Boom! This is Books & Biceps #376!

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If you’re a new subscriber you’ll love this profile that the New Yorker ran on us.

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The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created – Jane Leavy

One hundred years before Shohei Ohtani became a pitching/hitting sensation (and if you haven’t been watching him this post-season, you’re missing out on historic greatness), we had Babe Ruth on the Red Sox. Dominant pitcher. Power hitter. Like nobody we’d ever seen, yet…

In 1916 he was 23-12 as a starting pitcher with a league leading .175 ERA. In 1917 he was 24-13 with .201 ERA. In 1918, he was 13-7 with a .222 ERA.

By 1919, his last year with Boston, he was pitching less because he became the best hitter in baseball, leading the league in home runs and RBI (29 and 113) while batting .322.

So, yeah, before Ohtani and his MVPs and 3-homer/10K playoff games, there was the one and only Babe Ruth.

In 2025, far too often the Babe is just a name we throw out. A reference point for greatness without a true understanding of just how great he was. And, as importantly, how FAMOUS he was.

If you’re interested in learning, I can’t recommend Jane Leavy’s biography, The Big Fella, enough.

I should also mention that when it comes to Jane Leavy writing biographies, I’m essentially a fanboy.

Acclaimed writer Jonathan Eig said it best: “Jane Leavy could write the biography of a tube of toothpaste and I’d be first in line to buy it.” I do not disagree with this statement.

Leavy is, I think, a writing genius. If Babe Ruth interests you at all, even if you’ve read other Ruth bios, I’d suggest you grab this book. Not only did he revolutionize baseball, but he completely transformed the concept of celebrity and endorsements and sports superstardom. Every single modern icon, from Tiger to LeBron to Serena to Brady owes Ruth.

One thing you won’t be able to wrap your head around is that a century before social media and the internet and ESPN, Babe Ruth was all those things rolled into one. He was more famous than the president. He had more endorsements than all other celebrities of his day combined. He was an athlete, movie star, business man, philanthropist, philanderer and media empire all unto himself.

And there are so many excellent stories in here about the real Ruth: with women, with drinking, with food, with baseball, with Cuban con men who hustled him out of $100,000+ in a single trip. A near perfect biography. Read it!

My left shoulder clicks. My range of motion in my right shoulder sucks. If I’m doing wall angels, for example, I can’t keep the back of my right arm on the wall. It’s pulls forward a few inches. This affects three things: my streamline off the wall in swimming, throwing a football & general comfort.

I’m not in pain or anything, but I know the shoulder angles that cause it if that makes sense. And that’s why I started doing the ATG Shoulder Mobility program.

Yes, another thing from the Knees Over Toes guy.

I don’t know what to tell you. His shit just works for me.

He has a three exercise shoulder routine that I’ve tried on and off but that I’m now committing to at least twice a week. It takes 12 minutes, so I’m just tacking it onto my lifting days as my shoulder routine.

The core lift in this routine is what he calls the Eccentric Trap Raise.

It looks so simple, but it’s tough if you have range issues like me. This is how you start, chest on an incline bench arms up, making a straight, incline line. I’m using his photos here:

Then you slowly lower them down in front of you to a count of five, while keeping your body straight:

And guess what? This is so hard for me. I am literally using 5 pounds in each hand, focusing as hard as I can on keeping my shoulders back and straight and my whole body shakes haha. It’s so clearly working against my rigidity that I realize I should have been doing these ten years ago. But alas, here we are:

Three sets of five. With 5 pounds. And I can barely complete them - despite being able to crank out standing shoulder presses with 15x the weight. Amazing. Give these a shot if you have shoulder mobility issues and let me know how those five pounders feel haha!

If you’re a guy over 40 and you’ve been looking for a new digital magazine that’s written for midlife men, by midlife men, on the topics that actually matter to us: family, fitness, fashion, finance, food & fun, then join us at Midlife Male.

I write a column every Tuesday called The Manologue. This week I wrote about a topic near and dear to every dude’s heart: the movie Fight Club and the idea of Single Serving Friends:

And HAPPY HALLOWEEN from the World Famous Flex Factory.

Remember: Today is the perfect day to…

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