The year was 1920. Baseball was different then. The pitch was dead. The ball was dead. People were tired of seeing zero-run games and endless pitcher duels. Then the New York Yankees traded Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. The league held its breath.
Ruth wasn’t just a player that summer. He was a spectacle.
July 9 arrived. The Polo Grounds hosted “Babe Ruth Day.” The Knights of Columbus presented him with a diamond-studded watch fob. Ruth didn’t just smile. He homered. He tipped his cap while rounding the bases. It was theater. It was religion.
Crowds were everywhere. Every park the Yankees visited had record throngs. Five of seven American League cities saw massive turnouts. The crowd wasn’t just fans. It was small children. It was great-grandfathers. Everyone wanted one thing. They wanted to see the Bambino hit one out.
He became a showman. On the field. Off the field.
In St. Louis, three cowboys walked into the Yankee locker room. They had ridden horses for three days to reach a Wyoming railroad station. They caught a train to Missouri. They just needed to see him. One reportedly said he would have ridden all the way to St. Louis on horseback just to see Ruth hit home runs.
The appeal was universal. It was dangerous, too. One Washington man took the excitement too far. He dropped dead of a heart attack after watching Ruth hit a homer. The thrill was immense. It was everywhere. Kids surrounded him wherever he went.
Building Murderer’s Row
Pitchers hated walking him. But they kept doing it. Home crowds booed their own pitchers for issuing walks. It was the only way to stop him. Many of those walks were intentional. This wasn’t recorded as a statistic then. It just happened.
Yankees manager Miller Huggins saw the trend worsening. He tried to fix it. He moved Ruth from fourth to third in the lineup. He put young slugger Bob Meusel at cleanup.
The results were messy.
July 11 against Detroit. Ruth homered off Howard Ehmke. Then he was walked four straight pitches in his other three at-bats. He swung the bat twice in the entire game.
Yet the Yankees still won. They had depth. Carl Mays joined the staff. He became an ace quickly. The rotation was exceptional. It included Bob Shawkey, the American League ERA champion with 20 wins. Jack Quinn was there. Rip Collins too. Ernie Shore filled in for spot starts.
The lineup was stacked. First baseman Wally Pipp was consistent. Catcher Muddy Ruel was promising. Infielders Del Pratt, Roger Peckinpaugh, and Aaron Ward were steady. Outfielders Ping Bodie and Duffy Lewis were veterans. Meusel provided power as a rookie.
Before Ruth even arrived, a cartoonist dubbed the lineup “Murderer’s Row.”
Ruth outshone them all.
July 15. Polo Grounds. Ruth tied his record of 29 home runs. He blasted one off Bill Burwell of St. Louis. Four days later, he broke it. A doubleheader against the White Sox. Three shots in one game.
He had 37 homers by July. The pennant race was tight. New York. Chicago. The Cleveland Indians. All three were battling.
The attendance proved it. Nearly 200,000 fans showed up for a seven-game homestand late in July. That number was unheard of.
The battle stayed close through August.
The Day the Game Changed
August 16. Monday. The Indians visited New York.
Cleveland was four percentage points ahead of Chicago. They held a half-game lead over New York.
Rain fell early. Soft rain.
The Indians led 3-0.
Ray Chapman stepped up in the fifth inning. He was the shortstop. Carl Mays was on the mound. Mays led the league with an 18-8 record. He used an underhand windup.
Chapman leaned over the plate. He was in his usual crouched stance. He took the first pitch. He waited for the second.
Mays delivered a fastball. High. Inside.
It struck Chapman in the left temple. The impact was brutal. Chapman fell back. He didn’t collapse immediately. He sort of sat. He sprawled. Blood oozed from his ear.
Muddy Ruel, the catcher, picked up the ball. He thought it was the first out of the inning. He fired it to first base.
A doctor came from the stands.
Babe Ruth watched from the outfield.
Chapman managed to get to his feet. He couldn’t speak. He was brought to the visitor’s clubhouse. The doctor determined emergency surgery was needed. Pressure on his brain had to be relieved.
Baseball didn’t stop. The Yankees missed a chance to take first place. They lost 4-3. Only then were the players told Chapman had been taken to St. Lawrence Hospital.
Operations happened that night.
At 4:40 the next morning, Ray Chapman died. Intercranial hemorrhage. He was the first major leaguer killed by a pitch.
Hopefully the only one.
The Finish
The Yankees postponed Tuesday’s game.
Then they split two 4-3 contests. Ruth hit his 43rd homer in one of those games. They stayed one and a half games out.
