One Summer: America, 1927

were the longest ever seen in the parks in which they were hit. Ruth hit a home run once every 11.8 times at bat. He had at least 6 home runs against every team in the American League. He did all this and still batted .356 – and scored 158 runs, had 164 runs batted in, 138 walks, and even had 7 stolen bases and 14 sacrifice bunts. It would be hard to imagine a more extraordinary year.
    Ruth and Gehrig between them came first and second in home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage, runs scored, total bases, extra base hits and bases on balls. Combs and Gehrig were first and second in total hits and triples. Four players – Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri and Meusel – each had more than 100 runs batted in. Combs was also third in runs scored and total bases, and Lazzeri was third in home runs. As a team, the Yankees had the American League’s highest team batting average and lowest ERA. They averaged 6.3runs and almost 11 hits per game. Their 911 runs were more than any American League team had ever scored in a season before. Their 110 victories were a league record, too. Just one player was ejected from a game all season and the team had no fights with other teams. Baseball has never fielded a more complete, dominant and disciplined team.
    Babe Ruth’s home run record stood until 1961 when Roger Maris, also of the Yankees, hit 61, though Maris had the advantage of a longer season, which gave him 10 more games and 50 more at-bats than Ruth in 1927. In the 1990s, many baseball players suddenly became immensely strong – some evolved whole new body shapes – and began to smack home runs in quantities that made a mockery of Ruth’s and Maris’s numbers. It turned out that a great many of this new generation of ballplayers – something in the region of 5 to 7 per cent, according to random drug tests introduced, very belatedly, in 2003 – were taking anabolic steroids. The use of drugs as an aid to hitting is far beyond the scope of this book, so let us just note in passing that even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn’t hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hot dogs.
     
    Practically speaking, there’s no saying when the summer of 1927 ended. October brought some of the most summery days of the year, with temperatures touching 85 in New York and rising into the high 90s elsewhere in the east. Autumn arrived gradually, on no particular date, as seasons generally do.
    The Yankees met the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series (or World ’s Series, as it was still commonly called), and beat them easily in four games, confirming in many people’s minds that the Yankees were the best team ever.
    Calvin and Grace Coolidge returned to Washington from the west and moved back into a refurbished White House. The president stood by his vow not to run for re-election. Herbert Hoover failed to secure Coolidge’s endorsement, but made nosecret of his wish to succeed him. In November, terrible floods ravaged much of New England, killing more than a hundred people. Coolidge declined to visit and sent Hoover instead.
    The Jazz Singer played to huge crowds in New York, even at $10 a ticket. Samuel Raphaelson, who wrote the play on which the film was based, thought it was a terrible picture. ‘I’ve seen very few worse,’ he said, but most people disagreed. The actress May McAvoy, who also starred in the film, recalled later that she would stand in cinemas where it was showing and watch the audiences. When Jolson spoke, she said, people reacted with such rapture ‘you’d have thought they were listening to the voice of God’. The movie cleared a profit of $1.5 million in its year of release.
    The Holland Tunnel opened after five and a half years of construction, and work began in earnest on Mount Rushmore. In England, Dr Dorothy Cochrane Logan, an American doctor working in London, was charged with perjury for claiming to have swum the English Channel for a $5,000 prize when in fact she had mostly ridden across in the support vessel. That seems to have marked an end both to Channel swimming and to stunts generally. In Detroit, Henry Ford began hiring again as the company geared up for production of the new Model A.
    Charles Lindbergh finished his long tour at last. In the final month he dashed through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware and