A fresh look at the baseball annals has pinpointed the exact date of Babe Ruth’s first major-league home run: Sept. 5, 1915. The clarification narrows a longstanding, broadly cited entry that has typically listed only the year 1915, and helps sharpen the early timeline of a career that would transform the sport.
At the time of the blast, George Herman “Babe” Ruth was still a young player with the Boston Red Sox. He had debuted in the big leagues in 1914 and split time between pitching and hitting in his early seasons. The Sept. 5, 1915, home run is now recognized as his first in major-league competition — an early sign of the prodigious power that would come to define him even though, in the mid-1910s, Ruth was primarily valued for his arm.
Ruth’s evolution from a two-way player into the game’s premier slugger is one of baseball’s defining narratives. After being sold to the New York Yankees in 1920, he shifted fully into a hitting role and rewrote the offensive record books. He retired with 714 career home runs, an all-time mark that stood for decades, and was an inaugural Hall of Fame selection in 1936. His 1927 season — when he hit 60 homers — came to epitomize the live-ball era and the rise of power hitting in professional baseball.
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Refinements such as the Sept. 5 date matter to historians and statisticians because they tighten timelines and allow clearer comparisons of career trajectories. Ruth’s first homer now has a fixed point in the chronology of a player whose milestones are often used as touchstones in discussions about changing styles of play, athlete celebrity and the commercialization of sport in the early 20th century.
The updated date emerged amid a broader “Today in Sports” historical roundup marking notable events across many years. While most of the roundup compiled familiar milestones — from Kentucky Derby winners to record-setting playoff performances in hockey and motor racing — the addition of an exact date for Ruth’s maiden long ball stands out for its cultural as well as statistical significance.
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Baseball researchers and archivists continue to comb box scores, contemporary accounts and official records to refine the sport’s historical record. Pinpointing moments like Ruth’s first homer deepens understanding of how his early development presaged the seismic impact he would have on the game, and ensures that one of baseball’s most-referenced careers is documented with greater precision.
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