TDL Book Reviews: Recrowning Baseball’s Greatest Slugger
As it’s been getting kind of serious around here for the last couple of weeks I figure it’s about time to lighten up for a bit and blow through the six-ish drafts of books and TV and movie stuff in my draft queue before getting back to depressing myself with our sham political system. Let’s even take a break from the fantasy novels that I’m relatively certain no one but me cares about.
I don’t remember exactly where I first read about Bill Jenkinson’s The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball’s Greatest Slugger. It must have been listed as a source to one of my previous baseball books. When I read the blurb about it on the NYPL’s website, I pegged it as a statistical study of Babe Ruth’s career numbers and, in particular, his 1921 season (not a typo… it pays more attention to his under-appreciated World Series-losing 1921 season in lieu of his World Series-winning 1927 season). When I read the “104 home run” title, I presumed it would be something about ballpark dimensions and such and be a distinctive study of tape-measure home runs and retro-fitting current stadiums (like… the Oakland Coliseum vs. Shibe Park, The Cell vs. Shibe Park, The Metrodome vs. Griffth Stadium, Fenway vs. er… Fenway) to see where Ruth would have wound up for the season if he played in those stadiums. Sounds interesting, right?
I thought so, too. Turns out, this book wasn’t that all. I don’t think. Really, I read the whole book over three weeks and still really don’t know what the author was trying to prove other than “Ruth Was The Greatest Baseball Player Ever.” The 104 home runs may have been referring to the ones Ruth was robbed of when he hit 500-foot outs or he may have been including the home runs he hit in mid-season exhibition games. Honestly, the argument wasn’t presented concisely enough for me to even figure out what the author was trying to say.
By the first chapter, I was pretty sure I was in for a long, long read. In the first 20 pages Jenkinson professes his love for Babe Ruth and his disdain for modern-day sluggers. He also tells us he spent something like ten years exhaustively researching every home run Ruth ever hit. Instead of going through box scores, he tried to find as many primary sources as possible and piece together an actual distance for all of those home runs. He looked for people who were at various exhibition and barnstorming games to get their stories and, in some cases, have those people show him exactly where home plate was in the game and where the ball landed. He then listed all these accomplishments.
Exhaustively.
A standard paragraph in the first few chapters was something like: Ruth then traveled to Philadelphia where he belted four homers against the Athletics. One of those is rumored to have gone 550 feet but my research puts it around 495. The Yankees were only up by three games on the Senators at that point and Ruth felt ill. But the Babe felt guilty leaving the team in such hard times. On the way to St. Louis they stopped off in French Lick, Indiana and played an exhibition game against the Church of the Assumption All-Stars. Babe put on a show that day! Can you imagine modern players not only playing in exhibition games but having 30 scheduled in as part of the regular season? Sometimes even on the same day as real games? When Ruth finally made it to St. Louis he was exhausted but he couldn’t leave the people without a show. He ate a dozen hot dogs and struck out three times but hit a triple off the wall 450 away.
And that goes on. And on. And on for something like 2,487 pages.
What I DID get out of the book were a couple of well-constructed arguments to defend the more dishonest claims made by Ruth’s detractors. For example, the oft-heard point that he’s over-rated because he didn’t face the best competition because the league wasn’t integrated. While the latter part of that statement is true, the former isn’t. Ruth was one of the few major league players who actually DID face Negro League pitching… playing in a fairly large number of games against Negro League teams. The book mentions the confirmed number of home runs he hit off Negro League pitchers (I can’t remember it). It’s not like when Ruth played Negro League teams he suddenly turned in to .094 hitter who slugged .188. Another well-constructed point is this: professional athletes really didn’t have the options then that they do today. If you were a professional-caliber athlete and wanted to make money in the 1910s or 1920s then you either played baseball or boxed. He draws this comparison to the current crop of Latin baseball players. If you’re an excellent athlete in the Dominican Republic, you play baseball. If you’re an excellent athlete in the US, you play whatever you feel like — and baseball’s probably a distant third option. A third point mentions that some of Ruth’s career numbers are hindered by the time. He spent something like 100 games over the course of his career suspended for doing crazy things like “barnstorming” and “not hating black people.” He was also frequently sidelined with things like chest-colds and the like and would miss five or six games at a clip with things such as “chest colds.”
To say I was disappointed in this book would be a gross understatement. I thought it was going to be a statistical analysis or something like that. It turned out it was just a baseball book designed to canonize Ruth and give a laundry list of his accomplishments. If anything, I spent three weeks to get a couple good arguments if I’m ever in an argument in which I have to defend Ruth.
Best sub-plot in the book was the description of Ty Cobb’s disdain and hatred for Ruth because of the popularity he gained by hitting home runs. Cobb insisted that anyone could do what Ruth did and, to make the point, hit three home runs in one game before going back to playing “real baseball.” Another fun story: Ruth was covering third when Cobb decided it was time to come in spikes up. Ruth tagged him with the ball. In the face. And knocked him out cold. Apparently Cobb never came in spikes up on Ruth again.
Not a particularly fun book to read, though. Recommendation to avoid.