Babe Ruth and the Season That Invented Modern Baseball

On the morning of September 30, 1927, Babe Ruth came to the plate in the eighth inning of a game at Yankee Stadium with the score tied and the season almost over. He was sitting on 59 home runs — one shy of his own record, which he had set six years earlier.

Tom Zachary, a left-handed pitcher for the Washington Senators, tried to keep the ball away from him. Ruth fouled one off. Zachary threw again. Ruth swung.

The ball landed in the right field bleachers. Home run number 60.

Ruth ran the bases while the stadium erupted. He crossed the plate, bowed in mock formality, and tipped his cap. Then he went back to the dugout.

The record stood for 34 years.

Before the Sultan

George Herman Ruth grew up in Baltimore, the son of a saloon keeper. At seven, his parents sent him to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys — a reform school and orphanage run by the Xaverian Brothers — because, in his father's words, he was "incorrigible." He would spend most of the next 12 years there.

Brother Matthias, a 6-foot-6 disciplinarian who loved baseball, became his surrogate father. He taught Ruth to hit. He taught him to pitch. He taught him that excellence was possible.

Ruth was signed by the Baltimore Orioles at 19 and sold to the Boston Red Sox months later. He was a pitcher — one of the best in the American League. From 1915 to 1918, he went 78–40 and pitched 29 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series, a record that stood for 43 years.

He was also, in his spare time, destroying baseballs.

The Transition

In 1918 and 1919, the Red Sox began playing Ruth in the outfield on days he wasn't pitching. He hit 29 home runs in 1919 — more than any player in modern baseball history at the time. The record-holder before him had hit 27. The record before that had been 16.

The scale of what Ruth was doing hadn't registered yet. It would.

In January 1920, the Red Sox sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 and a $300,000 loan against Fenway Park — the most ever paid for a player. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed the money to fund a Broadway musical called No, No, Nanette.

Red Sox fans would not win another World Series for 86 years. They called it the Curse of the Bambino.

The 1920s and the Invention of the Home Run

Ruth's first season in New York, 1920, he hit 54 home runs. No other player in the American League hit more than 19. He out-homered every other team in the league.

This was a different game from what had come before. "Deadball era" baseball — the game before Ruth — relied on singles, bunts, stolen bases, and manufactured runs. Home runs were rare, often the result of mishit balls bouncing into the outfield in the configurations of old stadiums. The game was cerebral, low-scoring, and strategic.

Ruth made it irrelevant. He hit balls over fences with a frequency and distance that the game had no framework for. He swung from his heels, with a full rotation that would make modern hitting coaches wince — and it worked on a scale that changed what everyone else thought was possible.

The Yankees built a new stadium in 1923 specifically to accommodate his right-handed pull. The right field stands were close, the right field porch reachable. "The House That Ruth Built" opened with Ruth hitting a three-run home run on opening day.

1927

The 1927 New York Yankees are often called the greatest baseball team ever assembled. They went 110–44. They swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series.

Ruth hit 60 home runs. His teammate Lou Gehrig hit 47, which would have been the record in any other year. Together they were called Murderers' Row — along with Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri, they constituted a lineup so dangerous that opposing pitchers began walking Ruth intentionally with remarkable frequency, which only made Gehrig more dangerous.

Ruth also hit .356, drove in 164 runs, and had an on-base percentage of .486. By any measure, it was one of the greatest individual offensive seasons in baseball history.

The Called Shot

The legend of Babe Ruth accumulated incidents the way stars accumulate mass. None is more debated than the Called Shot.

Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. Cubs pitcher Charlie Root. Ruth allegedly pointed to center field — indicating where he intended to hit the next pitch — and then hit it there. A home run. The crowd, which had been heckling him all game, went silent.

Did he actually call it? The film footage is ambiguous. Eyewitness accounts conflict. Ruth himself gave different versions at different times. Root denied it until his death.

What is not disputed: he pointed somewhere, and then he hit a home run to center field. Whatever the intent, the legend was sealed.

After Baseball

Ruth's final season was 1935, with the Boston Braves — a sad return to a city that had sold him. He retired with 714 career home runs, a record that stood until Hank Aaron broke it in 1974.

He died of throat cancer in 1948, at 53. Two days before he died, he attended the premiere of a film about his life at Yankee Stadium. He told the players in the dugout: "The termites have got me." He died in his sleep.

The stadium held his body for two days. Hundreds of thousands of people filed past.

Why It Still Matters

Leigh Montville's The Big Bam is the biography that strips away the cartoon and shows the complicated man: the enormous appetites, the generosity to children he visited in hospitals, the marriages, the feuds, the sadness of the final years. It is a portrait of someone who was genuinely, historically exceptional — and genuinely human.

Baseball was a broken institution in 1920. The Black Sox scandal had just shaken public faith in the integrity of the game. Ruth rebuilt it almost single-handedly by making it impossible to look away.

He hit 60 home runs in a single season, in 154 games, at the age of 32. He did it in the era of train travel and double-headers and no off-season conditioning programs.

"I hit big or I miss big," Ruth once said. "I like to live as big as I can."

He did.