The Babe's biographer explains why the 60-homer barrier looms as large as the legend of George Herman Ruth

by Robert W. Creamer

Mark McGwire hits home runs in a world very different from the one Babe Ruth gloried in 70 years ago. That's obvious, I suppose, but it's amazing how people try to force parallels between the two in an effort to compare them. There are some similarities, of course. Like McGwire, Ruth was a big, powerful man of distinctive appearance who was recognized and cheered whenever he appeared on the field. Fans came to the ballpark early to watch the Babe hit balls over the fence in batting practice, just as they do with McGwire, and they often left the game after Ruth's last time at bat, just as they do with McGwire.

But the differences are enormous. While Ruth was a huge drawing card, he did not experience the overwhelming media coverage that McGwire faces every day and that Roger Maris endured in 1961 when he broke Ruth's record of 60 homers in a season. Unlike Maris and McGwire, Ruth played baseball in a world that had no television sets and few radios, no nightly sports highlight show, no TV cameras and tape recorders catching his every word and action.

There were plenty of newspaper reporters around. Newspapers—not radio or TV—were where the fans in the 1920s got their baseball news. But the newspapers' job was to report each game in inning-by-inning detail; postgame interviews were a minor part of the baseball coverage. Thus, players did not look on reporters as pests or antagonists, and except on rare occasions the press exerted little pressure on the exuberant, outspoken Ruth. His volatile remarks and obscenities were carefully coated with euphemism, or excluded in entirety. The Babe wasn't afraid to pop off, didn't have to be careful of what he said to reporters. He wasn't besieged, wasn't nagged by the same questions day after day, as Maris was and McGwire is.

In short, it was easier for the Babe. He had comparatively little pressure. In 1920 when he shattered the old home run record of 29 by hitting 54, and in 1921 when he topped that with 59, no one else was in the same ballpark with him as far as hitting home runs was concerned. There was no Ruth and Maris ahead, no Griffey and Sosa close behind.

In 1927 Ruth had his first direct challenge. Teammate Lou Gehrig fought him toe to toe from Opening Day until the middle of August, when Lou led Babe 38 homers to 36 (more than six weeks behind McGwire's 1998 pace). But Gehrig only hit nine the rest of the way while Ruth roared ahead, smacking 24 homers in 41 games. "60!" the exuberant Ruth shouted in the clubhouse after the big one. "Count 'em, 60! Let's see some other son of a bitch match that!"

Roger Maris matched it and surpassed it in 1961, but he didn't get a tenth of the joy out of it that Ruth did. The Babe loved the spotlight. Roger shied away from it. He hated the attention, the intrusion, the pressures that his 61 homers brought into his life.

Ruth loved all of it. Yet in 1928, the season after he hit 60, even the great Babe seemed to feel the strain. In the first half of the season he produced home runs at a furious rate. He hit his 30th in the Yankees' 67th game, on June 28, and his 40th on July 23. He was an astonishing 28 games ahead of his 1927 pace and seemed certain to breeze past 60. And then he stopped. He hit only 14 more during the rest of the season. I don't know why. Maybe it was just a slump. But maybe it was because, for the first time, Ruth had that big 60 out there ahead of him as a target, and the pressure got to him. He finished the season with only 54 and never again hit as many as 50.

Think of the pressures today. It's no easy job Mark McGwire has ahead of him.