The Called Shot
Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932
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- €29.99
Publisher Description
Best Baseball Book of 2020 from Sports Collectors Digest
2021 Seymour Medal Finalist
In the summer of 1932, at the beginning of the turbulent decade that would remake America, baseball fans were treated to one of the most thrilling seasons in the history of the sport. As the nation drifted deeper into the Great Depression and reeled from social unrest, baseball was a diversion for a troubled country—and yet the world of baseball was marked by the same edginess that pervaded the national scene.
On-the-field fights were as common as double plays. Amid the National League pennant race, Cubs’ shortstop Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Violet Popovich in a Chicago hotel room. When the regular season ended, the Cubs and Yankees clashed in what would be Babe Ruth’s last appearance in the fall classic. After the Cubs lost the first two games in New York, the series resumed in Chicago at Wrigley Field, with Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt cheering for the visiting Yankees from the box seats behind the Yankees’ dugout.
In the top of the fifth inning the game took a historic turn. As Ruth was jeered mercilessly by Cubs players and fans, he gestured toward the outfield and then blasted a long home run. After Ruth circled the bases, Roosevelt exclaimed, “Unbelievable!” Ruth’s homer set off one of baseball’s longest-running and most intense debates: did Ruth, in fact, call his famous home run?
Rich with historical context and detail, The Called Shot dramatizes the excitement of a baseball season during one of America’s most chaotic summers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wolf (coauthor, Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland), delivers a solid and exciting look at the 1932 baseball season, "one of the most remarkable seasons in the history of the sport." Wolf chronicles the on-field heroics in that season's tight race that led to the New York Yankees meeting the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, which the Yankees won in a four-game sweep, and whose game three is now legendary for Babe Ruth's "called shot," when Ruth "somewhat ambiguously" pointed toward the Cubs players in outfield before hitting a home run over their heads. But the beauty of Wolf's work is how he seamlessly connects the day-to-day grind of a sport whose teams still "principally traveled from one city to another by train" with the changing, post-Depression world beyond the ballpark ("As the homeless suffered in crudely made shelters... most of America watched to see what would happen in the conventions being held in Chicago" in 1932), with cameo appearances by Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wolf also provides an excellent look at how Ruth transformed from the excellent Yankee pitcher who lost to the Cubs in the 1918 World Series into the legendary slugger of 1932. Baseball fans will delight in this thrillingly told history.
