Nearly 90 years after Babe Ruth played his final MLB game for the Boston Braves, the impact of his career is still singular, unique, as big as any athlete’s in any game ever played.

In remembering the Bambino’s life and baseball career in 1973, 25 years after he passed away, columnist Red Smith noted correctly that the all-time great’s home-run hitting prowess revolutionized the game.

At the time of his column’s publication in The New York Times, Major League Baseball had had two eras: before Babe Ruth walloped 29 homers in 1919 and every season since then.

“He changed the rules, the equipment and the strategy of baseball,” Smith wrote. “Reasoning that if one Babe Ruth could fill a park, sixteen would fill all the parks, the owners instructed the manufacturers to produce a livelier ball that would make every man a home-run king. As further aid to batters, trick pitching deliveries like the spitball, the emery ball, the shine ball and the mud ball were forbidden.

“The home run, an occasional phenomenon when a team hit a total of twenty in a season, came to be regarded as the ultimate offensive weapon. Shortstops inclined to swoon at the sight of blood had their bats made with all the wood up in the big end, gripped the slender handle at the very hilt and swung from the heels.

“None of these device produced another Ruth, of course, because Ruth was one of a kind.”

Indeed. In 1920, Ruth smacked 54 homers for the New York Yankees, proving that his success in 1919 with the Boston Red Sox was just the start.