by Jane Leavy
Like everyone else, Santoro wanted to talk to the Babe about home runs. He elicited what passed for headline news: “Ruth Challenges World to Break His Record, Ruth Believes His Mark of 60 Homers Will Always Stand”—a prophecy that remained fact until Roger Maris hit 61 homers in 162 games in 1961.
“When I get up to the plate I just swing, that’s all,” Ruth told Santoro. “If it goes out of the lot, hooray. I’ve added another home run to my string. I don’t take much stock in this place-hit talk.”
Ruth also credited Gehrig, batting fourth in the lineup behind him, with providing the protection and the impetus for his late-season power surge.
Gehrig deflected the praise and demurred when asked if he expected to equal the 47 home runs he hit in 1927. “I will be in there offering at the good ones (maybe some bad ones),” he said, “but I can’t promise I’ll get as many as I did this year or even come close.”
Santoro devoted the lead of his Monday column to his big interview, which no one else in town reported, and ran an unsigned news story on his section page beside a photo of the happy trio, with an effusively self-congratulatory caption claiming they “aired everything but a baseball scandal. No umpire ever got the talking to that ‘Iron Mike’ got Saturday night.”
Santoro wrote: “Mr. B. Ruth and Mr. L. Gehrig, King and Prince of Swat, respectively, do an Alphonse and Gaston. Each credits the other for what he is today—Ruth home-run record holder, Gehrig most valuable man to his team in the American league. Gehrig praises Mr. Ruth for personal instruction in the art of lifting the ball out of the lot, and Ruth says that his protégé’s consistency with the willow put him in such fear of his title that it spurred him on to a new home-run record, 60 for a season.
“It may be modesty when Ruth says he doesn’t believe it likely that he will duplicate his feat of 1927, but it sounds considerably like a challenge to the Gehrigs and others, who may wrench their backs with a good old college try. Ruth believes his mark of 60 will stand.”
Sadly, that’s all that remains of the landmark interview.
II
The third installment in the thirty-part life story of Lou Gehrig, titled “FOLLOWING THE BABE,” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner the day he and Ruth arrived in town. The chapter recounted his first visit to Yankee Stadium when he was still Columbia Lou and his first close-up look at the Babe.
When I saw the way he swung, watched the perfect rhythm and timing, and saw how he managed to get his full weight back of the blow without hitching or losing any of his smoothness, I made up my mind that there was the one man to pattern after. I learned a lot from Babe Ruth in that one day. And I’m still learning. Talk all you please about Cobb and Speaker and the rest of the great hitters. The Babe is in a class by himself.
When I reported for practice the next day I changed my whole batting style with [Columbia coach Andy] Coakley helping me. Before that I had been a “choke” hitter, as they call a fellow who holds the bat up toward the middle. Now I started gripping my bat at the end and taking a full arm cut. “You’ve got great shoulders and great driving power,” Coakley used to tell me. “If you can learn to take a full swing you ought to be able to hit for plenty of extra bases.”
That sounded like Gehrig as far as anyone knew, given how infrequently players, especially shy Lou, were quoted. But Ed Neil of the AP had gotten him talking that afternoon in Asbury Park. Among other things, what made the interview so compelling was the unaccustomed authenticity of his unimproved speech.
“The Babe is a freak,” Gehrig told him. “He’s the greatest player, the greatest hitter, in the history of the game, but he’s a freak just the same. Look at the way he swings, legs, body, arms, shoulders, even his ears go with the bat. No one else can do that.”
Like Gehrig, Ruth divided the world into “choke” hitters and “swing” hitters. Ty Cobb, who would get his four thousandth hit on July 18 that season, was the best of the former; Ruth was the prototype of the latter. “The choke hitter was all right,” Ruth would say later, damning him with faint praise. “But he couldn’t give you much of a thrill.”
Having created that expectation, he understood it was his job to fulfill it. During the 1946 World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals employed a then radical defensive shift to foil Ted Williams, packing the right side of the infield and leaving the left virtually unprotected. “They did that to me in the American League one year,” Ruth told Frank Graham. “I coulda hit .600 that year slicing singles to left.”
