The great man stepped onto the field for the first time around 2 o’clock on the afternoon of April 17, 1923. It was a clear and cool day in New York City, and normally the baseball season already would have been underway for a week. The grounds on which Ruth stood was the reason for the delay.

Somehow, this enormous building had risen from the dust in only 284 days. Five hundred workers had put in double shifts every day across a relatively mild winter, but they still were going to need an extra week to get the thing done.

When they realized this, the men who owned the New York Yankees — Col. Jacob Ruppert and Col. Tillinghas L’Hommedieu Huston — petitioned Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the all-powerful commissioner of baseball, to delay the whole season a week.

Landis normally wasn’t one to agree to favoring any one player or team over another. But this was different. This was baseball shedding its simple, rustic roots and reaching for the sky, on a scale  it had never before known, or even pondered.