I keep reading this lunacy of "short porch" where Babe Ruth is concerned. In every media published, printed or filmed, Ruth is widely heralded as the most powerful hitter to ever play the game.  Yet when presented with facts, those facts are ignored and yet another incredible sentence appears about the "short porch" in Yankee stadium.  This is beginning to look like a mental disorder and not a debate. Maybe it's like Bush Derangement Syndrome, only it has to do with the dimensions of Yankee stadium?  When someone is presented with facts about unrivaled performance and they respond with the dimensions of a single field as the focus of accomplishment, you begin to wonder.

But let's not rely on one fans opinion, from the Baseball Almanac,  http://www.baseball-almanac.com/feats/art_hr.shtml, we get this:

Babe Ruth, it can be said defies rational analysis. Not only did he set distance records in every major league ballpark (including National League stadiums where he played only infrequently), he also set similar standards in hundreds of other fields, where he made exhibition and barnstorming appearances. Amazingly, many of those records remain unequaled, which is to say that Ruth is a true athletic anachronism. In virtually every other field of endeavor in which physical performance can be measured, there are no Ruthian equivalents. In 1921 alone, which was Ruth's best tape measure season, he hit at least one 500 foot home run in all eight American League cities.

There should be no doubt about the authentication of these conclusions. Despite the scarcity of film on Ruth, we can still make definitive evaluations of the approximate landing points of all of his 714 career home runs.

Ruth played during the height of American's newspaper culture, when approximately 10 New York papers gave first hand accounts of each Yankee game. When you consider that the other baseball town's average about five comparable publications, it is clear that we can draw upon approximately 15 descriptions of most of the hundreds of four-base blows struck during his career. A suitable example can be identified in Ruth's classic Comiskey Park roof topper on August 16, 1927. Fifteen writers from New York, Chicago, and other places emphatically stated that Ruth's fifth-inning drive cleared the 52-foot-wide grandstand roof by a considerable margin.

Although other sluggers occasionally reached the rooftops during Comiskey's long lifetime, the only other left-handed batter known to have flown the right-field roof was Detroit's Kirk Gibson in 1985. That magnitude of Ruth's accomplishment can be understood with the knowledge that, because home plate had been moved, the distance to the grandstand for Gibson was 341 feet, while for Ruth it was 365 feet. Similarly, Comiskey's left-field roof was also visited by many batted balls, but only one is confirmed to have cleared it on the fly. That homeric deed was performed by the powerful Jimmie Foxx on June 16, 1936. As Ruth's talents waned in the early 1930s, Foxx began his ascendancy. In 1932, the muscular "Double X" almost equaled Ruth's season record of 60 home runs. Many of them even rivaled the Babe's for distance.

It was heresy to suggest that Ruth's accomplishments could be surpassed, but for a few seasons it appeared that Foxx might do just that. One of the greatest quirks in baseball history is that Jimmie Foxx, following immediately in the footsteps of Babe Ruth, was to establish the second-greatest distance legacy in the annals of the game. Foxx never quite measured up to Ruth, but it is remarkable that no once since Foxx has measured up to him. The other great distance hitters of that period were Lou Gehrig and Hank Greenberg, but their optimum drives fell about 50 feet short of those struck by Ruth and Foxx.

But what do those guys at the Baseball Almanac know.  Yankee Stadium had a short porch so Ruth was a pipsqueak hitter, right?

This from the Scranton/Wilkes Barr newspaper.

It's one thing to prefer another player or condone drug use or like to eat cheese dogs.  But to just keep refusing the delivery of facts and continue to write inanities, well, some people will NEVER know right from wrong.

For those who are capable of learning, and some obviously are not, I strongly suggest Bill Jenkinson's "The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs". It's a rather starry eyed look at Ruth, but the documentation is absolute, complete with photos of the titanic shots he hit,  footnoted to death and an overall great read. The conclusions are factual and any suggestions that he was seriously aided by the "short porch" are dispelled. Every player sneaks one over the fence sometime. But for Babe Ruth that was the exception to the Sultan of Swat's rule: GO DEEP!