One Summer: America, 1927

from a tobacco farm in North Carolina. Though a pious Quaker, Zachary was not without guile. One of his tricks was to cover the pitching rubber with dirt so that he could move closer to home plate – sometimes by as much as two feet, it has been claimed. In 1927 he was in his tenth season. He gave up just six home runs all year. Three of them were to Ruth.
    It was Ruth’s fourth trip of the day to the plate. He had walked once and singled twice and had come nowhere near a home run. The score was tied 2–2. There was one out and one man on – Mark Koenig, who had tripled.
    ‘Everybody knew he was out for the record, so he wasn’t going to get anything good from me,’ Zachary told a reporter in 1961. Zachary wound up, eyed the runner, then uncorked a sizzling fast ball. It went for a called strike. Zachary wound up and threw again. This pitch was high and away, and Ruth took it for a ball. For his third pitch, Zachary threw a curve – ‘as good as I had’, he recalled. Ruth hit the ball with what was effectively a golf swing, lofting it high into the air in the direction of the right-field foul pole. The 8,000 fans in Yankee Stadium watched in silence as the ball climbed to a towering height, then fell for ages and dropped into thebleachers just inches fair. Zachary threw down his glove in frustration. The crowd roared with pleasure.
    Ruth trotted around the bases with his curiously clipped and delicate gait, like someone trying to tiptoe at speed, then stepped out of the dugout to acknowledge the applause with a succession of snappy military salutes. Ruth was responsible for all four runs that day. The Times the next day referred to the score as ‘Ruth 4, Senators 2’.
    A little-known fact was that the game in which Babe Ruth hit his sixtieth home run was also the last game in the majors for Walter Johnson, the greatest pitcher of the age. No one threw harder. Jimmy Dykes, then of the Athletics, recalled in later years how as a rookie he was sent to the plate against Johnson, and never saw Johnson’s first two pitches. He just heard them hit the catcher’s mitt. After the third pitch the umpire told him to take first base.
    ‘Why?’ asked Dykes.
    ‘You’ve been hit,’ explained the umpire.
    ‘Are you sure?’ asked Dykes.
    The umpire told him to check his hat. Dykes reached up and discovered that the cap was facing sideways from where Johnson’s last pitch had spun the peak. He dropped his bat and hurried gratefully to first base.
    In twenty-one years as a pitcher, Johnson gave up only 97 home runs. When Ruth hit one off him in 1920, it was the first home run Johnson had yielded in almost two years. In 1927, Johnson broke his leg in spring training when hit by a line drive, and never fully recovered. Now, with his fortieth birthday approaching, he decided it was time to retire. In the top of the ninth inning, in his last appearance in professional baseball, he was sent in to pinch-hit for Zachary. He hit a fly to right field. The ball was caught by Ruth, to end the game, Johnson’s career, and an important part of a glorious era.
    In the clubhouse afterwards, Ruth was naturally exultant over his sixtieth homer. ‘Let’s see some son of a bitch try and top thatone!’ he kept saying. The general reaction among his teammates was congratulatory and warm, but in retrospect surprisingly muted. ‘There wasn’t the excitement you’d imagine,’ Pete Sheehy, the team equipment manager, recalled many years later. No one expected Ruth to stop at sixty. It was assumed that he would hit at least one more the next day, and possibly reach even greater heights in years to come. Ruth after all had been the first to hit 30, 40, 50 and 60 homers. Who knew that he wouldn’t hit 70 in 1928?
    In fact, neither he nor anyone else would hit so many again for a very long time. In his last game of the season, Ruth rather anticlimactically went 0 for 3 with a walk. In his last at-bat he struck out. Lou Gehrig, however, did hit a home run, his forty-seventh of the season. That might seem a disappointing number after his earlier pace, so it is worth remembering that it was more than any other player had ever hit, apart from Ruth.
    In banging out 60 home runs, Ruth outhomered all major league teams except the Cardinals, Cubs and Giants. He hit home runs in every park in the American League and hit more on the road than at home. (The tally was 32 to 28.) He homered off 33 different pitchers. At least 2 of his home runs