Met and chatted with with Ben Chapmans son over the weekend...........

[MacDice]

Always love hearing old baseball stories from the family members. You should ask him if he would be interested in doing a formal interview and recorded it. The stories that were to told to him by has dad should be documented if nothing more than for the future generation of his family. Once he passes away a lot of those stories also die.

Please post the pictures when you get them.

[barrysloate]

I always felt if Root believed that Ruth was predicting he would hit a home run on the next pitch, the pitcher would have thrown him a high and tight fastball, a little chin music. In that circumstance, why give him a pitch to hit? Plus, I always believed that story was a little too good to be true. Great piece of baseball folklore, but maybe it never happened that way. We'll never know for sure.

[tedzan]

It is my understanding that Charley Root was a proud and "cockY' guy. If Babe Ruth did indeed point to where he was going to hit
the next pitch, Charlie Root would have dared him to do it by giving him his best pitch.

For example, take the other nite at Arlington, Texas. After Pujols hit 2 HR's, wouldn't you think that the Rangers would either WALK
him....or give him nothing sweet to hit ?

That's BASEBALL for you.


TED Z

[barrysloate]

Hi Ted- I thought of that too, that he may have felt Ruth couldn't hit his best pitch and challenged him. The Called Shot is one of baseball's most enduring myths, and we will probably never know for sure what happened at that moment.

[Jay Wolt]

JB Thanks for the post.

[Fred]

Cool story - thanks for sharing that.

[tedzan]

If this event was real, and not a myth, Charley Root would never, ever admit to it.

Here's what Gabby Hartnett (in his first World Series) said of Ruth's "called shot"......

"I don't want to take anything away from the Babe, but he didn't call the shot. He held up the index finger of his left hand,
looked at our dugout, not at center field, and said, `It only takes one to hit it.'" For what it's worth, existing film seems to
back Gabby's account."


WHATEVER......Ruth's HR traveled 490 feet and was the very last HR that the Babe hit in World Series play.


TED Z

[barrysloate]

A cool story either way...490 feet is a wallop!

[glchen]

Last year, Hunt sold a Babe Ruth "Called Shot" scrapbook with player autographs and hand-written accounts of what happened: Link

In that scrapbook, Ben Chapman wrote: "No he did not call his shot, but he could have, he was the greatest."