Thirty When Ten Led

In 1910, the best home run hitters in the major leagues topped out at 10. Jake Stahl, Wildfire Schulte, and Fred Beck split the titles between them, and nobody else in either league reached double digits.

Out in San Francisco, a local kid named Francesco Pezzolo was playing a different game entirely.

The Pacific Coast League ran on its own clock back then. West Coast weather meant baseball from early spring deep into the fall, and schedules stretched well past 200 games. The Seals once played 230 in a single season. It was a grind no big leaguer would have recognized, and it produced numbers that looked like typos to anyone reading box scores back East.

Pezzolo played as Ping Bodie, borrowing his last name from the California mining town where his father had worked. He carried it to Chicago the following spring as one of the first Italian Americans in the majors. A decade later he was rooming with Babe Ruth in New York, joking that his real roommate was Ruth's suitcase.

There's a strange symmetry to it. The man who hit 30 when 10 led the majors ended up sharing a room with the man who would make 30 look ordinary.