One Summer: America, 1927

League ultimately failed, but for a time it seriously undermined the cosy status quo of major league baseball.
    fn2 A brief primer for those who don’t know American baseball: at the top level, there are two leagues, the American League and the National League. Together these are known as the major leagues. This was where every serious baseball player wanted to end up, but most players began with lesser teams in the minor leagues (or ‘minors’) until they were good enough to advance to the top level. For Babe Ruth to go from the minor league Baltimore Orioles to the major league Boston Red Sox in his first season was highly unusual and a reflection of his skills.
    fn3 An at-bat is an important but slightly arcane concept in baseball. In rough terms, it is a record of the number of times a player has gone to the plate to bat in a given period. A player’s batting average is his number of at-bats divided by the number of times he has reached base safely with a hit. The batting average is expressed as thousandths of a percentage. A batting average of .333 means that a batter has hit safely in one third of his recorded at-bats. A batting average of .300 is considered good and of .350 or better is sensational. Only a few times have players finished a season batting .400 or better.

C HAPTER 9
     

     
    BEFORE BABE RUTH changed everything, a home run in baseball was a pretty rare event. John Franklin Baker of the Philadelphia Athletics became known to posterity as ‘Home Run’ Baker not because he banged out lots of home runs, but because in the 1911 World Series he hit crucial homers in two successive games. The rest of the time Baker didn’t hit many home runs at all – just two all season in 1910, for instance. Even so, he was one of the game’s preeminent sluggers, and the name ‘Home Run’ Baker didn’t seem silly to anyone.
    In baseball’s deadball era, as the period before 1920 is commonly known, teams didn’t look for rocket-like hits and big rallies, but manufactured runs ‘scientifically’, by slapping out singles and moving runners along by any means possible – through bunts and walks and other patiently incremental strategies. Some teams actually practised getting hit by pitches. Scores tended to be low but close.
    There was a good reason for this. Hitting a baseball is hard, and in many ways it was harder in Babe Ruth’s day than it is now. A baseball thrown at 90 miles an hour hits the catcher’s mitt four-tenths of a second after it leaves the pitcher’s hand, which clearly does not allow much time for reflection on the batter’s part.Moreover, in order to get his bat to the plate to meet the ball’s arrival, the batter must start his swing at 0.2 seconds when the ball is still only halfway there. If the pitch is a curve, nearly all its deviation will still be to come. Half of it will occur just in the last fifteen feet. If the pitch is some other sort – a fast ball, change-up or cutter, say – the ball will arrive at a fractionally different instant and at a different height. Because of friction, the ball will also lose about five miles an hour of speed during the course of its short journey from the pitcher’s hand. In Babe Ruth’s day, pitchers had an additional advantage in that the mound they stood on was fifteen inches high instead of the modern ten. That makes a difference, too.
    So the batter, in this preposterously fractional part of a fraction that is allotted to him for decision-making, must weigh all these variables, calculate the place and moment that the ball will cross the plate and make sure that his bat is there to meet it. The slightest miscalculation, which is what the pitcher is counting on, will result in a foul ball or pop-up or some other form of routine failure. To slap out a single is hard enough – that is why even the very best hitters fail nearly seven times out of ten – but to hit the ball with power requires confident and irreversible commitment.
    It was this that Babe Ruth did as no man ever had before. Ruth used a mighty club of a bat – it weighed 54 ounces – and gripped it at the very end, around the knob, which enhanced the whip-like motion of his swing. The result was a combination of power and timing so focused and potent that it generated 8,000 pounds of force (scientists actually measured it in a lab) and, in the space of one thousandth of a second – the duration of contact – through the miracle of physics it converted the sizzling