Babe Ends His Slump

The most famous (or infamous, if you are a Red Sox fan) transaction in baseball history was the sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season.  But twenty games into the 1920 season, Yankee fans may have been wondering if the Babe would live up to their expectations.

He'd had a slow spring training, going three weeks before smacking his first home run.  Babe went into the stands after a taunting fan and in another game knocked himself out after running into a palm tree in Miami while tracking a fly ball.  At the start of the regular season Ruth was nursing a sprained knee.

Entering the home game with the Chicago White Sox on May 11, 1920 the Yankees, expected to be pennant contenders, had only managed a disappointing 9-11 record, while the defending American league champion White Sox stood at 11-7 (it would not be until late September that the scandal surrounding the 1919 World Series was revealed and several of the White Sox players ultimately banned from baseball).

The White Sox 2-5 hitters, Eddie Collins, Buck Weaver, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Happy Felsch were off to strong starts, with each hitting well above .300.  The Babe started the game hitting only .210 with 2 homers, 9 RBIs, drawing 7 walks but striking out 14 times in 62 at bats.  Adding to his woes, in his last game Babe muffed a fly ball near the foul line, costing his team a run, along with going 0 for 5. But today things would be different. 

The headline in the next day edition of The Sun and New York Herald told the story, "Lid Off For The Babe".  In the bottom of the 1st, coming to bat against Sox hurler Roy Wilkinson with Wally Pipp on first, Babe hit a shot into deep right field described by the Herald as a "leviathan drive".  In the 3rd, he smashed a triple to right, driving in Pipp once again, and according to the Herald, only "fast fielding kept [it] from being a second home run".  Facing little Dickey Kerr (the only honest Sox starting pitcher in the 1919 series) in the 5th, the Babe whacked another four-bagger into the upper grandstand of the Polo Grounds (the Yankee's home park until 1923) before drawing a walk in his final plate appearance in the 7th.  The Yankees won 6-5.

The game launched one of the hottest streaks of Ruth's career.  Over the next 65 games he hit .453 with 16 doubles, 7 triples and 30 HRs, scoring 86 runs, driving in 78, and walking 69 times.  With an on-base percentage of .587 and slugging 1.019, the resulting OPS was a staggering 1.606.  At the end on July 20, Ruth was hitting .398 and, including six games he missed, the Yankees had won 48 of 69 contests since May 11.

Babe would cool off a little over the remainder of the season, hitting .402 with an on-base percentage of .560, while slugging .922 over the final 124 games.  The Yankees still finished in 3rd, three games behind the pennant winning Indians and the White Sox.  In 1921 the team would capture its first pennant.