Ruth's tremendous blow to right-center field in Detroit on June 8, 1926,
was
measured at 601 feet in the air before touching ground. And it can be
said
that he defies rational analysis. Not only did he set distance records in
every major league ballpark (including National League stadiums where he
played only infrequently), he also set similar standards in hundreds of
other fields, where he made exhibition and barnstorming appearances.
Amazingly, many of those records remain unequaled, which is to say that
Ruth
is a true athletic anachronism. In virtually every other field of endeavor
in which physical performance can be measured, there are no Ruthian
equivalents. In 1921 alone, which was Ruth's best tape measure season, he
hit at least one 500 foot home run in all eight American League cities.
There should be no doubt about the authentication of these conclusions.
Despite the scarcity of film on Ruth, we can still make definitive
evaluations of the approximate landing points of all of his 714 career
home
runs.
Ruth played during the height of American's newspaper culture, when
approximately 10 New York papers gave first hand accounts of each Yankee
game. When you consider that the other baseball towns average about five
comparable publications, it is clear that we can draw upon approximately
15
descriptions of most of the hundreds of four-base blows struck during his
career. A suitable example can be identified in Ruth's classic Comiskey
Park
rooftopper on August 16, 1927. Fifteen writers from New York, Chicago, and
other places emphatically stated that Ruth's fifth-inning drive cleared
the
52-foot-wide grandstand roof by a considerable margin. Although other
sluggers occasionally reached the rooftops during Comiskey's long
lifetime,
the only other left-handed batter known to have flown the right-field roof
was Detroit's Kirk Gibson in 1985. That magnitude of Ruth's accomplishment
can be understood with the knowledge that, because home plate had been
moved, the distance to the grandstand for Gibson was 341 feet, while for
Ruth it was 365 feet.
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