Although Ruth has company in the fraternity of players to hit three home runs in a single World Series game (Reggie Jackson, Albert Pujols, and Pablo Sandoval), Ruth was the first player to record the feat and the only player to do it twice, in 1926 and 1928. And he first established the record in unusually impressive fashion against the Cardinals in St. Louis. In Game 4, his first homer sailed over the right field roof of Sportsman’s Park. His second cleared the right center-field roof, and his third reached the centerfield bleachers. In what many considered a ill-considered gamble in the seventh and deciding game, though, Ruth was caught trying to steal second base in the ninth inning, with the Yankees trailing 3-2. That ended the Series. Although never fleet of foot, the roundish Ruth did steal 11 bases that season and 123 during his 22-year career.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
