Fantastic footage! Loved seeing the kids interviewed. My dad would have been about their age, but he was a Dodgers fan. Thanks for showing us some history.
Any footage of seeing Ruth at the plate is wonderful. Ruth looks pretty good and could still run the bases well, after hitting the home run of Carl Hubbell.
It was simply amazing to see him load up like in softball and still had the strength to pull that ball. They teach that a hitch is detrimental to a batter in baseball and for all the praise he's received, I don't think we realize just how great he was. This was at the end of his career and he could still drag bunt and swung that forty-something ounce bat like it was a toothpick. Unbelievable!
Ruth would hit 5 more home runs, including his final three in the same game, before calling it a career in late May. Since people only had batting average to look at back then, his final year at .181 looks terrible, but he still walked a lot, his OBP was a respectable .342, and his OPS+ was 119, or 19% above league average. Not at all Ruthian, but not awful. The Braves won this game 4-2. They would only win 37 more games the rest of the season, finishing a historically awful 38-115. This was probably one of the flukiest bad years of all time, the Braves were .500 or better for the three seasons before this one and two of the three seasons following. They were 12 games below their Pythagorian projection of 50-103, and they had a genuine superstar in center fielder Wally Berger, who led the NL in both home runs (34) and RBI (130) The Giants were a consistently good team in this time period, they were World Champions 2 years ago, and took the Gashouse Gang Cardinals to the wire last year. This year they finished third, but would win the next 2 NL pennants. Hubbell had another solid season, 23-12, an All-Star selection and 6th in MVP balloting, but his ERA of 3.27 for him was actually a little high, sandwiched between 2 years in the 2.30 range, and two years following a 1.66 mark.
Baba Ruth's home run "record" ought to have an asterisk. He habitually stepped out of the box on his swing and many "homers" should have simply been called strikes.
@@jhs8496 I saw it but there were no video replays, two umpires only almost all the time with the home plate ump focused on the pitch the pitcher and at least one baserunner. I doubt they looked at the batters foot placement too often. Plus just because it's there this time doesn't mean he did it ALL the time.
