Baseball · 1932 · Chicago, USA
The Called Shot
Heckled hard from the Chicago Cubs' dugout, Babe Ruth gestures towards the outfield and then hits a home run to roughly that spot, and people have argued about what he meant for nearly a century.
Yankees swept Cubs 4-0
Result
5th
Inning
Charlie Root
Pitcher
Game 3 of the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field was hostile even by the standards of the rivalry. The Cubs had spent the series taunting Babe Ruth and the Yankees over a contract dispute involving a former Yankee, and both the Chicago dugout and the crowd rode him through his first two at-bats.
In the fifth inning, with two strikes on him, Ruth raised a hand and pointed at something. The Cubs' bench, the pitcher, the direction of centre field: accounts from the people who were there differed that same evening and have never fully agreed since. Charlie Root threw the next pitch and Ruth hit it near the flagpole in deep centre field, one of the longest home runs struck at Wrigley to that point.
The newspapers printed it as a called shot, a man pointing at the exact spot where the ball would land. Ruth answered the question differently for the rest of his life, confirming the legend to some and waving it off for others, and Root always denied it had happened that way. Nearly a century on, nobody can prove either of them.
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