“Why didn’t you?” Graham asked.
“That wasn’t what the fans came out to see.”
Home runs were a fact of life before Babe Ruth. But they were infrequent, rarely decisive, often inside-the-park or short fence jobs, not totemic occasions. The high-water mark in nineteenth-century baseball was in 1894 when twelve teams conspired to hit 629 home runs. Over the next twenty-five years, home-run totals waxed and waned as Ty Cobb’s brand of “smart” baseball asserted itself.
No one hit more than 12 home runs in 1916, 1917, or 1918, when the major-league total was 235, the lowest in thirty-six years. That season, the year before Ruth’s first offensive detonation, the major-league average was 14.7 home runs per team, or one every 9.5 games, .116 per game. Only .2 percent of the United States population witnessed one of those 235 events—11 of which were contributed by Babe Ruth, who also surrendered one as a starting pitcher for the Red Sox. According to economics professor Michael Haupert, a person was more likely to know one of the 177 American survivors of the sinking of the Titanic than to see a home run hit in 1918.
Thanks to the Babe, by 1927, the number (922) and frequency (.373 per game) of home runs had tripled and the experience of power had become if not commonplace then at least a reasonable expectation for the 5.2 percent of the U.S. population that saw a home run hit that year and for countless others who experienced the reverberations over the radio. That’s 36.3 times as many witnesses as in 1918.
Ruth’s power was the consequence of reflex and eyesight, coordination and strength, but also personality. Each of his 714 career home runs was the act of a man who defied expectation and authority at every turn. He may not have set out to revolutionize baseball when he learned to hit at St. Mary’s Industrial School but there was intentionality in his insistence upon playing the game his way.
Did he change the game because he could or because he wanted to? It’s a question Bill James, another baseball revolutionary, has wrestled with for years. His conclusion is unequivocal.
“I would argue that defiance of authority is THE central idea of Babe Ruth’s life, and the secret of his success,” he said. “It was mostly a cheerful, agreeable defiance of authority, but I argue that if you pick ANY story about Babe Ruth—any of the thousands of Babe Ruth stories—and look at it, what it really is, is Babe Ruth’s way of saying that ‘the rules don’t apply to Babe Ruth.’ Dangling a manager off the back of a moving train, whether it actually happened or not, is Babe Ruth saying that the rules don’t apply to Babe Ruth.
“And his success as a player absolutely came directly from that. The belief of the time was that hitting long fly balls was a sucker’s game, because for every long fly ball that made the fences, there would be twenty that were outs. You tell Babe Ruth he can’t do something; he’s going to show you that he can. Some people have suggested that he was ‘allowed’ to do this only because he was a pitcher. He wasn’t ‘allowed’ to do anything; you just could not tell him what to do. He was determined to become an outfielder because people told him that he couldn’t. That was who he was; giving him rules or instructions or directions just made him angry.”
In Ruth’s day, the language of baseball was simple. He liked to say he felt “hitterish.” Or better yet, “homerish”—his word of choice while waiting impatiently for Charles Lindbergh to arrive at the Stadium on June 16, 1927. “My left ear itches,” Ruth said. “That’s a sure sign.”
The umpire delayed the first pitch as long as he could, twenty-five mi
nutes, which was not nearly long enough for Ruth, who hit his twenty-second homer with a poor swing off poor Tom Zachary in the bottom of the first inning. “I held off as long as I could but it had to come,” Ruth told reporters later. “When you get one of those things in your system it’s bound to come out.”
Biomechanics and kinetics, weight transfers and loading mechanisms, would not enter baseball’s vocabulary for decades. Nobody analyzed what the Babe did, they just marveled at it. And what he did was so novel and the way he did it was so biomechanically efficient that few contemporary observers had the ability to describe it.
To wit: Otto Floto in the Denver Post. “He has mastered the knack of making his bat meet the ball at the psychological moment.”
Shirley Povich at the Washington Post was an exception, providing elegant eyewitness testimony to the chaos Ruth wrought on the national pastime. “Every pitcher who faced him would have the memory of Babe Ruth stationing himself in the batter’s box, standing a bit behind home plate, his feet close together, toes turned in somewhat,” Povich wrote in 1995. “The bat on his shoulder was twitching a bit as if eagerly awaiting the pitch that Babe liked. The picture he presented was that of a menace looking down the pitcher’s throat.”
