Babe Ruth clubs his first major league homer

When the New York Yankees arrived at the Polo Grounds to begin their first three-game set with the Boston Red Sox in 1915, they had only a faint idea of what to expect from Boston’s starting pitcher.

As it turned out, there was another side of the young southpaw named “Ruth” that the Yankees weren’t prepared for – his bat.

It was on May 6, 1915 that Babe Ruth hit his first of 714 major league home runs. Tabbed by the Red Sox to win the game with his arm, not his bat, the rookie hurler flashed the kind of prodigious power at the plate that would make him the most famous slugger in history.

The game was scoreless and the bases were empty in the top of the third inning when George Herman Ruth stepped up to the plate against Yankee right-hander Jack Warhop. It was only his 18th major league at-bat, and while he had notched three doubles earlier that season, surely few people at the Polo Grounds expected much pop from a hitting pitcher. Only Ruth’s former teammates in Baltimore, with whom he had played during Ruth’s brief International League days, knew of the clout he possessed.

But when Warhop wound up and delivered his first offering, Ruth smacked it with a sound that made the 8,000 in attendance gasp.

“In the third inning, Ruth knocked the slant out of one of Jack Warhop's underhanded subterfuges,” wrote Damon Runyan in the next day’s New York American, “and put the baseball in the right field stands for a home run."

Ruth’s slam cut through the chilly spring air and landed in the second tier of the Polo Grounds’ right-field grandstands. It was a left-handed swing that the young Ruth would later employ, ironically, to christen the original Yankee Stadium and repeat many times over in the Bronx.

"Mr. Warhop of the Yankees," wrote Wilmot Giffin in the New York Evening Journal, "looked reproachfully at the opposing pitcher who was so unclubby as to do a thing like that to one of his own trade. But Ruthless Ruth seemed to think that all was fair in the matter of fattening a batting average."