Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: The year of the 180-foot homer.

Uncle Scoopy's Ballpark: The year of the 180-foot homer.

I drilled deep into the Well of Obscurity for this one. When Babe Ruth hit 29 homers in 1919, he beat the old record of 27 set by Ned Williamson. At least that's how modern historians view it. The writers of Ruth's time however, thought he was chasing the "official" National League record of 25 (or maybe 26, because scoring was loosey-goosey in those days) set by Buck Freeman. It was only after Ruth passed ol' Bucko that people started wondering about the old days and combing through the old box scores.

They knew exactly where to look for the likely record. The Chicago White Stockings, predecessors of today's Cubs franchise, had exactly one year when they were able to hit 180-foot homers, which is a fly-out in little league. To make matters worse, hitting a ball in that direction was almost always backed with a breeze off the lake, so even routine pop-ups could end up as homers on Michigan Avenue. It turns out that four of the White Stocks had topped 20 on the homer ledger that year, topped by Williamson's 27. He hit 25 at home, two on the road. Williamson had hit only three homers the previous year, and would revert to three the following year, so his 27 made him the Brady Anderson of his own generation.

This article is about that year, but it is also about a great team. Between 1880-1886, the White Stockings won the championship in all five years that they weren't in that park. (The 180-foot homers did them no favors.) The article is also about an exciting time trapped between antiquity and modernity, when a burgeoning country was going mad for a baseball game not quite like the one we know today, and a great city was recovering from a catastrophic fire and growing in an unexpected direction - by pushing one of the mighty Great Lakes farther away!