Once again a headline jumped out at me and I just had to go for the receipts. One man was responding to Babe Ruth’s impressive feat saying slow down, chief, I did it even better…

Let’s get into it.

At Mitchel Field in July 1926, an Army plane flew over 100 miles an hour, 250 feet above Babe Ruth. The plane dropped seven regulation baseballs. Ruth caught one, after being knocked down by two others trying.

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Impressive. But Ruth was late to baseball's strangest contest, and nowhere near the top of it.

In 1908, Washington catcher Charley "Gabby" Street stood beneath the Washington Monument while baseballs fell more than 500 feet toward the concrete below. The first ten missed on the south side, glare off the granite made the balls impossible to track, some bounced nearly fifty feet on impact. Three more missed on the north side. On the fourteenth attempt, Street got underneath one and held on. He played that afternoon's game anyway, and helped beat Detroit. Earlier players had claimed similar catches before him, but none could produce witnesses. Street's, done in front of a crowd, went down as the first ever verified.

Ten years later, in 1918, Army Corporal Bessolo of the 819th aero squadron caught a ball dropped 700 feet from a biplane at Kelly Field, Texas. More than three dozen balls were wasted first, hitting sandy soil and going dead. When one finally curved toward him, he caught it almost directly overhead, "a most dangerous position," the paper noted, since a miss would have struck him in the face rather than his glove. The impact drove his hands back to his own chest. He said it felt like an electric shock.

The record held. Two months later, fifty soldiers in France attempted to break it from a plane climbing to 900 feet. Every one of them failed. One man got his mitt under the ball but couldn't hold it. The papers covering the attempt called Bessolo "still world's champion high catcher."

Eight years after Bessolo's catch, a Washington newspaper ran a photograph beside Ruth's own achievement under a headline that wasn't congratulatory at all. This was the headline I started the day with and led me to reading about a bunch of men trying to catch baseballs from airplanes. Welcome to my Tuesday.

Ruth's catch was real. It just came eight years late, and 450 feet short.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources

Washington Herald, August 22, 1908
Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer, June 13, 1918
Omaha Evening Bee, September 10, 1918
The Evening Review, July 22, 1926
The Evening Sun (Hanover, PA), July 24, 1926
Washington Times, August 18, 1926