One Summer: America, 1927

zip of an incoming 90 mph baseball into an outgoing spheroid launched cloudward at 110 mph.
    The result was like something fired from a gun. It was hypnotic and rare – and now here was a man who could do it pretty regularly. Babe Ruth’s home runs were not merely more frequent, they were more majestic. No one had ever seen balls travel so loftily and far.
    ‘During batting practice all the Cleveland players stopped what they were doing just to watch him hit,’ Willis Hudlin, a pitcher for the Indians at the time, recalled more than seventy years later for Sports Illustrated . ‘He’s the only guy the players ever did that for.’
    No player had ever brought this kind of excitement to the game. When Ruth came to the plate, the whole ballpark fell silent. ‘Even the peanut vendors paused in their shouting, and turned to watch,’ noted one observer. With Ruth at bat, as Marshall Smelser put it in a 1993 biography, the game became a contest ‘between two men instead of eighteen’.
    In 1920, his first year with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs – more than any other team in the major leagues. He batted .376 and led the league in ten batting categories. It was almost impossible to imagine anyone ever having a better year – or, come to that, a more timely one. Baseball in 1920 was about to be sent reeling by its greatest scandal, the throwing of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago ‘Black Sox’, a game-fixing scam by a group of White Sox players which, when exposed, wholly undermined people’s faith in the game. Ruth’s colossal swatting was the greatest distraction in sporting history. He didn’t just transform the game, he very probably saved it.
    In 1921, impossibly, Ruth had an even better year than in 1920. He hit 59 home runs – a number so high as to be beyond the reach of any meaningful adjective – and scored more runs, had more extra base hits, and racked up more total bases than any player ever had before. He led the league in runs batted in and bases on balls, and had the third highest batting average at .378, just behind Harry Heilmann and Ty Cobb. Ruth also stole seventeen bases and led the Yankees to their first league championship. This was the best season that any player had ever had.
    Curiously, it wasn’t just Babe Ruth who was hitting home runs in volume as the 1920s began. Suddenly balls were flying out of parks all over the place. From 1918 to 1922, American League home runs traced an unexpectedly impressive trajectory, as a simple summary shows:
     
    1918 –   96
    1919 – 240
    1920 – 369
    1921 – 477
    1922 – 525
     
    For the major leagues as a whole, the total number of home runs went from 235 in 1918 to over a thousand in 1922 – a quadrupling in just four years, a wholly unprecedented level of change. So what happened? Well, quite a lot actually.
    First, in the wake of the Ray Chapman killing, umpires were instructed to keep a decent ball in play at all times. No more would pitchers be allowed to turn the ball brown with dirt and tobacco juice, making it all but invisible in late innings. The major leagues also banned what was loosely known as the spitball. The application of spit (or grease, tobacco juice, Vaseline or any of at least two dozen other globulous additives) to the side of the ball induced an imbalance that caused the ball to wobble and dip in abrupt and unpredictable ways, rather as a modern knuckleball does, but with the difference that spitballs could be thrown hard.
    Every spitball pitcher had his own favourite substance. Eddie Cicotte of the Chicago White Sox used paraffin wax to great effect, though how he did so without poisoning himself over the course of nine innings was something of a wonder. Home teams on the receiving end of doctored balls sometimes tried to discourage opposing pitchers by painting that day’s game balls with mustard oil, tincture of capsicum or some other fiery surprise, which at least provided the home players with the possibility of amusement, if not more hittable pitches.
    After the 1919 season it was decided to ban the spitball for everyone except seventeen pitchers whose careers were dependent on it. They would be allowed to retain the pitch until their own retirements. The last legal spitballer was Burleigh Grimes, who retired in 1934. Babe Ruth, for one, believed that without thebanning of doctored balls no batter could risk the big swings necessary to hit home runs.
    The most important change of all, however, was