The following essay was published in the first issue of the Outsider Baseball Bulletin back on June 8, 2010, and recently appeared in the Agate Type newsletter.

When Babe Ruth smashed the single-season home run record with 54 in 1920, he was of course breaking his own record of 29, established just the year before. 1919 was really the year when Ruth firmly established his reputation as a slugger. That was the year he became known primarily as a home-run hitter, and the year his home run count became a running, day-to-day story. It’s true that 1920 was the Big Bang of the lively-ball era, but the “Little Bang” of 1919 was an important premonition.

But if Ruth’s 1919 tends to be overlooked, Pete Hill’s 1919 has been utterly forgotten.

John Preston Hill, veteran outfielder and long-time captain of Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants, had just become the founding player-manager of the new Detroit Stars. For a decade he had played most of his games within the very spacious and offense-killing confines of Schorling Park, the former White Sox Park on Chicago’s South Side. The Stars, by contrast, had moved into a former semipro field called Mack Park, with a very cozy right-field porch. Our colleague Kevin Johnson recently uncovered a Sanborn fire insurance map of Mack Park.

Ballpark expert Ron Selter estimates the distance down the right field line as 265 feet, with 278 feet to straightaway right, and 318 feet to right center. (Center field and left field were, obviously, more spacious: 358 feet down the left field line, and 444 feet to the center fielder corner, slightly left of straightaway center field.)

The 37-year-old Hill installed himself as center fielder and cleanup hitter, and started feasting on semipro and blackball pitching. He hit his first known home run of 1919 on April 27 against the Northway Motors semiprofessional team, driving it not to right but over the center field fence, a feat that had been accomplished at Mack Park only once before in its decade of existence (by fellow Hall of Famer Cristóbal Torriente, as it happens). It was during a series with the Cuban Stars in June that Hill really served notice of what was to come. He knocked out four home runs in the first three games of the series, including one on June 8 that the Detroit Free Press called “the longest ever seen at Mack park.” When Hill only managed a “beautiful double” in game four, the Free Press was moved to comment that “Captain Hill failed to get his customary homer.”

On June 26 Hill beat the Cuban Stars with an eleventh-inning, three-run shot. By July 7 the Free Press noted of a game against Joe Green’s Chicago Giants that “Captain Pete Hill waited seven innings before he got his regular home run. No game is official unless the stocky captain of the Detroit team hits the ball out of the lot.” On July 16, with the Stars traveling on the East Coast, Hill hit another extra-inning, three-run game-winner against the Bacharach Giants, according to the Free Press the “longest home run ever seen in the Atlantic City park.”

In the meantime Babe Ruth was beginning to attract notice for his home run count. He hit his tenth in St. Louis on July 10. When he reached 15 on July 24, James C. O’Leary of the Boston Globe contended that “if he keeps up to his present form there is no doubt but what he will break all home run records…”

Three days later, on July 27, the Detroit Free Press previewed an upcoming series between the Detroit Stars and Hill’s old team, the Chicago American Giants. Hill and the Giants’ Cristóbal Torriente were singled out as “rivals of Babe Ruth for slugging honors of the season.” Hill, the article said, “now has 16 home runs to his credit, two more than the slugging outfielder-pitcher of the Boston Red Sox, in addition to a large collection of triples and doubles. He is a real clouter, who seldom hits the ball for a single but drives it far out when he connects, which is very often….”

Hill was really only one ahead of Ruth at this point (16 to 15). His total included games against all opposition, most played in a very favorable park, while Ruth’s home games were in Fenway, at that point not an easy home run park, particularly for lefthanded hitters. On the other hand the Red Sox by late July may have played nearly twice as many games as the Stars.

Pete Hill maintained his lead over Babe Ruth into August. The Babe hit his 16^th against the Detroit Tigers at Fenway on July 29, while Hill upped his total to 18 the next day against the American Giants at Mack Park. By August 4 Hill was ahead 20 to 16. He then went through a drought that lasted for nearly three weeks, although he continued to hold the lead until Ruth finally got his 20^th on August 23—at Detroit’s Navin Field, as it happens. Ruth went on a tear against the Tigers, hitting two more the next day and adding another on August 25, making four in three games in Detroit and giving him the lead on Hill. He wouldn’t relinquish it again on his way to a major-league record 29.

