Titles

The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs

Bill Jenkinson
Carroll & Graf
Winter 2007
ISBN: 0786719060

This is not another Babe Ruth biography. Rather, it is an authoratative, illustrated analysis of Babe Ruth’s amazing batting power, sure to inspire debate among baseball fans of every stripe, one of the country’s most respected and trusted baseball historians reveals the amazing conclusions of more than twenty years of research. Jenkinson takes readers through Ruth’s 1921 season, in which his pattern of battled balls would have accounted for more than 100 home runs in today’s ballparks and under today’s rules. Yet, 1921 is just tip of the iceberg, for Jenkinson’s research reveals that during an era of mammoth field dimensions Ruth hit more 450-plus-feet shots than anybody in history, and the conclusions one can draw are mind boggling.

The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs contains: never-before-seen spray charts of Ruth’s home runs, long-distance fly balls, and “foul home runs” (potential home runs judged foul based on pre-1931 fair/houl rules); aerial ballpark photos showing the landing spots of Ruth’s longest homers; a detailed comparison of Babe Ruth and other great sluggers (past and presetn); a description and distance estimate for all 714 official Ruthian home runs; a thorough response to the contention that Babe did not play hard-fought games against the great African american ballplayers of his time; a carefully crafted comparison of every aspect of competitive difficulty in the baseball world of Ruth's era and baseball as it’s played today.

Author Bio

Bill Jenkinson has served as consultant for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball, the Society for American Baseball Research, the Babe Ruth Museum, and ESPN. He is the acknowledged expert on the history of long-distance home runs and the country’s top Ruthian scholar. Jenkinson lives in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.