A daughter’s love lasts

PHOENIX – With seven more home runs, the Giants’ Barry Bonds would move into second place on baseball’s all-time list.

Or, as Julia Ruth Stevens put it: “Daddy will go down to third.”

The man she calls daddy is the man the rest of the world calls Babe Ruth. Stevens lives in Sun City, Ariz., just a short drive from where Commissioner Bud Selig announced this week that he would launch a review into the latest steroid allegations surrounding Bonds.

The Babe’s adopted daughter is 88 and legally blind, but she can see the news if she sits close enough to her big-screen television. Her heart sank as she watched the latest Bonds events unfold this week.

“I personally hate controversy,” Stevens said, hesitantly. “But I really and truly think baseball waited too long to do something about it. They should have done something right away and nipped this in the bud.

“They hung around and hung around until it was too late.”

A new book, “Game of Shadows,” alleges the Giants left fielder took massive quantities of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, fueling a late-career home-run binge that has Bonds pulling alongside Ruth’s career total of 714.

Stevens spoke by phone – she wasn’t quite feeling up to a visit – but she sounded delighted when she talked about baseball and The Babe. The only time she slowed was when the topic turned to steroids.

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News in 2002, she said her father would be pulling for Bonds.

“I’m sure he would think the same thing about any of the players who are striving to break a record,” she said. “He would be rooting for them.”

But it’s getting difficult to make sense of Bonds’ latest achievement. Did he cheat? And if he did, should his records count?

“Daddy’s going down to third in that particular category, but I think he’ll always be No. 1 in people’s hearts,” she said.

But Stevens stopped short of offering the same endorsement this week.

Julia’s mother, Claire Hodgson, was 17 when she gave birth. Claire was a widow (Julia’s father died in 1922) when Ruth spotted the brown-eyed stage actress in the stands at a Washington Senators game and invited her to a party. A romance bloomed, and Julia remembers meeting The Babe for the first time when she was about 6. He picked her up, put her on his lap and started chatting. “I thought he was very nice,” Stevens said.

Ruth was separated from his first wife, Helen, at the time but as a Catholic he did not get a divorce. In 1929, three months after Helen died in a fire, Ruth and Claire tied the knot.

The family – including Ruth’s daughter Dorothy – moved with four of Claire’s relatives into a 14-room apartment in Manhattan.

Ruth, a legendary carouser, was strict with his children. Julia had a midnight curfew until the day she was married, at 22.

That was fine with Julia, who rarely wanted to be around anyone other than her gregarious father. The Babe taught her to golf, to bowl and to dance.

“He was a beautiful dancer, so light on his feet,” Stevens said. “I can’t think of anything he wasn’t good at.”

Julia sometimes made her father’s favorite breakfast – fried bologna, eggs and bread.

At night, they would sit together and listen to “The Shadow” and “The Green Hornet” on the radio.

Stevens and her mother attended most of the games at Yankee Stadium in the six years before Ruth retired in 1935. She spent nearly 60 more years rooting for the Yankees before switching her allegiance to the Boston Red Sox, her father’s first team, in the early 1990s. It was getting hard to cheer against them: Stevens spends her summers in New Hampshire.

“Daddy had that ‘Curse’ thing that went on, which I suppose was a great story,” Stevens said with a laugh. “But I got tired every year of watching the Red Sox lose in such horrible ways when they were always in there fighting. They had tried for so long.

“The Yankees had won so many World Series and so many pennants. It was time for some other team to get their chance. So I switched.

“Of course, living in New England as I do, everybody was just delighted.”

Stevens also cheers for her other home team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Because of her failing eyesight, Stevens rarely attends games, but she makes a trip a few times a year to feel the vibe of the ballpark.

“I love the atmosphere,” she said. “It’s like nothing else.”

Stevens joked that she can no longer remember the names of all the players, but she knows the game’s history. She noted that neither Bonds nor Hank Aaron could match Ruth’s home runs per at-bat average. Ruth hit one every 11.8 at-bats, Aaron every 16.4 and Bonds every 12.9.

She also pointed out the way Ruth towered over the rest of the players of his era. When he hit 59 home runs in 1921, no other player hit more than 24.

And there is Ruth’s pitching background. Ruth was primarily a starter for the Red Sox from 1914 to ‘19 and racked up a career record of 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA. Neither Bonds nor Aaron could match that.

“To me, it’s apples and oranges,” Stevens said. “It’s all fruit, because it’s all baseball, but it’s hard to compare, especially with all those years that daddy spent as a pitcher.”

Still, Stevens expressed her admiration for Aaron, who was consistent throughout a 23-year career.

“I was talking to my son the other night, and I reminded him that Hank Aaron never hit more than 50 home runs in a season,” she said. “He just kept plugging away and plugging away.”

Stevens is such a fan that this is usually her favorite time of year. As a widow living alone, she said nothing perks up her spirits like the return of spring training.

But the latest news about the Bonds book has sapped some of her enthusiasm.

“It’s just a shame,” she said. “I’m really sad for baseball.”