BABE RUTH: FAT AND 43 AND NEVER TO PLAY BALL AGAIN

LET'S go back in time for a baseball story that comes as a deep, dark secret. I give you Babe Ruth, fat and 43, and suddenly back in the game in 1938 as a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers, of all teams. After a few months, he asks one small favor. He wants to be activated, to play again. Incredibly, the Dodgers, who are going nowhere, say no. They take the bat out of his hands. You don't believe it? It happened.

I think of this wrenching scenario every year as we approach September, traditionally the time when rosters expand. I think of it for two reasons. First, because it seems utterly incomprehensible that anybody would tell Babe Ruth he couldn't play baseball, if only for a month, if only as a pinch-hitter. Second, because his appeal was turned down in the last days of August.

There was a third. I think of it because it was my story, no one else's. As a kid baseball writer on The New York Sun, I sat next to the Babe in a Pittsburgh dugout when he asked to play again - and I could see those headlines jumping on Page One. How wrong I was.

Ruth was still the idol of the masses, the man who turned a nation of immigrants into baseball fans.

Now it was the summer of 1938 and Ruth had been yanked off the golf courses and stuffed into a Dodger uniform by the new man in charge of the Flatbush Follies. The name was Larry MacPhail, lampooned in song by the New York baseball writers as Thomas A. Edison MacPhail because he always thought of something. Now he thought of the Babe three years in retirement and what a waste of a natural resource.

So he struck a deal. The Babe - from mid-June on - would get $15,000 to position himself on the first-base coaching lines, to let people see him as if he were a national monument, which he was. He would get to play some on the open dates MacPhail would fill with exhibitions in places like Syracuse and Elmira and Buffalo.

The early-morning call came from John A. MacDonald, MacPhail's road secretary. On the phone, MacDonald read this bare statement: ''The Dodgers have signed Babe Ruth to a coach's contract. Ruth will report in uniform tomorrow for the doubleheader with the Chicago Cubs.''

Ruth did more than that. He reported with his old bats, his favorite Betsies, as he called them. The Dodgers held no formal press conference to hype the event. Every baseball writer was on his own.

If you poked around long enough, you learned that the Babe's bats weighed 42 ounces - monstrous, prehistoric bludgeons even in the late '30's. Also, that the Babe invited all of the Dodgers to try them in the games coming up. Only one did. Dolph Camilli, a first baseman with arms like Popeye, choked up on one of the Babe's big sticks and banged out two doubles and a single in the opener. He went hitless in the second game. He never tried again.

The Babe's presence even on short notice attracted 28,000 for his first game at the old ball park - about 10,000 less than capacity - but still a good deal more than they might have drawn routinely.

On the Dodger side of the field, in the pregame ritual, press photographers had a field day with the Babe, and with a tolerance that made him such a lovable character to all writers, he answered the same questions over and over. How much did he weigh? He said 240. Wasn't his best playing weight 210? No, he hadn't weighed 210 in 20 years. Did he miss baseball? Of course he missed it.

Across the field, the Cubs took a bemused view of the goings-on. ''He didn't sign just to be a coach, did he?'' asked the Cubs' manager, Charlie Grimm. Tony Lazzeri, an old Yankee favorite, was on the Cubs that year, and Ruth beckoned to him. So the photographers had another picture story.

Ruth, in pantomime, whispered into Lazzeri's right ear. Lazzeri said: ''That's my bad ear. I can't hear you.'' Ruth said: ''That's all right. I can hardly see out of my right eye.''

For the Babe, Ebbets Field must have seemed a thousand miles away from Yankee Stadium, but he fit right in and enjoyed himself immensely - especially on those open dates MacPhail managed to fill in upstate New York. Ruth would toddle out to play first base after signing a thousand autographs, and then he'd hit one out of sight and call it a day.

The Dodgers also made use of Ruth's box-office appeal by staging long-distance contests before game time. One in late July was held in St. Louis. The Dodgers entered Ruth and Camilli and Ernie Koy. The Cardinals' artillery consisted of Joe Medwick, Johnny Mize and Don Padgett. First place was worth $50, and guess who picked up the check?

The Babe never lost his sense of obligation to plain, ordinary people. Wherever the Dodgers took him, there would be an unprecedented rise in the sale of baseballs. Strangers would accost him and ask: ''Would you sign a baseball if I got one?'' ''Sure,'' said the Babe. And off went the stranger to the nearest sporting-goods store.

The Dodger players loved him. He called Camilli ''Cameo.'' There was a pint-sized left-hander named Vito Tamulis. To the Babe he was ''Tomatoes.'' After games in hotel lobbies they would cluster around him and listen to his tales, and at respectable distances they'd be encircled by transients who whispered and pointed.

The Babe wasn't the dumbest first- base coach, either. It puzzled him that Koy, fleet as he was, would slow down as he turned first base. The Babe brought it to the attention of the manager, Burleigh Grimes. They zeroed in on Koy from two angles and finally discovered why. Koy touched every base with his right foot, the wrong foot.

On Aug. 29, in bucolic Forbes Field, Pittsburgh, the Babe plunked himself down on the bench after his daily home-run hitting contest with Babe Phelps, a teammate. He was full of himself. ''He beat me twice,'' Ruth said, ''but I hit the ball hard and I'm still two up on him.''

Moments later, MacDonald, the road secretary, sat down beside the Babe. Ruth gave him a quizzical look and then dropped the bomb. ''Will I have to sign a player's contract if I wanted to be a pinch-hitter?''

MacDonald suggested that a contract change from coach to player was pure bookkeeping. It could be done at a moment's notice.

''But first,'' MacDonald said. ''I would have to clear it with the boss.'' Meaning MacPhail. ''Wish you would,'' grunted the Babe. MacDonald got up, and now, alone on the bench with the Babe, I asked him why he wanted to be a pinch-hitter.

''Well, nobody sees me now,'' he said. ''By the time they get to the park, we're done with batting practice.''

And then the Babe had this afterthought: ''In a couple of days the rosters go up from 25 to 40. I wouldn't be taking anybody's job. I wouldn't want to do that. Oh, I know what the guys are saying. I wouldn't get any fat ones to hit at. I can't run. O.K., if I hit one out, I don't have to run.''

In the hard-hitting style of some papers of that time, my lead might have read: ''The Babe is coming back to play. His record 714 home runs is about to topple.''

But in the low-key style of The Sun, my lead actually told it straight:

''Babe Ruth is contemplating a return to baseball's active list as a pinch-hitter.''

The headline read: ''Ruth Eyes Role of Pinch Hitter.'' And the subhead: ''After Dodgers Return Home Babe May Be Reinstated As Active Player.''

The next day, in Cincinnati, I sat down to dinner with the manager, Burleigh Grimes. Ol' Stubblebeard. ''You know Ruth wants to play,'' I said.

''And he's not going to,'' Grimes retorted sharply. ''Why not?'' ''Because I'm running the club. MacPhail called me on it. I told him: 'If he can hit, I can pitch.' And I know I'm too old for that.''

Over a headline that read: ''Dodgers Deny Plea of Ruth,'' with this subhead: ''Hold Pinch Hitting Job for Babe Would Be Unwise For All Concerned,'' my follow-up story listed six reasons why Ruth's request was shot down: 1 - His right eye, the hitting eye to a left-handed batter, is weak (I had never before heard that hitters had a single hitting eye). 2 - He cannot run. 3 - He has not been on the active list since early in the season of 1935. 4 - He would be endangering his health. 5 - The Brooklyn club is not a circus. (That was news!) The prime thought of the front office is to build a winning, hustling team. It is trying hard to eliminate a widespread idea that the Dodgers are still the ''Daffiness Boys.'' 6 - It would be a black eye for the National League if Ruth were reinstated and then badly hurt in a game.

Of all the major principals in this scenario, the only survivor is Grimes. He lives where he was born, in Clear Lake, Wis. He is 92 years old and in failing health. Recently, I talked to Burleigh by phone. He remembered that day in Pittsburgh as one in which Ruth ''hit two or three in the stands,'' and that later he had gotten a call from MacPhail.

''He asked me if I wanted him in there,'' Grimes said, ''and I said: 'You want to put me in there too?' ''

I suggested that Grimes, a Hall of Famer who had won 270 big league games and was then 45 years old, could probably have pitched.

''Well, I was still pitching batting practice,'' he said. And then, getting back to the Babe and his days with the Boston Braves, he added: ''I knew that a few years before that, he struck out so many times, and I didn't want that to happen to him or to me either.''

''You mean you didn't want him to look bad?''

''I didn't want him to look bad for the public,'' said Grimes.

The rejection broke Ruth's heart. I never saw him in batting practice again. Shortly after the team came home, he dropped out of sight. No announcement was ever made that he had retired.