It has been said that the hardest task in sports is to manage an aging superstar. No football coach wants to be there for the end of a great quarterback; no baseball manager wants to watch an old warhorse sputter out on the mound.
Sometimes, such things end gracefully. But not always. Frankly, it usually isn’t pretty.
The mid-1930s New York Yankees had to confront baseball mortality. Babe Ruth, the game’s defining superstar, was released in 1935. Age had come for the Sultan, and it didn’t miss. The Yankees weren’t finished, but how exactly does one prepare to wither the end of Babe Ruth?