When baseball, golf worlds collide: Meet Sam Byrd, who played in a World Series and won on TOUR

Sam Byrd was teammates with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and competed on the PGA TOUR alongside Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. He played in a World Series and was runner-up in a major championship, the 1945 PGA Championship.

He was nicknamed “Babe Ruth’s Legs” because he often was a defensive replacement or pinch runner for the legend, and also was the best driver of the golf ball that Bobby Jones said he’d ever seen.

With the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees upon us, here is the incredible story of this PGA TOUR winner who also played in the Fall Classic.

Byrd also had a massive influence on modern golf instruction, applying a baseball tip he’d learned from Ruth to the golf swing and making popular a drill that countless golfers still use on practice tees today.

Byrd went on to mentor Jimmy Ballard, who used that same swing key to become the first of the TOUR gurus to assemble a large stable of professionals. Ballard ushered in the era of modern instruction that saw teachers become as well-known as their students.

Byrd had 1,700 at bats in his major league career, hitting .274. He debuted with the Yankees to much fanfare at age 21 in May 1929. He played 62 games that year and hit .312. Byrd was an outfielder on the 1932 Yankees team that swept the Chicago Cubs.

The famed sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote in 1931 that “the biggest hitter of a golf ball today is not a golf pro but an amateur named Sam Byrd, a young outfield for the New York Yankees.” Bobby Jones once called Byrd “the best man off the tee I ever saw.”

Golf was a popular pastime for baseball players at the time, and Byrd, who grew up next to Roebuck Golf Course in Birmingham, Alabama, was the best of all of them. Byrd and Ruth were frequent competitors on the course. Byrd beat him in the finals of the Yankees’ golf championship, the results of which made the paper.

“Funny thing, but Babe never asked me for a stroke on the golf course, and there was no way in the world he could beat me,” Byrd once said. “We used to play $10 Nassau – sometimes it got up to $50 – and I was like Trevino, I couldn’t afford to lose. Babe could.

“The amazing thing about Ruth was he couldn’t hit the ball very far. He hit it straight, but … he didn’t use his big muscles, just picked his arms up over his head and swung. I weighed about 175 and outdrove him by an average of 75 yards a hole. But the Babe had probably the greatest coordination and reflexes I’ve ever seen in a big man. … On the golf course, he had an amazing touch around the greens and hardly ever missed a makeable putt.”

That’s ironic because it was Ruth who passed along the tip about the “big muscles” that Byrd applied to the golf swing (more on that below).

Byrd played for the Yankees from 1929-34, then played two seasons for the Cincinnati Reds. On May 23, 1936, he hit a pinch-hit grand slam in the bottom of the ninth with his team trailing by three runs.

Byrd was 30 when he retired after the 1936 season and chose to focus full-time on golf. He won six times on the PGA TOUR, with all six titles coming between 1942 and 1945. He was runner-up five times during Nelson’s 11 consecutive victories in 1945, including at the PGA Championship. Byrd also finished third in the 1941 Masters and fourth at Augusta National the following year.

He became an instructor after his days as a playing professional, espousing ideals that contradicted common tenets of instruction in the middle of the 20th century. He opened a driving range, where he hired Ballard and passed along the same swing tip that came from Ruth. Ballard called Byrd a “father figure.”

It was Ruth who showed Byrd a batting drill where he kept a handkerchief under his lead arm to maintain the “connection” between the arm and body. Byrd’s success as an instructor – and Ballard’s – continued to grow as he taught the idea of that “connection” between the arms and body in the golf swing.

Mac McLendon, a former LSU All-American who won the first pro tournament he played, was one of those who went to see Ballard. McLendon’s game had gone south as he chased distance to keep up in the pro game. But then he went to see Ballard, who stuck a handkerchief under McLendon’s left armpit. McLendon quickly gained the distance he had been seeking, and his career started to turn around. He won the first of his four PGA TOUR titles at the 1974 National Team Championship (where he paired with Green).

McLendon’s success led more TOUR players to seek out the services of Ballard, who moved his business to the Doral Resort in Miami. Ballard’s students included Hal Sutton, Sandy Lyle, Curtis Strange, Seve Ballesteros, Jerry Pate and Hubert Green. Golf Magazine named Ballard the Teacher of the Decade for the 1980s. Ballard’s instruction book was titled “How to Perfect Your Golf Swing: Using Connection and the Seven Common Denominators.” He was known as the “Pioneer of Connection.”

Sam Byrd had an incredible athletic career and, with an assist from Babe Ruth, his influence is still felt in golf today.