715: Uncovering the Lost Home Run of Babe Ruth

An Evolving Game and a 715th Home Run

Baseball, even today, is constantly evolving. However, In the early stages of the game, rules were changing year by year. For example, the number of balls and strikes hasn’t always been four and three. At one point, a batter needed six balls to be awarded first base. The rules concerning bunting changed back and forth. The sacrifice fly was altered several times. The mound was moved back and forth. And on and on the story goes.

In fact, Mr. Neft tells the story of how in 1887 baseball tried to promote itself through offense by counting walks as hits in computing batting average (BA). That season, Tip O’Neill led the American Association with a .492 BA. However, when Mr. Neft and his committee applied the current rule, O’Neill’s BA dropped to .435.

According to Mr. Neft, the game didn’t start to look like what we have become familiar with today until 1920. “If you saw a film of a game in the early 1920’s, you would totally recognize what was going on,” Mr. Neft explained.

And so this leads to Babe Ruth (aka “The Sultan of Swat”).

When Mr. Neft and his committee went through the laborious task of taking the earlier part of the game and applying the current rule, as they did with Tip O’Neill, they came across 37 cases in which a walk-off home run was not considered a home run.

Mr. Neft created a fictional story to illustrate what he meant by this.

“Before 1920,” he began, “if the score was tied in the bottom of the ninth inning and there were men on first and second, and Joe Smith,” Mr. Neft’s idea of a fictional name, “hits a ball fair into the seats, he was only credited with what would have been necessary to score the winning run.”

“In other words,” Mr. Neft continued, “Smith would have gotten a double and one RBI, no runs scored, no home run.”

Of the 37 such cases Mr. Neft and his committee found, one of them was Babe Ruth.

After conducting more research on this home run, I found an article published in the Tampa Bay Times on April 27th, 1969. After reporting that Babe Ruth was to be given a 715th home run, they delve into a July 8, 1918 game against Cleveland, when Ruth was with the Boston Red Sox.

"“On July 8, at Fenway Park, the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians went into the 10th inning of the first game of a double-header with the game scoreless. With one out in the home half of the 10th, Amos Strunk singled, and Babe Ruth belted Stanley Covaleskie’s next pitch about three-quarters of the way up into the right field bleachers.”"

At the time, the rules dictated that as soon as the winning run scored, as Mr. Neft described before, the game was over. Babe Ruth was to be awarded whichever base he had stepped on before the winning run scored. In this case, Ruth was awarded a triple.

Mr. Neft and his committee, having applied the current rule, awarded Babe Ruth one more home run, thereby increasing his career total to 715.

That wouldn’t last long.

A week later, after newspapers across the country reported that an official change to Babe Ruth’s home run total would come, Mr. Neft and his committee would receive a lot of unwanted attention. “It was probably a good thing,” Mr. Neft would say while chuckling, “probably helped to ramp up advance sales for the book.”

What Mr. Neft didn’t expect, however, was how fierce this “firestorm” would become. So much so that, according to Mr. Neft, “it caused the other members of the committee to retract what they had originally decided.” Babe Ruth’s record would be officially returned to 714.

When asked if anything else in the book had to be retracted, Mr. Neft replied simply, “This was the only thing.”

This was the only thing.