People were angry. Opposing players wanted Carl Mays gone. Sportswriters called for his banishment. Mays had a reputation for scuffing balls. He pitched tight. He was hated.
He stayed with the club.
He won eight games down the stretch. He helped New York briefly take over first place.
Ruth rebounded too.
He hit just six homers in August. But then he hit 10 in his final 24 games. It was one of his best power surges.
Despite the surge, the Yankees stumbled on their final western swing.
When it was all done, they finished three games back.
The season ended. The record stood. The tragedy remained.
Even in defeat, the final days of the 1920 campaign offered a different kind of victory. The Yankees weren’t just grinding out the end of the season. They were having fun.
Brother Matthias arrived on the road trips to Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. He wasn’t alone. He brought a band of youngsters from St. Mary’s Industrial School. The fire in April had ravaged the institution. The boys needed money to rebuild.
Babe Ruth didn’t just let them tag along for the ride. He made sure they got results.
The Charity Tour That Made History
When Ruth arranged for the St. Mary’s band to join the Yankees, the school netted over $13,000 in donations. That was a massive sum for the time.
Ruth contributed $4,100 personally. That was a fifth of his salary. He didn’t just write a check. He played the part. Photographers loved it. He wielded a tuba. He posed with the group. It was colorful. It was human.
It was a perfect way to close a stupendous summer.
But the standings told a harder truth. A Yankee pennant would have to wait. At least another year. The team had posted a franchise-best 95-59 record. They were dominant. They just didn’t finish first.
The revolution had begun, though.
How Dominant Was Babe Ruth’s 1920 Season?
If you look at the numbers from that year, the “Babe Ruth home run record” doesn’t feel like a statistic anymore. It feels like a glitch in the matrix.
His final tally was 54 home runs.
Think about that.
That total was higher than the combined home run totals of 14 other Major League teams. Only the Phillies hit more, and they managed 64. Ruth accounted for one out of every seven home runs hit in the American League that year.
The league runner-up? George Sisler. He had 19.
National League champion Cy Williams had just 15.
In fact, only 15 major leaguers hit as many as 10 homers in the entire season. Compare that to his 1919 campaign. That was incredible. But 1920 was something else entirely. He set power standards the sport had never seen. And still hadn’t seen for a long time.
His other stats were just as imposing.
He led the AL with 137 RBI. He scored 158 runs. He hit .376. That was fourth-best in the league.
He didn’t just swing for the fences. He had 36 doubles. Nine triples. Fourteen stolen bases. This proved he wasn’t just a brute. He was a strong, intelligent athlete.
The Slugging Percentage That Stands Alone
Then there was the slugging percentage.
Babe finished with .847.
That set a major league record. No other player has ever come within 75 points of that mark. Not in the 20th century. Not in the 21st. It remains one of the most isolating achievements in baseball history.
Analysts love to look for reasons. They cited the banishment of the spitball. They pointed to trick pitches disappearing from the game. Some whispered about unsubstantiated rumors of a “juiced up” ball. League averages did rise dramatically over the previous year.
But reality is simpler.
Babe Ruth did what no one else could do. It went beyond explanation.
For the crowds packing the Polo Grounds all year, the mechanics didn’t matter. They just loved what they were seeing. The atmosphere shifted. The Yankees wound up more than doubling their attendance.
They drew 1,289,422 fans.
That was a major league record. They were the first team to ever cross the one-million mark.
Seven other teams set attendance records that season. Credit went to Ruth. He was the most popular player in the game. Ty Cobb was great. Walter Johnson was a legend. Tris Speaker was a star. But Babe was the biggest drawing card in all of sports.
Off the Field: Fame, Fortune, and Risk
Ruth wasn’t naive anymore. He knew his worth.
He capitalized on his popularity immediately. He earned several thousand dollars in exhibition games following the season. Then he signed on with John McGraw.
A barnstorming tour of Cuba.
The team was comprised mostly of Giants players. Ruth took Helen along. The money was staggering. He made anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 for those games.
But fame brings new temptations.
He discovered he liked the excitement of putting money on the nose of a horse.
He didn’t just bet. He lost. He tossed away at least that much.
Varying accounts say he was set up by swindlers. They claimed to have “insider information.” Whatever the case, Babe enjoyed himself. The thrill was worth the loss, or so he thought.
By the time he came home, he weighed 240 pounds.
He was ready to take up where he left off in the spring.
He was out to prove the 1920 season hadn’t been a fluke. Only a beginning.
But first, he had to deal with financial and legal troubles. The money was flowing in, but it was flowing out faster.
The next chapter wasn’t about stats. It was about survival.
