Today’s picture is of Babe Ruth after a collision with a concrete wall. Ouch!
This picture from 1924 can be found on the Library of Congress Flickr stream, and has no known copyright restrictions.
In the days leading up to the Presidential Inauguration, the Baseball Continuum will be posting pictures celebrating the relation between the presidency and baseball. These are not meant to be an endorsement of either side of the political aisle nor the policies of any of the men featured within, merely a celebration of the close connection between America’s leader and America’s game.
You’ve seen the picture before, but it remains a powerful image: An aged Babe Ruth donating a copy of his manuscript to Yale University, with them being received by the captain of Yale’s baseball team: George Herbert Walker Bush.
From the U.S. National Archives flickr account, no known copyright.
Quick: What’s wrong with the picture below?
Okay, how about this?
The answer is: Neither of them are correct. In fact, they both have anachronisms in them: the Ruth jersey, for example, has the famous “NY” logo on the jersey itself, something that they didn’t do until 1936, by which point Ruth was retired.
But the biggest lie on these replica jerseys: they have names on the back. To the casual fan, perhaps, this is not anything out of the ordinary. After all, teams have been having the names of the players on the back of their uniforms forever, right?
They’d be wrong. In fact, the first time any MLB team had names on the back of the uniform was in 1960, when the White Sox started doing it.
So, in other words, Babe Ruth never wore a Yankees’ jersey with his name on the back (no Yankees, not even those of the present day, have their names on the back, with the exception of some recent batting practice uniforms). Ted Williams never had his name on the back. And, quite frankly, if you don’t know immediately that a “3” on the back of a Yankees uniform means Ruth and/or a “9” on a Red Sox uniform means Ted Williams, perhaps you should be paying more attention the history.
So, for giving people a false image of baseball history and insulting the intelligence of devoted baseball fans, I hereby declare that having names on the back of retro uniforms is one of the Great Baseball Lies.
From Baseball Digest in October, 1957:
The record he speaks of is his 60 HR in 1927. Among the reasons that the record won’t be broken are the fact that Ruth didn’t have to deal with the media pressure as he headed down the stretch that anyone going for 60+ has to, the fact there are fewer off days, the fact that there are now day and night games that could mess with a player’s rest schedule, and that most of the parks aren’t as easy to hit home runs out of as Yankee Stadium had been during Ruth’s day.
He implies that Ted Williams could if he wanted to, but that he doesn’t focus on home runs, instead focusing on being an all-around hitter.
Interestingly, Duke Snider and his ghostwriter Milton Richman also predict that if anybody did they’d be headed to Cooperstown for sure.
Roger Maris is not in the Hall of Fame…. but he did hit 61 HRs in 1961.
Josh Hamilton’s bat is dead.
No, I don’t mean his hitting ability, I mean his bat. Literally. It cracked a bit over the weekend. But this was no ordinary bat. It will go down in history as one of the great bats of baseball lore. It hit eight home runs, including four in a game, during one of the greatest weeks in hitting history. Such was it’s reputation that, before being sent to Cooperstown, the Rangers let people pay $5 (to charity) to pose with it on Monday.
A few things about the bat:
-It’s a H359 Louisville Slugger. It was made to Hamilton’s specifications after he signed an exclusive deal to use the company’s bats. It’s made of M9 maple and is 35 inches long.
-Befitting Hamilton, who credits his religion with helping him defeat the substance abuse that nearly killed him, he has a Bible notation emblazoned upon his bats: Jeremiah 29:11. I looked that up, and here it is-
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”
So now that we know of this great baseball bat, what about some of the other great baseball bats in history? Read on to find out about some of them.
Huzzah, internet! Google used to scan a bunch of old newspapers, and although they stopped doing it, the ones they did before they ceased the scanning are still there. Thus allowing us to see such headlines as this beauty from the Boston Evening Transcript July 10, 1914:
Kind of different from the reaction of Bryce Harper coming up to the bigs, huh?
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