Rare footage shows Babe Ruth catching a ball dropped from an airplane
Brian Murphy
@Spokes_MurphyHappy birthday, Babe Ruth!
Eighty-nine years after he played his last MLB game, the Bambino¡¯s legendary presence remains unparalleled in baseball. So let¡¯s contribute to it today by highlighting one of his more amazing, if also overlooked, feats.
This has nothing to do with any of the Sultan of Swat¡¯s historic homers. Instead, let¡¯s watch The Babe catch a fly ball.
Dropped from hundreds of feet above.
From a moving airplane.
As the narrator points out, Ruth risked a fractured skull if he misjudged one of the plummeting baseballs. But of course, because this is Babe Ruth, he made the grab with relative ease.
On July 22, 1926, Ruth became the first person to catch a baseball flung from an airplane. The achievement, mentioned in this story about Ruth¡¯s influential agent, landed the slugger on the front page of The New York Times. It¡¯s not certain that this video is from the same day, but that doesn¡¯t subtract from its awesomeness.