re: T or F: Babe Ruth Hit longest dinger in MLB history (575 ft)

Say what you want about distance. The HR Reggie Jackson hit in the 1971 all star game is the hardest ball I have ever seen hit. If it weren't for the lights there is no telling how far that ball would have went.

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Yeah, against others players in their era who were also part-time players plucked from a shallow talent pool. If you took 1920’s Babe Ruth and put him against pitchers like Randy Johnson, Justin Verlander, and Pedro Martinez, he wouldn’t have come close to having the career he did.

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But he hit against people like that. They were not ALL lobbing 80 mph fastballs.

The talent pool was just as deep if not moreso, as football, basketball, had not yet taken hold and skimmed off baseball players in significant numbers. The entire population was smaller, however, nearly everyone played baseball, the country was really eaten up with it in the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Hell "professional" baseball went down to class D with multiple levels of class D.

Today, minor league baseball is rookie, Low-A to AAA and then the show.

"Returning the discussion to Babe Ruth, it can be said that he defies rational analysis. Not only did he set distance records in every major league ballpark (including National League stadiums where he played only infrequently), he also set similar standards in hundreds of other fields, where he made exhibition and barnstorming appearances. Amazingly, many of those records remain unequaled, which is to say that Ruth is a true athletic anachronism. In virtually every other field of endeavor in which physical performance can be measured, there are no Ruthian equivalents. In 1921 alone, which was Ruth's best tape measure season, he hit at least one 500 foot home run in all eight American League cities. There should be no doubt about the authentication of these conclusions. Despite the scarcity of film on Ruth, we can still make definitive evaluations of the approximate landing points of all of his 714 career home runs.

Ruth played during the height of American's newspaper culture, when approximately 10 New York papers gave first hand accounts of each Yankee game. When you consider that the other baseball towns average about five comparable publications, it is clear that we can draw upon approximately 15 descriptions of most of the hundreds of four-base blows struck during his career. A suitable example can be identified in Ruth's classic Comiskey Park rooftopper on August 16, 1927. Fifteen writers from New York, Chicago, and other places emphatically stated that Ruth's fifth-inning drive cleared the 52-foot-wide grandstand roof by a considerable margin.

Although other sluggers occasionally reached the rooftops during Comiskey's long lifetime, the only other left-handed batter known to have flown the right-field roof was Detroit's Kirk Gibson in 1985. That magnitude of Ruth's accomplishment can be understood with the knowledge that, because home plate had been moved, the distance to the grandstand for Gibson was 341 feet, while for Ruth it was 365 feet. Similarly, Comiskey's left-field roof was also visited by many batted balls, but only one is confirmed to have cleared it on the fly.

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No way IMO. I seriously doubt anyone actually hit the ball further than McGwire, Canseco, Bonds, etc. at the height of the steroid era.

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Canseco had more influence on MLB than any other player short of Curt Flood.

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Canseco had more influence on MLB than any other player short of Curt Flood.

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Well also Jackie Robinson

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Well also Jackie Robinson

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Who?

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The player who the owners shamefully gave in to the PC police over

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Oh. Like Dusty Baker. Only reason I assume he has a job.

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The exact same. We all know why jackie is in the HOF and it isnt because of his play

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He barely contributed to the ‘55 team. More of a side show at that point

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I honestly don't think that modern training methods produce drastically stronger forearms and midsections than just constantly playing baseball, which is what the old guys did.

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Yep, no noticeable difference at all.

See my Tiger - Daly post above.