WASHINGTON, Sept. 27.—Babe Ruth hit his twenty-ninth home run of the season here this afternoon, and the only argument left about his record is over which record he has broken.

Three weeks ago there was no argument at all. When Ruth hit his twenty-sixth, on September 8, the papers credited him with a new mark, for the figure in everybody’s book was the 25 that Buck Freeman made for Washington in the National League in 1899. Cravath’s 24 for the Phillies in 1915 was held to be the best of modern times. Then a diligent searcher of the old records turned up Ned Williamson, who hit 27 for Chicago in 1884, and Ruth had a new mark to shoot at.

He tied it on September 20 at Fenway Park, on a day that the Knights of Columbus had arranged in his honor. Some 30,000 turned out, and they got full value. Ruth started the first game as the Boston pitcher, moved to left field in the sixth, and in the last of the ninth, with the score tied, hit one of Williams’s deliveries clean over the left field fence to win the game, 4 to 3. The Knights presented him with $600 in bonds and a diamond-studded insignia before the game. The home run was the better present.

He passed Williamson last Wednesday at the Polo Grounds, in the second game of a double-header with the Yankees, before a crowd of about 6,000. Shawkey had the Red Sox shut out, 1 to 0, going into the ninth, when Ruth caught a curve and drove it high over the right field stand and out of the grounds altogether, into Manhattan Field beyond, where a boy picked it up. It tied the game, which the Yankees won in the thirteenth, 2 to 1, when Pipp tripled off Hoyt and scored on Pratt’s fly. The Times called it the longest drive ever made at the Polo Grounds, and the Globe of Boston called it the most sensational batting feat ever seen there. We have not heard the Yankees dispute either description.

The twenty-ninth came today, and it brings us to the dispute. The Williamson figure is not what it appears. Williamson hit his 27 at the Lake Front grounds in Chicago, where the right field fence stood so close to the plate that in the seasons before 1884 a ball hit over it was ruled a double. For 1884 alone the rule was changed and such a hit counted as a home run, and the Chicago batters made the most of it. Those who hold that Freeman’s 25 is the honest record say that Ruth passed it three weeks ago; those who hold to Williamson say he passed it on Wednesday. On either reckoning he holds it now, and it is fair to add that Ruth has done it in the American League, where the parks are not built for the business, and while pitching part of the time.

His batting average, on the Associated Press figures to Wednesday, is .323. No batter in either league is within half of his home run total. Cravath, who leads the National League, had 11 on the same figures.

The Giants and the Phillies played the first game of a double-header at the Polo Grounds on Sunday afternoon in fifty-one minutes, which is believed to be the fastest nine-inning game ever played in the major leagues. Jesse Barnes pitched for New York, threw very few balls, walked nobody, and won his twenty-fifth game, 6 to 1, which makes him the leading winner in the National League. