After a bad game, Babe wonders what went wrong at a bar, until Claire Hodgson tells him that when he pitches his curveball he sticks out his tongue.

A depressed Babe Ruth finds himself at a bar, and amidst the crowd giving off negative vibes, he starts a fight with one of the gamblers who tried to make him throw the game and gets arrested.

[6] The casting was criticized because Bendix did not resemble Ruth, although the producers claimed that this was because they wanted to hire a professional actor rather than a stand-in.

Charlie Root, Nana Bryant, Barton Yarborough, Wally Scott, and Paul Bryar were also originally intended to be in the film.

Root claimed that he declined because the film portrayed Ruth's called shot at the 1932 World Series, which he himself had pitched with the Chicago Cubs, inaccurately.

"[7] Harrison's Reports called it "a highly successful picture, from the box-office as well as the entertainment point of view," adding that Bendix "handles his part with skill and restraint," and that "few people will come out of the theatre with dry eyes.

"[8] BoxOffice also ran a positive review, praising the film for its "great warmth and its constant down-to-earth humanness" with "much to appeal to every taste and age," and calling Bendix's portrayal of Ruth "flawless.

"[9] Shirley Povich of The Washington Post called Bendix "a believable Babe Ruth who, saddled with some of the worst lines and situations ever handed an actor, waded smartly through the mess and gave the screen its best baseball picture ... Hollywood didn't have to take all that license with it, but the nice thing is that the story of Ruth is too powerful for even Hollywood to mess up more than a trifle.

"[10] Negative reviews cited the film's moments of heavy-handedness, lack of good baseball action scenes, and dubious portrayal of Ruth as a childlike, kind-hearted oaf.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that it had "much more the tone of low-grade fiction than it has of biography ... it is hard to accept the presentation of a great, mawkish, noble-spirited buffoon which William Bendix gives in this picture as a reasonable facsimile of the Babe."

"[11] John McCarten of The New Yorker also panned the film, calling it "soggy with bathos" and writing that Bendix "handles a bat as if it were as hard to manipulate as a barrel stave.

This power is demonstrated four times in the film, each in an increasingly embarrassing manner, and William Bendix portrays Babe Ruth as a half-witted giant without any redeeming pathos.

[5][18] Michael Sauter included it in his book The Worst Movies of All Time, and Leonard Maltin called it "perfectly dreadful".