Babe Ruth hit No. 500 — and the Yankees still lost 6–5

The first man to hit 500 home runs did not get a win.

On August 11, 1929, Babe Ruth hit career home run No. 500 in the second inning at Cleveland's League Park. The Cleveland Indians still beat the New York Yankees 6–5. 1

That is the clean version of the oddity: baseball's biggest milestone arrived inside a loss. The stranger part is how far ahead Ruth was. He became the first major-leaguer to reach 500, and nobody else joined him for another 11 years. 23

Ruth's shot came off Cleveland pitcher Willis Hudlin in the second inning. It was also Ruth's 30th home run of the 1929 season, but the Yankees could not turn the moment into a result: the Indians kept scoring and held on for the one-run victory. 1

The setting mattered. League Park was Cleveland's ballpark, and the ball did not disappear into some anonymous upper deck. A later account says Ruth had told the park's police chief before the game that he would hit No. 500 and wanted the ball back. Then, on Hudlin's first pitch to him, Ruth sent the ball over the right-field wall and onto Lexington Avenue. 4

That story has a fittingly Ruthian ending. The account says a young fan, Jake Geiser, found the ball. Ruth offered him a signed baseball and $20 in exchange. The milestone ball came back to the man who hit it; the Yankees went home with a loss. 4

Today, 500 home runs can sound like a membership threshold. In 1929, it was a one-person category. Baseball-Reference calls Ruth the charter member of the club and records that he reached the mark in his 1,740th game and 5,801st at-bat. 3

That gap explains why the number mattered. MLB describes the 500-homer club as fewer than 30 players out of more than 20,000 who have appeared in the majors; Baseball-Reference's current list has 28 members. Ruth was not merely first on a leaderboard. For 11 seasons, he was the entire leaderboard. 23

The scorecard still has the best punchline: Ruth made baseball history in the second inning, and Cleveland made sure the history came with a losing line next to it.