Lost, however, in the Bunyanesque shadow of his baseball records are other facts of Ruth’s life. Facts that reveal Ruth’s broader legacy as a humanitarian beyond his well-known and frequent visits to children’s hospitals and orphanages. Those facts are worth remembering, too.

At the height of his celebrity, Ruth played an exhibition game inside New York’s Sing Sing, the state’s maximum-security institution, against a prison team, signing autographs and joking with the 1,500 inmates in attendance from start to finish. He pitched and, naturally, hit three home runs, including a couple before the game over the prison wall. Also forgotten is the fact that during an exhibition in Hawaii, Ruth visited a leper colony for a day despite warnings that he could contract the disease. If they could not come and watch him play, Ruth said, he would go to them.

A favorite among all baseball fans, Ruth regularly participated in barnstorming games against negro League and cuban all-star teams.

In the midst of Jim Crow bigotry and repression and baseball’s color line, from his earliest days as a professional, Ruth competed against Negro League and Cuban All-Star clubs during off-season barnstorming tours—leaving no doubt where he stood on the issue of taking the field with black ballplayers. The influential black newspaper the Chicago Defender declared Ruth “a friend of the race.” At a time of police-enforced segregation, lynching, and rampant KKK activity, not just from the Deep South but across the country, the most famous person in the nation—a born-poor white kid from Baltimore—publicly implored white fans to go watch Negro League games if they wanted to see some good baseball. When his epic 1920 season ended, Ruth received hundreds of barnstorming invitations and could have played anywhere in the country—or nowhere at all, for that matter. Instead, of the approximately 15 games that he picked, five were against Negro League teams. Afterward, Ruth set sail for Cuba, where he joined legendary manager John McCraw and his Giants to play another series of contests against a combination of Latino and black ballplayers. Symbolically, his actions spoke volumes. If Ruth, not just a baseball figure, but a cultural icon, didn’t hestitate to join black ballplayers on the diamond, why did the color line remain in place?

Ruth paid a price for it, too, including a suspension related to his overall barnstorming activities, but he never stopped playing and making friends among black ballplayers. Some have suggested, including his daughter, that his integrated barnstorming tours may have cost him a shot at managing after his playing career because owners feared he would push publicly to end baseball’s so-called “gentleman’s agreement” that kept black players out. Negro League Hall of Famer Judy Johnson told Ruth biographer Bill Jenkinson that the white ballplayers they encountered generally fell in to three categories. The first group refused to take the field against black players under any circumstances. Next, there were the guys who didn’t like African Americans, but agreed to play in order to make a buck. The third and smallest group, Johnson said, enjoyed the camaraderie. This was the camp Ruth belonged to, along with Dizzy Dean and a few others. “He was quite a guy, always a lot of fun. All the guys really liked him,” Johnson said of Ruth. On the other hand, he added, “We could never seem to get him out no matter what we did.”

Familiar with Harlem’s Cotton Club, Ruth was also the first person to invite a black man, entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, into the Yankee clubhouse. More than mere acquaintance, Robinson served as an honorary pallbearer at Ruth’s funeral.

“ he was quite a guy, always a lot of fun,” Negro League star judy johnson said of ruth. “All the guys really like him.”

“Ruth never met someone he considered a stranger,” Jenkinson says. “It’s not that he was colorblind or didn’t see someone’s color. It just made no difference to him.”

And during a period when the United States was implementing racist and xenophobic immigration laws, Ruth joyfully traveled to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines as an ambassador for the game and the country. He visited Hawaii (then a foreign country), China, and Japan, where he was feted like no other American before or since. (When charging Japanese fighters later shouted, “To hell with Babe Ruth!” at American soldiers during World War II, there could be no bigger insult.)

After Ruth had retired, when the Nazis’ “Final Solution” was at its terrifying height in December 1942, 50 prominent German-Americans signed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times and nine other daily newspapers “in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe.” By far, the most recognizable name to Americans: George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Ruth supported women’s sports, too. On one occasion, he and Gehrig faced a top women’s hardball pitcher—both striking out for the cameras . But the most humanitarian thing Babe Ruth ever did, he did every day. The son of a badly alcoholic mother and uninterested father, Ruth not once denied or forgot the poverty and circumstances into which he was born. Or the Xaverian Brothers, who taught him reading, writing, and their religious values at St. Mary’s. In particular, he credited Brother Matthias, a 6-foot-6 father figure who taught him baseball, with saving him from the penitentiary or cemetery. Ruth shared his story with every newspaperman who came his way for an interview and implored adults to never give up on any child.

During one barnstorming trip to Kansas City in 1927, author Jane Leavy recalls in her recent biography, The Big Fella , Ruth and Lou Gehrig visited three orphanages, two white and one black, and the white-only Mercy Hospital before a parade at noon and an afternoon game.

Somewhere in their schedule, Leavy dug up in her research, representatives from the town’s black hospital, Wheatley-Provident Hospital, invited Ruth and Gehrig to stop by. Ruth skipped lunch that day at the Kansas City Athletic Club to visit sick children. A photograph of the massive Ruth cradling an emaciated infant circulated among the nation’s most prominent African-American newspapers.

After his father’s death outside the Eutaw Street saloon that Ruth had bought him as a young pro (his mother had died when he was 15), the slugger no longer spent much off-season time in Baltimore—other than to visit St. Mary’s, which he did whenever the Yankees were down the road playing the Washington Senators. As much as he surely hated being locked inside its gates for most of his youth, it was his childhood home. When St. Mary’s was struck by a devastating fire, Ruth not only cut a large check, he brought the entire 49-member all-boys school band with him and the Yankees on their final road trip of the season so they could play in front of big-league crowds and collect donations.

“When Babe Ruth was 23, the whole world loved him,” his second wife, Claire Merritt Ruth, said in her memoir. “When he was 13, only Brother Matthias loved him.”