August 1948: Nine days after Babe Ruth’s death on August 16, The Sporting News hit newsstands with this memorial issue, capturing baseball’s immediate reckoning with the loss of its greatest player. Ruth had retired in 1935, but his legend only grew—he remained the measuring stick against which every slugger would be judged, his 714 home runs a record that seemed untouchable.
The issue features a striking drawing by William Mullin, a respected sports cartoonist for The Sporting News, whose ability to distill Ruth’s essence into a single image—part caricature, part reverence—made him the natural choice for this moment. The special Ruth section transforms a weekly baseball journal into a primary historical document, preserving the raw reactions of managers, players, and sportswriters still processing the death of the man who fundamentally changed what baseball could be.
For collectors, this is more than a magazine artifact—it’s a window into how an entire sport grieved. Ruth’s death marked the symbolic end of baseball’s first golden age; this issue captures that transition in real time, making it essential for anyone collecting Babe Ruth memorabilia, vintage sports magazines, or mid-century Americana.
