DISPATCHES

By DAVID SEIDEMAN/IN HEMPSTEAD

Babe Ruth was a champion at almost everything he did. The dominant player in baseball history, he transformed the way the game was played. Off the field, he could scarf down 18-egg omelets, chug-a-lug boilermakers (ice cubes and all) and, it has been claimed, make love seven times a night. A beloved boor, he also liked to show off a silver loving cup he won for placing first in a flatulence contest. Yet the Babe, product of a Baltimore reform school, came up short in one area. "My grandfather," says Ruth descendant Thomas Stevens, "always regretted that he didn't have the benefit of an education."

At a recent three-day conference honoring the centennial of Ruth's birthday, Stevens was on hand to see the Babe finally earn a measure of academic respect. Indeed - -with 26 panel discussions ranging from "Whitmanesque Hero" to "What Would Ruth Earn Today?" -- Hofstra University accorded the slugger the same reverence it has given the likes of James Joyce and Bach at similar symposiums. "He would have been pleased," said Ruth's grandson. "He might also have been a little bored."

More than 1,100 baseball fans, many in jerseys and caps, rubbed elbows with semioticians, psychobiographers and a smattering of baseball old-timers. They listened as Leonard Cassuto of Fordham University's English department deconstructed Ruth and "the politics of greatness." "Is baseball's canon-making procedure subjective?" Cassuto wondered. "Or does the statistically measurable quality of baseball make it possible to prove or measure Ruth's greatness?" Not surprisingly, there were many adherents to the latter proposition. William Jenkinson, a self-described investigative historian, attempted to quantify Ruth's home-run prowess, dropping such impressive phrases as "drag coefficient" and "fast-twitch muscle fiber." A more direct analysis was offered by Ray Hayworth, a Detroit Tigers catcher during Ruth's era who had the advantage of watching the superstar in action from inches away. "Babe was just great," Hayworth explained. "It always amazed me that when he'd swing, you could hear the bat actually grind in his hands."

A forum was devoted to the mythology of the "called shot" in the 1932 World Series, an incident in which Ruth allegedly pointed to the bleachers to announce the home run he promptly hit on the next pitch. "Ancient Olympus" came up in passing.

This being an academic conference, Ruth couldn't escape a little secondhand psychoanalysis. "The Babe's id appears to have been relatively unimpeded in its quest for satisfaction," maintained Adam Cox of Lehigh University's psychology department. "Through sex and food, Ruth nurtured the unresolved aspects of his infantile self with abandon." Buddy Hassett, who played for Ruth when he coached Brooklyn in 1938, revealed the true secret of the Babe's gluttony: "He had a great digestive system." As the Babe might have said if he had had the vocabulary: deconstruct that.