11. Babe Ruth’s called shot became a baseball legend.
The 1932 World Series featured the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees. In game three, held on the afternoon of October 1 at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Babe Ruth hit a towering home run over 440 feet. Prior to the hit, Ruth had been responding to heckling from the Cub’s dugout, raising his fingers to correspond with the strike count after the first two pitches. After the second strike and Ruth’s two raised fingers, he pointed toward the area where he hit the home run on the next pitch. Despite being witnessed by 50,000 in attendance (the Cubs installed temporary seating for overflow crowds), and captured on film, whether Ruth “called the shot” is still debated. Among the witnesses were then Presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, future Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (who was 12 years old), and Commissioner Landis.
FDR and Commissioner Landis never commented publicly on whether Ruth had or had not called his shot. John Paul Stevens claimed he did. So did multiple newspaper reporters, and the story made headlines around the country. Ruth responded to questions of whether the gesture had been indicating he would hit a home run to that spot by saying, “It’s in the papers, isn’t it?” The pitcher victimized by the home run, Charlie Root, always argued the called shot was fiction. But most of the country believed it. Ruth lapped up the publicity and embellished the story several times in later years. The Curtiss Candy Company took advantage of the story by installing a Baby Ruth Candy Bar sign near the spot where the ball landed. The sign remained part of the Wrigley Field landscape for several decades.