It was precisely at this time that the Free Press, or whoever was writing press releases for the Detroit Stars, lost interest in Pete Hill’s home run count, although he continued hitting them (three more through season’s end have been found so far). Writing in the Defender the following year, Hill would say that he fell “one short” of Ruth’s total in 1919, which would give him 28 home runs in the Stars’ 80 games in 1919 (compared to Ruth’s 29 in Boston’s 138 games).

Of these 28 home runs, we’ve so far been able to find 19 recorded in contemporary newspapers. Fully 16 of these were against the toughest class of opposition faced by the Stars—Black professional teams of the highest level, the equivalent of the Negro leagues (which, of course, didn’t exist yet). He accounted for fully half his team’s home runs. In the 24 games with box scores he played against the “Black majors” at Mack Park, Hill hit 14 home runs. Overall, he hit .393/.488/.874 in 37 games against this class of opponent. (The averages for western Black clubs that year were .247/.324/.344.) By contrast, over the three previous years (1916 to 1918), Hill had hit .274/.385/.359 with the American Giants’ Schorling Park as his home field, with a grand total of two home runs in 139 games. (See the Agate Type newsletter for a spreadsheet detailing these breakdowns.)

Let me be clear. I’m not arguing that Pete Hill was better than Babe Ruth in 1919. While Hill was certainly a great player, he was taking advantage of weaker opposition than Ruth faced in a park that was very, very favorable to him. What’s significant about Hill’s 1919 season is that it seems to have been the first outburst of true power-hitting in the history of top-level black professional ball. As such, I think you can argue that it marks the dawn of the lively-ball era in the Negro leagues. And it’s worth noting that it came about in a very different way than the Ruth-led home run explosion in the white majors. That was the result, not only of Ruth’s singular talent, but also of his stubborn insistence on swinging for the fences in virtually every at bat. Ruth’s insight, if you want to call it that, was not especially situation-specific—in fact, that was kind of the point. It was an instinct, an exuberance that was never drummed out of him the way it had been for the approved “scientific” hitters of the deadball era.

Pete Hill, on the other hand, clearly figured out, sometime in April, May, or June of 1919, that he could jerk the ball over the right field fence at Mack Park with startling regularity. It was situational, a tactical adjustment. There had been similar realizations in the major leagues before (Gavy Cravath hitting to the opposite field in the Baker Bowl; Ed Williamson and several other Chicago White Stockings taking advantage of Lakeshore Park’s tiny dimensions in 1884) and in the minors (Perry Werden’s astonishing 43 home runs for Minneapolis in 1894, followed by 45 the following year). But these were largely one-offs, with no lasting effect on the way the game was played.

In Hill’s case, he was, at age 37, actually starting a trend. Let’s start with Jim Taylor, erstwhile player/manager of the Dayton Marcos, spent a couple of weeks on loan to the Detroit Stars in 1919, and also played for the Marcos against the Stars in at least six games. Four years later, in 1923, Taylor joined the St. Louis Stars as player/manager. That season Taylor, never previously known as a power hitter, suddenly muscled up to hit 20 home runs and tie the Monarchs’ Heavy Johnson for the Negro National League home run crown. As Patrick Rock’s research has shown, 19 of those 20 home runs were hit in Stars Park, with its famously cozy left-field dimensions caused by the trolley car barn. Taylor, then 37 (the same age Pete Hill had been in 1919), was another canny veteran who figured out how to pull the ball over an invitingly near target.

Mack Park would be home to a number of successful left-handed power hitters over the next decade. The Stars’ first baseman, Edgar Wesley, got 8 home runs in 1919, all in Mack Park. He would go on to be the Negro National League’s first home run king in 1920. Turkey Stearnes fashioned a Hall of Fame career in large part by taking advantage of Mack Park (though he certainly had other talents, and spent half his career elsewhere). Another player who spent time on loan with the Stars in 1919 was Oscar Charleston, the NNL’s home run champ in 1922 and probably the greatest hitter in Black baseball before Josh Gibson.

The aging Hill wasn’t able to follow up on his own success, at least in terms of home runs, managing only a total of six over the next two years before he left Detroit (starting with the first home run in the history of the Negro leagues). But in 1919 he became perhaps the first Negro leaguer to realize, on a day-in, day-out basis, the potential of the home run as a regular weapon.