One Summer: America, 1927

Lindbergh’s tour got now.
     
    With the Dempsey–Tunney fight concluded, sports fans turned their attention back to baseball and the question of whether Babe Ruth could break his home run record. It was getting awfully close. Ruth went two games, on 24 and 25 September, without a homer, which left him four short of the record with just four games to play.
    On the first of those four games, on 27 September, Ruth got his fifty-seventh in style by hitting a grand slam off Lefty Grove of Philadelphia – one of only six home runs Grove gave up all season. Ruth didn’t hit grand slams often: this was his first of the season and only the sixth of his career.
    The Yankees had a day off on 28 September, and the rest clearly did Ruth good, for in his first at-bat the next day, at the start of a three-game series against the Washington Senators, he hit his fifty-eighth home run off Horace ‘Hod’ Lisenbee, a rookie who was having a great year – the only good one he would ever have. Like Lefty Grove, Lisenbee gave up just six home runs all season. Two of them were by Ruth.
    Ruth now needed just one more to tie his record. In the bottom of the fifth inning, he came to the plate with the bases loaded and two out. Senators manager Bucky Harris signalled to the bullpen to send in a right-hander named Paul Hopkins.
    Hopkins was an unexpected choice, and no doubt caused many a spectator to turn to the nearest person with a scorecard for enlightenment. Hopkins had just graduated from Colgate University and had never pitched in the major leagues before. Nowhe was about to make his debut in Yankee Stadium against Babe Ruth with the bases loaded and Ruth trying to tie his own record for most home runs in a season.
    Pitching carefully (as you might expect), Hopkins worked the count to 3 and 2, then tried to sneak a slow curve past Ruth. It was an outstanding pitch. ‘It was so slow,’ Hopkins recalled for Sports Illustrated seventy years later at the age of ninety-four, ‘that Ruth started to swing and then hesitated, hitched on it and brought the bat back. And then he swung, breaking his wrists as he came through it. What a great eye he had! He hit it at the right second – put everything behind it. I can still hear the crack of the bat. I can still see the swing.’ It was Ruth’s fifty-ninth home run, tying a record that less than a month before had seemed hopelessly out of reach.
    The ball floated over the head of the right-fielder, 37-year-old Sam Rice, who is largely forgotten now but was one of the great players of his day and also one of the most mysterious, for he had come to major league baseball seemingly from out of nowhere.
    Fifteen years earlier, Rice had been a promising youngster in his first season in professional baseball with a minor league team in Galesburg, Illinois. While he was away for the summer, his wife moved with their two small children on to his parents’ farm near Donovan, Indiana. In late April, a tornado struck near Donovan, killing seventy-five people. Among the victims were Rice’s wife, children, mother and two sisters. Rice’s father, himself seriously injured, was found wandering in shock with one of the dead children in his arms. He died nine days later in hospital. So, at a stroke, Rice lost his entire family. Dazed with grief, he drifted around America working at odd jobs. Eventually he enlisted in the navy. While playing for a navy team his remarkable talents became apparent. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, somehow heard of this, invited him for a trial, and was impressed enough to sign him. Rice joined the Senators and in his thirties became one of the finest players in baseball. No one anywhere knew of hispersonal tragedy. It didn’t become public until 1963, when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
    After Ruth’s homer, Hopkins struck out Lou Gehrig to end the inning, then retired to the bench and burst into tears. It was one of just eleven major league appearances Hopkins ever made. He missed the whole of the 1928 season with an injury and retired with a record of no wins and one loss after the 1929 season. He returned to his home state of Connecticut, became a successful banker and lived to be ninety-nine.
     
    The last day of September was sultry in New York. The temperature was in the low 80s and the air muggy when, in the next to last game of the season, Ruth came to the plate in the bottom of the eighth against Tom Zachary, a 31-year-old left-hander