The Bambino’s Cheap Shots

October 21, 2004

Last night, October 20, 2004, I watched the baseball game I’ve been waiting to see for fifty years.

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No, I’m neither a Yankee-hater nor a Red Sox fan. I was rooting for the Red Sox for an odd reason, and it’s not just that I like to see liberals happy once in a while.

When I was a boy, I was nuts about baseball. I studied its history, memorized statistics, and even invented a board game, giving each player his own odds on the dice. For example, a roll of 10 was a home run for Mickey Mantle, who homered about every 12 times at bat.

One of the facts about baseball that fascinated me was that no team had ever come back to win the World Series after losing the first three games. I wondered if I’d live to see it happen.

Last night it finally did, sort of, as the Red Sox whipped the Yankees in the seventh game of their play-off series. I doubt they can repeat this feat in the actual World Series, but winning the pennant this way is close enough to suit me. What’s more, I managed to stay awake all the way. No, I wasn’t on steroids, just adrenalin. Which brings me to my topic.

“Reverse the curse!” the Sox fans cried, and in a way it happened. Boston’s Johnny Damon popped a cheapissimo grand slam into the short seats in the right field corner, 314 feet from the plate. Not exactly a steroid blast, but it was a blow the Yankees never recovered from. (For good measure, Damon later added another blast that would have been a homer in the Grand Canyon.)

For several days I’ve been taking heat for a recent column in which I marveled at Barry Bonds’s amazing batting records this year. Many readers are scolding me for failing to mention that Bonds owes his miraculous performance to steroids.

[Breaker quote: Steroids? He had something better.]

[Breaker quote: Steroids? He had something better.]

Well, I was giving him the benefit of doubt; the charge isn’t proved. But I have to concede it’s truly hard to believe he’s never touched the stuff, all things considered. And many fans passionately believe he hasn’t honestly earned the right to be compared to Babe Ruth. Players his age just don’t improve in both power and reflexes the way Bonds has late in his career. And Bonds’s face has become almost unrecognizably different from the way it used to look — another sign, they say, of steroid use. Imagine Ruth on steroids! (Imagine his face!)

Before we fill the record book with asterisks, as some angry fans want to do, let’s consider a basic fact about baseball: It’s full of anomalies. One reason statistics aren’t always reliable measures of ability is that every park is different. Boston’s Fenway Park, with its Green Monster of a wall in left field, is the most famous example.

But another example is Yankee Stadium. Its nickname is “the House That Ruth Built.” It would be more accurate to call it “the House That Was Built for Ruth.” When Ruth came to the Yankees, the game’s first sensational slugger, the team’s owners realized they needed a new ballpark to accommodate the huge public that wanted to see him play. The result was Yankee Stadium.

Since the rules concerning outfield fences were pretty latitudinarian in those days, the field was made horribly lopsided. Left field was huge, in order to frustrate right-handed hitters, but right field was short, to allow Ruth to get home runs on balls that would otherwise have been outs or doubles.

Steroids may give a hitter an unfair edge, but so does tailoring a whole stadium to his specifications. If Bonds’s records are tainted, so are Ruth’s. It’s reasonable to suppose that Ruth owed 150 or so of his career home runs — about 10 per season in his House — to that short fence. And it’s no coincidence that Ruth’s season home-run record was broken by another left-handed Yankee hitter, Roger Maris in 1961.

Yankee Stadium’s dimensions have been slightly modified over the years, but they remain wildly asymmetrical. That’s what added a delicious irony to last night’s game: The Red Sox took a crushing lead when Damon hit one over the short fence that was put there for the convenience of the Yankees’ greatest slugger. Talk about reversing the curse!

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
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