One Summer: America, 1927

that the ball itself became livelier – though when exactly, why exactly and by how much are questions that are surprisingly difficult to answer.
    The quest to produce a sturdier, more resilient baseball was a longstanding one. Ben Shibe, co-owner of the Philadelphia Athletics and a manufacturer of sporting goods, who had begun his colourful career in the leather-goods industry and so knew his way around stitched products, for years devoted much of his spare time to trying to make better baseballs. In 1909 he invented the cork-centred ball. Cork centres were lighter than rubber centres, which meant that the balls required more twine, wound tighter, to obtain their regulation weight and circumference. Shibe’s new ball, nearly everyone agreed, was notably livelier. Hits seemed sharper, particularly in the later innings of games when balls normally grew spongy. Then some time after the war – when precisely is another curiously vague matter – Shibe’s company, A. J. Reach, began to import a superior grade of wool from Australia, which was even springier and could be wound tighter still around its feather-light cork. The result was what was commonly known as the ‘rabbit ball’ because of its liveliness.
    Interestingly, Reach strenuously denied that the new ball was livelier, and produced results from the US Bureau of Standards showing that the ball was neither more nor less bouncy than those that preceded it. Most players didn’t agree, however. ‘There was a great difference between the ball that was in use when I broke in and the rabbit ball that was handed us a few seasons ago,’ Walter Johnson told a reporter in the summer of 1927. ‘This ball travels with much more speed than the old one when hit.’
    Although home run numbers grew generally, no one came close to matching Ruth’s totals. In 1920, when Ruth hit 54 homers, no other player hit even 20. In 1921, his 59 homers were 11 more than the next two best hitters combined. By July 1921, in only hissecond year as a full-time batter, Ruth had already hit 139 home runs, more than any person had hit in a career before. ‘So compelling is his presence at the plate, so picturesque and showy and deliciously melodramatic his every move and appearance that he is, from the point of the onlooker, a success even when he is a failure,’ wrote one observer. Even his pop-ups (that is, a ball hit in the air and caught for an out) were sensational and were often hoisted so high that he had comfortably rounded second base before the ball dropped into an infielder’s glove.
    In Babe Ruth’s first year in New York, the Yankees’ attendance more than doubled to 1,289,000 even though they finished third. The Giants had never attracted a million fans in a year. The Yankees now never attracted fewer. John McGraw was so offended by Ruth’s assault on the principles of ‘scientific’ baseball, and so envious of the Yankees’ success, that he ordered them to leave the Polo Grounds and find a new home. In 1922, Jacob Ruppert began building Yankee Stadium – the greatest ballpark ever seen to that time. He placed it on a plot of land carefully chosen to be within sight of McGraw’s Polo Grounds. When finished, the stadium cost $2.5 million and was 50 per cent bigger than any previous ballpark. From the day of its opening it was known as ‘The House That Ruth Built’.
     
    Babe Ruth became celebrated as no sports figure ever had before. Everything about him, said the writer Paul Gallico, seemed larger than life – ‘his frame, his enormous head surmounted by blue-black curly hair, his great blob of a nose spattered generously over his face’. He wasn’t good-looking, but he was irresistibly charismatic. As his friend and teammate Waite Hoyt put it: ‘He was one of a kind. If he had never played ball, if you had never heard of him and passed him on Broadway, you’d turn around and look.’
    Ruth’s rise to fame could not have been more impeccably timed. It coincided precisely with the birth of tabloid newspapers, newsreel films, fan magazines and radio – all vital cogs in the newcelebrity culture – and his arrival in New York brought him into the throbbing heart of the media world. Newspapers began running a daily column entitled ‘What Babe Ruth Did Today’. When Babe Ruth had a bunion trimmed, it received national coverage. Interest in him went way beyond the sports pages, however. He featured on the covers of dozens of magazines that had nothing to do