Most people don’t understand how critical that is
What drove that point home to me was a trip to the Ruth museum in Baltimore (back before Baltimore was a war zone). They have a plexiglass case holding two bats upright, one the Babe's and the other Cal Ripken's, and there are holes in the case so you can grasp each hat by the handle and heft it.
What was astonishing (to me anyway) wasn't so much how heavy the babe's bat was, it was how much thicker it was at the handle. It felt like I was grasping a wooden fencepost. Nowadays, all the weight is concentrated in the barrel. The handles are thin and fragile, but no matter if you break one at every at-bat because the bat company has a van with a wood lathe and bat blanks in the parking lot and they will make you a new one in five minutes. In Ruth's day it wasn't unheard of for one bat to last a player an entire season.
Ruth's heaviest bat was 54 ounces. That's a full pound heavier than Barry Bond's bat was.
The Babe Ruth museum also had a display case of balls signed by the big hitters. I stood there and read every signature on every ball. Some were old and faded and you had to study on them a while to figure out who's signature it was. But the one that surprised me the most was signed by Sadaharu Oh. Which I found not only extremely diplomatic of the museum curator, honoring a player who never played in the American majors because he exceeded the Babe's record showed that both that museum and the sport of baseball are (or at least once were) bigger even than The Bambino.
Interesting facts, thanks for sharing.
54 oz. bat.......that’s more of a CLUB. LOL!
i love the babe ruth museum... the list of each homerun showed that yes, whenever ruth batted, the fans expected a homerun, with him having many multiple homers per game...
and yes his bat was like a fence post that he could swing effectively.