While Ruth’s jersey number, 3, is well known, the reason he wore it is not common knowledge. Until 1929 neither the Yankees nor any other team wore numbers on the back of their jerseys, though there had been a few earlier experiments with numbers on sleeves. The Yankees and Indians debuted the back-of-jersey numbers, and Ruth wore No. 3 because he usually batted third. Other regular players were given numbers on the same basis, which is why Yankee cleanup hitter Lou Gehrig wore No. 4. Gehrig’s number was the first retired by any major-league team, in 1939, a decision that grew out of the team’s desire to hold a special appreciation day for him after he fell ill and was forced to retire prematurely. The Yankees didn’t retire Ruth’s number until 11 years later, in 1948, about two months before he died. Ruth, however, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in its inaugural class enshrinement in 1936, with Gehrig entering three years later.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