His hands bunched together at the end of the bat looked big enough to strangle it. But he kept the little finger of his bottom hand on the knob, not because his hands were big, but to facilitate the follow-through on his swing—it was a pinkie guidance system.
“When he did uncoil that swing it was easy to see where the power came from,” Povich continued. “In addition to the hands and wrists that brought the bat flying off his shoulder, the Babe also got the big power from an almost imperceptible lunge that brought into play his hips and derriere, all of it adding up to a gorgeous piece of timing that sent the pitch streaking.”
Most striking of all, Povich told Sports Illustrated in 1998, “There was no violence in the stroke. He put everything into it, but he never looked like was extending himself.”
Scientists began trying to explain this phenomenon in 1920, with Professor A. L. Hodges, “the Well-Known Physicist,” taking the first hack in a syndicated newspaper story that appeared, among other places, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch under the headline: “Science Explains ‘Babe’ Ruth’s Home Runs, Interesting Principles of Physics and Psychology Involved in the 44 Horse-Power Swing Which Shoots the Ball Skyward at Six Miles a Minute.”
Hodges concluded that over the course of a fifty-home-run season, Ruth would expend enough energy to lift a fifty-five-ton locomotive six inches off the ground.
His numbers were specious. Alan M. Nathan, the go-to guy on the physics of baseball in the modern era, deconstructed Hodges’s analysis in 2011, pointing out, among other things, his failure to take into account the crucial variable of bat speed and to differentiate between the transfer of energy from the body into the bat and from the bat into the ball. The real significance of Hodges’s article was the recognition that Ruth represented something entirely new, and the attempt to come to grips with it.
The following year Walsh sent Ruth to Columbia University for a battery of tests to gauge motor skills and cognitive performance and generate hype. The results, trumpeted in the October 1921 issue of Popular Science Monthly and on the front page of the New York Times, proved that he met the criteria for what sports orthopedist Stephen B. Haas has called “neuromuscular genius.”
The testing was primitive, cave art compared to the high-tech, biofeedback, neural-patterning analyses employed today to decode and enhance athletic genius. Its true value lay in Walsh’s creation of an irrefutable idea of the Babe. Nobody has improved on that methodology.
“Ruth Supernormal, So He Hits Homers,” the Times declared. “Psychologists Prove Co-ordination of Eyes, Brain, Nerves and Muscle Is Virtually Perfect, 30% HIGHER THAN AVERAGE.”
Among the findings: “The average man responds to stimulus of light in 180 one thousandths of a second. Ruth needs only 160 one thousandths of a second. . . . Translate the findings of the sight test into baseball if you want to see what they mean in Babe Ruth’s case. They mean that a pitcher must throw a ball 20 one thousandths of a second faster to ‘fool’ the Babe than to ‘fool’ the average person.”
In August 2006, GQ magazine asked scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to run similar tests on Albert Pujols, then with the Cardinals. To measure speed and endurance, he was asked to press a tapper with his finger as many times as possible in ten seconds; he finished in the 99th percentile, as had Ruth. In a test of bat speed—a critical factor left out of Hodges’s analysis—Pujols measured 86.99 miles per hour with a 31.5-ounce bat, compared to Ruth’s 75 miles per hour with the 54-ounce bat.
Which, Ruth noted, he wielded against pitchers who had at their disposal “ash cans, mud buckets and licorice pits into which they used to dip the ball before firing it up to the plate. We put everything on it but a cable to Mussolini. Often it was so discolored it was practically invisible when thrown with any great amount of speed.”
Hitting got easier, he told Grantland Rice in 1930, when there were no more “sail balls, the fuzzy wuzzies, and the emery balls that used to flop in all directions and keep you guessing.”
III
For an architect, space is liberty. A gift to the imagination seeking to impose form and function in unprecedented fashion. For an athlete, whose success is contingent upon the ability to replicate form that affords maximum function, space is an invitation to deviation, which is an invitation to disaster. To the yips. To messed-up mechanics and lost release points. To 0-fers and golden sombreros. To sophomore slumps that last a lifetime.
