Jane Leavy, the Museum’s Library, and Digitization

Jane Leavy is an acclaimed author who has written biographies on some of baseball’s biggest names, but her most recent work involves maybe the game’s biggest name. For her upcoming book on Babe Ruth, she painstakingly went through page after page of scrapbooks that until recently were only available to peruse onsite at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Now, 25 volumes of 10 different Ruth scrapbooks in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, totaling more than 1,400 pages and donated in 1956 by Ruth’s widow, are available online at collection.baseballhall.org. These one-of-a-kind leather-bound scrapbooks, created by Ruth’s agent Christy Walsh from 1921 to 1935, provide a unique look at Ruth’s career through newspaper clippings, letters and photographs, and give a glimpse at the authentic Ruth.

Additional digitized material – including photos, audio, video and text – from the Museum collection will be published every other Wednesday as the Museum adds to the PASTIME (Public Archive System To Interact with the Museum Electronically) online collection.

The next group of materials scheduled to be available on PASTIME beginning Sept. 21 will feature items related to Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball. The third release scheduled for Oct. 5 will include materials related to the first five Hall of Famers elected in 1936: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner and Ruth. Future release will include oral histories, additional scrapbooks and Negro League photos.

In a recent telephone interview with Leavy, a former sportswriter with The Washington Post and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, she talked about the important role the Ruth scrapbooks have played in her own research.

Hall of Fame

Can you talk about your introduction to the Ruth scrapbooks?

Jane Leavy

I started researching Babe Ruth and his barnstorming tours in the mid-1990s. I remember taking notes on something that had the progression through the 1927 tour and that is what gave me initially the idea to do a book that would use those tours as a vehicle for talking about Babe Ruth at the apogee of fame. The title of the book that I’m writing right now is The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the Advent of Celebrity, so, of course, one of the first things I did was to come back to the Hall of Fame Library and go back to those scrapbooks that I remembered so clearly. And I went through them painstakingly to try and reconstruct what I remembered and the chronologies of the tours. But had I had the incredible gift of doing this online, in digitized form, it would have saved me months of work.

Hall of Fame

Has digitization helped you in your own research?

Jane Leavy:

Because of the revolution in technology and the accessibility of archives, whether it’s the scrapbooks at the Hall of Fame or birth and death records at the Maryland State Archives, there is now an ability to look things up from long ago and to find things that other writers who came earlier couldn’t have found because it was really needle in the haystack. There’s no way they would have known where to look. But somebody now can go to the Baltimore Sun and type in George Herman Ruth Sr. and hit a button; somebody now can go to the Ruth scrapbooks without having to laboriously pour through them, going back-and-forth and back-and-forth, trying to copy down things and make sense of the chronology. It’s an incredible, incredible gift. I think it improves the ability of people writing sports biography and doing serious sports research to be more scholarly. And I don’t mean you should write more scholarly. I’m not suggesting that baseball writers become academic in tone. But the ability to go back further and find things you couldn’t have found prior to this technology is astonishing.