... so I've decided some baseball facts and history are in order! (That was meant to sound campy.) Bill Bryson is a fantastic and funny writer. I'm reading his book, One Summer: America, 1927, in which baseball just happens to be a topic...
"Hitting a baseball is hard.... A baseball thrown at 90 miles per hour hits the catcher's mitt four-tenths of a second after it leaves the pitcher's hand, which clearly does not allow much time for reflection on the batter's part. Moreover, in order to get his bat to the plate to meet the ball's arrival, the batter must start his swing at two-tenths of a second, when the ball is still only halfway there. If the pitch is a curve, nearly all its deviation will still be to come. Half of it will occur just in the last fifteen feet. If the pitch is some other sort – a fastball, change-up, or cutter, say – the ball will arrive at a fractionally different instant and at a different height. Because of friction, the ball will also lose about 5 miles per hour of speed during the course of its short journey from the pitcher's hand.... So the batter, in this preposterously fractional part of a fraction that is allotted to him for decision making, must weigh all these variables, calculate the place and moment that the ball will cross the plate, and make sure that his bat is there to meet it. The slightest miscalculation, which is what the pitcher is counting on, will result in a foul ball or pop-up or some other form of routine failure. To slap out a single is hard enough – that is why even the very best hitters fail nearly seven times out of ten – but to hit the ball with power requires confident and irreversible commitment. It was this that Babe Ruth did as no man ever had before.... 'During batting practice all the Cleveland players stopped what they were doing just to watch him hit,' Willis Hudlin, a pitcher for the Indians at the time, recalled more than seventy years later for Sports Illustrated. 'He's the only guy the players ever did that for.' ... In 1920, his first year with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs – more than any other team in the major leagues.... Although home run numbers grew generally, no one came close to matching Ruth's totals. In 1920, when Ruth hit 54, no other player hit even 20. In 1921, his 59 homers were 11 more than the next two best hitters combined.... 'So compelling is his presence at the plate, so picturesque and showy and deliciously melodramatic his every move and appearance that he is, from the point of the onlooker, a success even when he is a failure,' wrote one observer. Even his pop-ups were sensational; they were often hoisted so high that he had comfortably rounded second base before the ball dropped into an infielder's glove.... People loved him – that's genuinely not too strong a word – and not without reason. He was kind and generous, especially to children, and endearingly unpretentious.... He wasn't good-looking, but he was irresistibly charismatic... (and) he commanded a certain wit... that combined shrewdness with simplicity and innocence with penetrating perception.... His appetites for sex and food, both seemingly boundless, were a source of perennial wonder.... On the whole, he got away with his wayward lifestyle, but when he faltered, he faltered spectacularly."
— Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927
"Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.... Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.... Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games.... If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.... If I'd just tried for them dinky singles I could've batted around .600."
— Babe Ruth
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