Babe Ruth hit more home runs than he’s been given credit for.
Babe Ruth hit more home runs than he’s been given credit for.
I t’s one of the most enduring moments in sports history: Chubby 40-year-old slugger Henry Aaron steps to the plate in front of 54,000 fans in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, wallops his 715th career home run to left-center field, bell-bottomed fans jump out of the stands to round the bases with him, and he is mobbed by family and reporters as he crosses home plate. And with that, professional sports’ most hallowed record fell.
But what if Aaron didn’t actually break the record that night? What if he actually surpassed Babe Ruth’s home-run record 13 days later, when he hit number 717 in front of a sleepy afternoon crowd of 14,922 fans in the antiseptic new Astrodome in Houston?
For decades, Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs was the most famous mark in all of American competition. But the old records show Ruth actually hit more round-trippers than he has been given credit for.
The discrepancy comes about because, prior to 1920, Major League Baseball counted walk-off home runs as home runs only if the bases were empty. According to the old rule, if there was a man on base in the bottom of the ninth inning and a batter hit a home run, the batter would be credited only with the number of bases it would take to force the runner home.
For instance, if a game were tied 0–0 and a batter hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth with a runner at second base, the batter would be awarded a double and the game would end 1–0. Even if the bases were loaded and the batter hit a grand slam, he would be credited with a single, and the game would still end 1–0.
According to contemporaneous reports, Babe Ruth hit two such home runs as a member of the Boston Red Sox in 1919, the year he set the major league’s new single-season home-run record of 29.
In January 1920, the push to change walk-off home runs to count as homers found itself with an unlikely supporter. Writing in the Boston Globe, Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson urged the rule change (despite the damage it would do to pitchers’ earned-run averages), calling the home run “the most spectacular individual play in baseball.”
“When a man can smack the ball over the fence and send in the winning run for his team in the ninth inning, it seems kind of hard to penalize him because there was a man or two on bases when he made the hit,” he wrote.
Ruth “was credited with 29 home runs last year,” said Mathewson, but “the figure would have been 31 had such a rule as the proposed one been in force.”
And Ruth’s career home-run record would have been 716, not 714.
One month later, at the behest of the baseball writers’ association, the National and American Leagues jointly changed the rules to count walk-offs as homers. At the same meeting, the leagues created the concepts of the “balk” and the “dead ball,” and they outlawed “freak” pitches, which we now commonly know as “spitballs.”
In 1969, a blue-ribbon commission put together by baseball’s authorities and charged with reviewing old records unanimously decided to credit Ruth with one more home run. They had combed old box scores and found one from 1918 in which Ruth hit a towering game-winning home run for which, under the pre-1920 rules, he was only credited with a triple. (Note that the homer for which they gave him credit occurred the year before the two cited by Mathewson, meaning Ruth may have hit three such homers.)
But the addition of the extra homer didn’t even last a week. A few days later, amid howls of indignation by traditionalists, the committee reversed itself and restored Ruth’s record to 714.
They shouldn’t have.
The traditionalists have some convincing arguments. For one, the Babe knew the rules at the time he was playing, so his legacy has to abide by them. Further, if you go back and give full credit for walk-off home runs, you also have to retroactively alter the pitching stats so they match up. Many dead-ball-era pitchers will be aggrieved from the great beyond. Some pitchers are certainly worse than others, but it takes a particular skill to give up home runs after you’ve been dead for 60 years.
Additionally, if you mess with the home-run records prior to the rule change, why not go back and change statistics gathered before other rule changes? For instance, between 1940 and 1953, sacrifice flies counted as an at-bat for batters, lowering many of their individual batting averages. This is notable because in 1941, Ted Williams became the last player to hit .406; according to Joe Cronin, Williams’s manager that year, had sacrifice flies not counted against batters (as is the case now), Williams would have hit .419.
But baseball is the one sport where we can, more or less, compare players’ statistics over nearly 150 years of records. There is no crime in standardizing the statistics to make them reflect what actually happened on the field and thus allow us to compare generations accurately. If Babe Ruth actually hit more balls over the fence than any other players did, we should know exactly what that number is as defined by the rules of the past 103 years.
Further, the home-run records should be far easier to figure out and correct than other more expansive retroactive records. The 1969 committee identified 43 total instances of walk-off home runs not being credited to the hitter; simply correct these to make the records consistent with the post-1920 rule. Just because we can’t look back and revise every record pursuant to modern rules doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do so for the obvious ones.
Granted, it seems impossible to go back and take away an at-bat for, say, every player who hit a sacrifice fly between 1940 and 1953. Perhaps computer-literate baseball fans can set up an artificial-intelligence program to scan newspaper accounts of games and box scores to give us a more accurate accounting of past records. We will call it “BabeGPT.” (Although I would recommend not Googling that term.)
Further, crediting old-timers who legitimately hit game-ending home runs will play a small part in erasing the obscenity that was baseball’s steroids era, where homers were the by-product of chemistry sets and not skill. The record books have now been permanently defiled by cheaters, so we should have no problem granting legitimate home runs to players like Ruth, whose performance was enhanced primarily by hot dogs, rare steaks, and beer.
Ruth was sold to the Yankees before the 1920 season and subsequently hit 54 home runs in a season when no other player hit more than 19. But history continues to sell his legacy short; he won only one league Most Valuable Player award (in 1923) because the rules at the time barred repeat winners.
Granted, any appeal to have records reinstated after the fact carries all the heft of a Sidney Powell legal memo. But as Mathewson wrote, the home run is the ultimate act in America’s most traditional game. Dingers are the scoring method easiest to understand — hit ball far, count your runs. The fact that a technicality has robbed players of their justly accrued home-run statistics should no longer stand.
Major League Baseball can make up for this. Give Ruth the homers he earned on the field.