs cast a pall over the sport of baseball, but he may not have been as innocent as you may think based on his retroactively ill-advised decision to harness sheep testicles to gain an edge.
If you’re a baseball fan, you probably know Babe Ruth got his start with the Red Sox before he was traded to the New York Yankees in 1920, a transaction that marked the start of the so-called “Curse of the Bambino,” which wasn’t snapped until Boston won the World Series in 2004.
While he was more than able to hold his own as a pitcher, Ruth is primarily known for revolutionizing the game with his power at the plate; there are some people would argue the slugger helped bring the sport’s “Dead Ball Era” to an end thanks to players who imitated the style that allowed him to hit home runs at a previously unprecedented pace.
His strength was made possible with the help of the notoriously unhealthy diet he relied on to stay fueled, and while that eating regimen was the official cause of a setback that caused him to miss more than 40 games at the start of the season in 1925, there’s evidence that suggests his hiatus was actually caused by a doping strategy that failed to pan out as hoped.
Babe Ruth suffered a setback after injecting sheep testicle extract
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Ruth immediately benefitted from the change of scenery that came with playing in New York.
He hit 54 home runs during his first season with the Yankees in 1920 after going deep 29 times with Boston the year before—a number that rose to 59 the following season (and contributed to the career-high 168 RBI he recorded).
The Great Bambino had a bit of an off year in 1922, but he was able to bounce back in a big way when New York (which had previously been playing at Polo Grounds) relocated to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. He was able to take advantage of the short fence in right field, hitting 41 home runs during the venue’s inaugural season and topping that number with 46 in 1924.
Ruth’s gradually growing weight had already become a point of concern with the team and the media prior to that point, but things really reached a tipping point in the lead-up to the 1925 campaign. The 6′ 2″ slugger was reportedly tipping the scales at 250 pounds and fell ill multiple times prior to opening day—including multiple incidents that required hospitalization.
The official story painted Ruth’s diet as the primary culprit; one journalist said he’d eaten 12 hot dogs in a single sitting, which led to the setback being dubbed “The Bellyache Heard Around the World.” There’s also evidence that suggests alcohol was the root cause (he was a noted drinker who reportedly played games while inebriated), but sportswriter Dave Zirin has floated a much more intriguing theory.
In the book Welcome to the Terrordome, Zirin discussed the work of French scientist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who conducted research during the Industrial Revolution that led him to believe it was possible to extract testosterone from the testicles of animals and process it into a liquid that humans could inject to boost physical, mental, and, um, virile strength.
While that hypothesis would eventually be debunked, there were plenty of people who thought he might be onto something. That apparently included Ruth, who Zirin said injected himself with an elixir derived from sheep testicles around the same time his medical issues began to rear their ugly head in 1925.
Ruth ultimately missed a grand total of 41 games to start the season but made a full recovery, as he spent 10 more years in the MLB before retiring as one of the greatest players of all time.