On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Steven Desjardins <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, it's all about Babe Ruth. Very few American sports figures have > so towered in their sport. Hence the American adjective "Ruthian".
It may be true that he literally saved baseball. After the Black Sox scandal attendance dropped around the majors. Ruth was the superstar that turned that around and brought fans back to the parks again. And why not? He single-handedly changed the way the game was played. Until he came along home runs were not a part of the game - it was thought to be better to keep the ball in the park, to keep rallies going, to continue to have base runners. Turned out, however, that the fans ~loved~ home runs! His finest year is thought by many to have been 1920, when he hit 54 home runs, with a .376 batting average. He hit more home runs than any other ~team~ in the league that year, except the Phillies who hit (as a team) 64 homers. And he did all that while drinking and eating to excess, whoring around and playing many games hung over. Imagine if he'd had modern training techniques available to him? Hard to know... cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
