One Summer: America, 1927

measure of a pitcher’s potency) of just 2.28, a very impressive figure indeed. His winning percentage of .671 remains the seventh best of all time.
    The problem was – and never before for any human had this been a problem – he was also a peerless hitter. In 1915, his first full season, Ruth hit four home runs in 92 at-bats. fn3 That was just three fewer than Braggo Roth, the American League home run leader, who had more than four times as many plate appearances. In 1918, to take advantage of his bat, the Red Sox began playing Ruth at first base or in the outfield when he wasn’t pitching. Nineteen eighteen proved to be the worst year ever for home runs in major league baseball. The Senators as a team hit just 4 home runs that year. The Browns hit 5, the White Sox 8 and the Indians 9. Babe Ruth alone hit 11. The next year, despite pitching 133⅓ innings (including 12 complete games), Ruth hit 29 home runs, almost doubling the American League record set by Socks Seybold of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1902. In 111 games in the outfield he had 26 assists and just 2 errors. His fielding average of .996 was by a considerable margin the best in the league. That is a most astounding achievement – and it was, of course, only the beginning.
     
    Modern baseball has a certain air of timelessness that is much cherished by its fans. A visitor from our age transported to a major league ballpark of the 1920s would find himself, in most respects, in entirely familiar territory. The play on the field, the sounds of thecrowd, the cries of the vendors would all be reassuringly familiar in ways that many other aspects of life in 1920s America would not. (The same visitor would struggle to start a car, make a phone call, tune a radio, even cross a busy street.) But even at the ballpark differences would soon become apparent.
    For a start, games were generally a whole lot brisker. Traditionally, they started at 3 p.m. and rarely went much beyond five. (The ability to provide that day’s baseball scores had a great deal to do with the popularity of evening newspapers.) Ninety-minute games were not uncommon, but sometimes they were even faster than that. On one notable occasion, on 26 September 1926 in St Louis, the Browns beat the Yankees 6–1 in just 1 hour and 12 minutes in the first game of a doubleheader, then came back and won the second game 6–2 in 55 minutes. These were both full nine-inning games. Quite how they managed it is a wonder. The two teams banged out 25 hits between them in the first game and 20 in the second, so these were hardly classic pitchers’ duels. There was just a lot less messing around.
    Games were often a good deal wilder, too. Fights were common and sometimes involved fans as well as players. In 1924, a punch-up between Ruth and his great rival Ty Cobb in Detroit not only cleared both benches, but caused a riot in the stands. Seats were ripped out and thrown on the field, and at least a thousand spectators invaded the playing area. The game had to be abandoned. Players also didn’t hesitate to go into the stands after fans who heckled them beyond forbearance. Ruth in 1920 vaulted into the stands to confront a man who had called him ‘a big piece of cheese’ – then retreated smartly when the man pulled a knife on him. Ty Cobb once went for a spectator who had been riding him all afternoon, and beat the man severely. When fans shouted at Cobb that the man was a war veteran who had no hands, Cobb cried, ‘I don’t care if he has no feet,’ and kept pummelling until police arrived and pulled him off. Cobb was suspended for ten days for that. Ruth once punched an umpire in the jaw in an argument. He was fined $100 andsuspended for ten days, too, and was very lucky to get away with that.
    For players, life wasn’t terribly glamorous. When a visiting team arrived in a city on a road trip, the players usually walked from the station to the hotel, and carried their own bags. They often played in dirty uniforms, particularly in Chicago where White Sox owner Charles Comiskey charged his players for doing their laundry.
    The major leagues were more cosily compact, with just sixteen teams in ten cities, as compared with thirty in twenty-seven cities today. Boston, Chicago, St Louis and Philadelphia each had two major league teams; New York had three. St Louis was as far west as the major leagues went, Washington as far south.
    Parks often had distinctive idiosyncrasies, which gave them a kind of