Interesting article about Hot Springs, Ark., site of Babe Ruth's first 500'+ HR.

"Baseball spring training" first started in the Arkansas Spa City in 1886. The Yankees would send Babe to HS to "dry out" from his winterly consumptions. Which is ironic, as HS was full of bath houses, casinos, horse racing, golf . . . . and booze.






Hot Springs makes case for Babe Ruth homer

If accurate, hit would be first home run of more than 500 feet

By: Mark Gregory - The Sentinel-Record -Published: 03/16/2011

RUTH’S SHOT: From left, baseball historian Bill Jenkinson speaks at the site of home plate at the former Whittington Park on Tuesday as Jack Bridges, owner of the Arkansas Alligator Farm, and Larry DeWitt, chairman of the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission, hold a sign commemorating a 573-foot home run hit there by Babe Ruth on St. Patrick’s Day in 1918.

The Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau made the case Tuesday that Babe Ruth hit a 573-foot home run from the former Whittington Park across the street to the Arkansas Alligator Farm on St. Patrick’s Day 1918.

If true, it would be the first home run of more than 500 feet in baseball history, the first 500-foot-plus home run in Ruth’s career, and one of the longest “tape measure home runs” ever hit, said Steve Arrison, CEO of the CVB.

Bill Jenkinson, primary historical consultant for the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum in Baltimore, Md., who has called the shot “the day that changed baseball forever,” said Tuesday that he does not know if the ball traveled exactly 573 feet, but it “certainly is somewhere close to that,” which he called a “credible number.”

“Until that day, I am 100 percent certain that no human being had ever hit a ball close to 500 feet in the air, and I’m also sure, from studying the historical context, that it was assumed no human being ever would,” said Jenkinson, who has also served as a consultant for ESPN, The Society for American Baseball Research, and Baseball Hall of Fame.

“We’re standing in a place where the culture of our country changed, certainly where the world of sport changed, and it is all demonstrable by way of historical fact,” Jenkinson said.

Jenkinson joined the CVB in a press conference held at the site of the former Whittington Park, now a parking lot for Weyerhaeuser Co. located across Whittington Avenue from the Alligator Farm, to announce the distance.

The stone benches from the park’s bleachers that stretched down the left field line still stand on the hillside. The field was built in 1894.

A home plate was spray-painted onto the asphalt for Tuesday’s press conference to mark where Ruth stood.

“We know that this is where home plate was, and we know that the ball landed on the fly in the Alligator Farm,” Jenkinson said.

The CVB hired B&F Engineering of Hot Springs to determine the distance of the home run.

Jonathan B. Hamner, a certified Arkansas professional surveyor with B&F, said there was a “small problem” with the CVB’s request. “We didn’t have home plate; the field’s not here any more.” The only thing remaining unchanged from that era were the ponds in the Alligator Farm.

Jack Bridges, owner of the Arkansas Alligator Farm, said the alligator ponds are in the same locations today as they were in 1918.

Bridges said the alligators would have been hibernating inside the farm in 1918, otherwise, “they might have ate the danged thing.”

Hamner said B&F, using old photographs, including old aerial photography, was able to see the old base paths, the old pitcher’s mound, and the remnants of the grandstand.

The measurements, according to the CVB, were derived from GPS information from U.S. and Russian satellites and other equipment that allows positional accuracy of less than one tenth of a foot.

The distance of the home run was reported to the nearest foot to allow for minor inaccuracies in the location of home plate or where the ball quit rolling, the CVB said in a press release issued Tuesday.

“When that happened, baseball went into a sea change which hasn’t stopped moving since then. Up until that moment, most big-league teams were looking for players with speed, skill and guile, and Ruth, of course, came up and said, ‘To heck with all that. I’m just going to swing as hard as I can all the time and hit the ball as far as I can all the time,’” Jenkinson said.

“Not only did he change the way the game was played competitively, he changed the way the game was approached financially. Attendance records were broken all over the country wherever he played, wherever he appeared, and the owners quickly got used to what was going on and said ‘Find me the next Babe Ruth,’” Jenkinson said.

“We’re still playing the power game. Speed is still, of course, important, but not like power,” he said.

The home run occurred during an exhibition game between Ruth’s Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Ruth, 23 at the time, was the best left-handed pitcher in the American League, said Mike Dugan, of Hot Springs, a member of the Brooks Robinson-George Kell Chapter of Society for American Baseball Research.

Dugan is also a member of SABR’s Dead Ball Era Committee, which covers 1900 to 1920. “Dead ball” refers to the soft baseballs used during that era.

“It didn’t go anywhere. The league leader in home runs most years had eight, 10 or 12,” Dugan.

Jenkinson said Ruth’s shot was assisted by about a 5- to 10-mph breeze that was blowing basically out to center field.

He hit a second home run a week later, to the same area, also against the Dodgers, Jenkinson said.

Jenkinson said it was difficult to say if the ball would have flown further if Ruth was not hitting a “dead ball,” but while there is no “scientific answer” to that question, he said an additional 30 feet would be a “fair projection.”

Jenkinson also noted that neither Barry Bonds nor Jose Canseco, two “muscle men” of recent baseball history, never recorded a 500-foot home run in their careers.

Gregg Patterson, editor of Arkansas Farm Bureau’s Front Porch magazine and baseball historian, said his uncle, Arthur “Red” Patterson, public relations director of the New York Yankees in 1953, retrieved the ball and estimated the distance of Mickey Mantle’s gargantuan shot off Senators pitcher Chuck Stobbs in Washington, D.C., at 565 feet.

His uncle never took a tape measure to it, but the term grew out of the incident, which Patterson said has been measured, and re-measured, and argued about ever since.

Spring training in Hot Springs dates back to 1886 when Cap Anson, the manager and Hall of Fame player for the Chicago White Stockings, which later became the Chicago Cubs, brought his team to Hot Springs to “boil out” the winter. Dugan said it was the first time a major league team had ventured out of their home environment to train elsewhere, making Hot Springs the “starting point” for spring training.

Through the years, almost all of the original 16 Major League teams came to Hot Springs for spring training, but none more than the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The last complete team trip was made to Hot Springs about 1930; the combination of unpredictable weather and gambling helped end spring training here, Dugan said.