Babe Ruth Bows Out
photograph by Nat Fein
Babe Ruth Bows Out, also known as The Babe Bows Out, is a 1948 photograph of Major League Baseball player Babe Ruth taken by New York Herald Tribune photographer Nathaniel Fein at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx. The picture won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.
Ruth was photographed with his back turned to the camera; he was sick with throat cancer at the time and was leaning on a baseball bat for support. The New York Yankees were honoring Ruth by retiring his jersey number. It had been 14 years since he had played for the Yankees: he wore his number three Yankees uniform to celebrate the occasion.
Background
Babe Ruth played for the New York Yankees from 1920 to 1934 and was regarded as one of the greatest baseball players. According to economist Michael Haupert, Ruth created public enthusiasm and he generated US$137,975.52 (equivalent to $3,320,679 in 2025) for the team in his first year as a Yankee. Baseball historian John Thorn said of Ruth's trade to the New York Yankees, "It marked the beginning of the age of the hero in baseball". Babe Ruth's impact on the Yankees is demonstrated by the fact that Yankee Stadium was often referred to as "the house that Ruth built".
Ruth initially was signed by the Boston Red Sox in 1914.
“Babe Ruth Bows Out” enters the record as photograph by Nat Fein. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Babe, Ruth and Bows can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q80218220. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1949, 1920 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Babe Ruth Bows Out” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.