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Fish tale? Baseball historian claims Babe hit 600-footer in Pa.Posted: Friday August 08, 2003 3:42 PMPHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Most baseball fans are familiar with Babe Ruth's "called shot" home run in the 1932 World Series. Same goes for the 1926 homer he hit as a promise to a bedridden New Jersey boy. Even so, a little-known long-ball crushed decades ago in Pennsylvania might be among his most significant. Bill Jenkinson, a prominent baseball historian, has measured a homer that the Great Bambino clobbered after a 1926 exhibition game in Wilkes-Barre as having traveled at least 600 feet and says he believes it to be the longest home run ever hit. "The significance here is not in the competitive nature of the blow. It's more of a scientific phenomenon. It tells us what this man was physically capable of doing," said Jenkinson, an expert on long-distance home runs and member of the Society of American Baseball Research, who measured the distance on Thursday. Ruth was participating in an exhibition game in Wilkes-Barre on Oct. 12, 1926, when he hit the home run. After the game ended with Ruth failing to get a hit, the Sultan of Swat challenged a local pitcher to throw him his best fastball. The pitch was launched over a wire fence and onto an athletic track in an adjoining field, according to news reports at the time. Ruth, apparently awestruck by the feat, is said to have remarked that the ball was the longest he had ever hit, Jenkinson said. "It would seem ridiculous to assume that a man born in 1895 could hit a ball farther than Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire," said Jenkinson, who has studied more than 1,000 of Ruth's home runs, including those during postseason play, exhibition games and spring training. "But the record clearly indicates that this man could and did." Using aerial photographs of the ballpark, where the Wilkes University baseball team still plays, a 300-foot measuring tape and eyewitness accounts, Jenkinson on Thursday determined the distance of the homer to be at least 600 feet -- though he's quick to admit that "there's no way to know with absolute certainty." The geometry of the field also has shifted, with the track where the ball once landed now sitting further from the baseball diamond. Jenkinson said he has no plans to approach the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., with his research, but will include it in a book he is writing. He and other baseball experts say home runs of distances are hard to document precisely, though it's fitting that the larger-than-life slugger might have the longest homer. "That's a Ruthian shot, as they would say," said Greg Schwalenberg, curator of the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore, when told of the home run. "That seems pretty far-fetched, but if it's been documented, it's hard to dispute it," he added. John Odell, a curator of history and research for Hall of Fame, said he was interested in the home run, but acknowledged that it might not have the same meaning since it was hit in exhibition play. "It's the kind of thing that if it were proven, it would be an interesting thing, especially since it's Babe Ruth," Odell said. "Anything that Babe Ruth has ever done is always of tremendous interest to baseball fans." But, he added, "Whether it could be conclusively proven or not is definitely a tough thing, given that this is 80 years ago now." |
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