Babe Ruth’s 700th Home Run.
A 2-run shot off Tommy Bridges in the top of the 3rd in a game against the Tigers at Detroit, July 13, 1934.
Final Score: New York 4 – Detroit 2.
A Detailed List of Babe Ruth’s 714 Career HR
Baseball Reference.com and Baseball Almanac.com are both baseball data reference sites that many of us who love, live, write, read, and breathe the history of the game would hate to live without. They do so much of the work for us in our needs for research and writing. They don’t simply gather information. They each present their material in flexible, usable ways. And they keep up those data files that change multiply each day of the regular season. No longer is it necessary to be totally on the static, time-limited data of MacMillan’s hard copy encyclopedia and then do all the updating manually by your own time-eating system.
Thank goodness for the digital age.
Let’s say you want to write an article or pursue another book on baseball’s favorite hero-player subject, Babe Ruth, and his career home run journey. The following link should give you everything you need to help decide what else you need to research before you are ready to outline and write your piece. The expansiveness of the available data by year, career, by game box score, by the pitchers involved in 714 instances, and so much more – are all right there for us to use, miss, or dismiss.:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/event_hr.cgi?id=ruthba01
Much of the credit for Baseball Reference.com’s vivid presentation of the Ruth career home run data is systemically connected to much earlier pioneer research and the ability of SABR to convert that earlier work into the SABR Home Run Encyclopedia. Here’s how that relationship is described near the bottom of that very page you have just linked:
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About the SABR Home Run Encyclopedia
Much of the data on Baseball-Reference.com’s Home Run Logs comes from the Tattersall/McConnell Home Run Log, a database of all homers hit in the major leagues since 1876. This project was begun in the 1940’s by John C. Tattersall and was continued after Tattersall’s death in 1981 by Bob McConnell, one of SABR’s original 16 members. David Vincent, another SABR member, has since assumed the leadership of the project. Baseball-Reference.com has licensed this remarkable database from the Society for American Baseball Research. All credit for the data therein goes to the intrepid researchers who digitized this data from archival sources.
For years from 1913 to 2016, RetroSheet play-by-play data has been used whenever the home run occurred in a game for which we have complete play-by-play data.
There are a handful of cases where the home run logs totals do not agree with the totals on our player pages. We are working to reconcile all of those differences, but believe that in all cases the Home Run Encyclopedia is correct.
~ Baseball Reference.com notation on page linked above.
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Have fun with the Babe Ruth Career Home Run page. And please share with us the questions or observations this data brings to your own minds. We find it almost impossible to go there and not see something that piques our curiosity in a way it never had previously. This time I’m looking at Babe Ruth’s home runs by inning and wondering – What made the 1st inning Babe’s favorite time to go long? He hit 133 homers in the first, but did not achieve triple digit figures in any other stanza, and only once did he hit as many as 94 in the same inning, when he notched those in the 3rd. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that the 1st inning was the only time in any game that #3 hitter deluxe Babe Ruth was sure to come up. That explanatory guess is supported by the fact that, batting 3rd, he rarely came up to bat in the 2nd inning, where his total for that frame was only 21 over the course of his career.
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Publisher, Editor, Writer
The Pecan Park Eagle
The Pecan Park Eagle 
December 19, 2016 at 7:54 pm |
For a fascinating chronicle of the distance each of Ruth’s homers traveled, among other data, I can recommend “The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs”, by Bill Jenkinson. While I can’t comment on the quality of the research methods he describes (one way or the other), the book nevertheless was immensely entertaining, and well-illustrated with diagrams, photos and assumed trajectories and distances, and the reader is left with a sense of awe about the unusual strength and/or bat speed Ruth generated. Wait until you see that shot in Detroit that exited the ballpark over the center field stands!
December 19, 2016 at 11:44 pm |
We are always thrown the same comment, guys in that era couldn’t play now. Um,why don’t the Prima Donnas of this era go back and play in the Babe’s era. Trains, no AC, wool uniforms, not very good medical attention for athletes, so so food. It seems the Babe’s era always has to move ahead. OK they would have had the same training, travel conditions, diet, ac , night games and no double headers, medical attention , and Salaries….too bad it’s a moot point.The BBe Rocked……