The greatest athletes are nonconformists like Babe Ruth, inventors who think outside the box with their bodies. Athletic genius—kinesthetic intelligence, as it’s now called—is the ability to impose order on the human form as it moves through space, maximizing (and also taming) the idiosyncrasies of body shape and body type while summoning the muscle and the muscle memory necessary to create the most biomechanically efficient means to an end.
Only those with the highest kinesthetic IQ can remake an entire sport in their own image: Jimmy Connors at the baseline turning a return of serve into a weapon by taking the ball on the rise; Maury Wills on the base paths disrupting a pitcher’s concentration with timing, daring, and speed; Bill Russell, the NBA’s first great shot blocker, showing that defense wins the most important games; Bobby Orr, revolutionizing the role of NHL defensemen by making theirs an attacking position; Johnny U. distributing the ball to a plethora of receivers and making the quarterback the fulcrum of the NFL game; and Babe Ruth devising the modern power swing that transformed the national pastime.
He honed his swing the way he boned his bats. And he had the neuromuscular control—the physiological self-discipline—to repeat it again and again. That’s what made him a career .342 hitter as well as baseball’s sui generis slugger. There is irony and truth buried in the statistic known as OPS+, the modern metric that combines on-base percentage plus slugging—power and discipline—and adjusts the numbers according to ballpark and league allowing for a comparison of players from different eras. Ruth is the all-time major-league leader with a rating of 206, ahead of Ted Williams who is second with 190. Isn’t it ironic that a man known for succumbing to so many temptations did not yield to those afforded by infinite space?
Ruth called Shoeless Joe Jackson “the greatest natural hitter I have ever seen” and said he had the “perfectest swing.” Ruth had faced him from sixty feet, six inches, often enough as a pitcher—holding him to a .282 batting average and a .300 on-base percentage in 39 at-bats—to observe the way he went about his business. They played together for Reading Steel and Casting after the end of the war-shortened major-league season in the fall of 1918. Each owned a bat he called Black Betsy.
“Babe Ruth used to say that he copied my batting stance and I felt right complimented,” Shoeless Joe told Furman Bisher in a 1949 interview f
or Sport magazine. “I was a left-handed hitter, and I did have an unusual stance. I used to draw a line three inches out from the plate every time I went to bat. I drew a right-angle line at the end next to the catcher and put my left foot on it exactly three inches from the plate. I kept both feet together, then took a long stride into the ball.”
Comparing them in the smattering of available film clips, it is easy to see what Ruth stole and what he improvised on: feet stacked together at the rear of the batter’s box, Ruth kept his left rear foot slightly behind the right and his body turned almost at a diagonal to the plate so that he was looking at the pitcher over his front shoulder.
He was so much bigger than everyone else and his body type so unusual that old-timers mistakenly labeled him “an upper-body hitter.” They didn’t focus on what the lower half of him was doing. Grantland Rice, in a departure from his usual poetics, described his biomechanics perfectly in a May 24, 1924, “Sportlight” column. “Ruth, by keeping his left foot well back of the right, gets an abnormal body turn as he swings into the ball. As he steps forward with his right foot his vast body turns with the swing and adds at least 20 percent more impetus than he would normally get. Through this turning movement of the body he can whip the bat through at greater speed with less effort and with less of a lunge or a lurch.
“Ruth does no swaying. It is all in the turn of the body, with his head held as anchor. In this way he can speed up the big bat he uses without putting the entire burden on hands and arms. If he had to swing a 52-ounce bat as most ball players swing a much lighter bludgeon the extra effort needed would kill all timing and rhythm. The ‘Babe’ worked out his own system, basing it in part upon Joe Jackson’s way of batting with the right foot well advanced.”
The reason for that was to increase the distance for acceleration of his hips as he turned into the ball, increasing rotation and force. Or as Ruth put it in a recently discovered 1943 interview broadcast on Armed Forces Radio: “Well, I’d always put my front foot toward the home plate and the back foot back a little bit so I’d give ya a perfect pivot.”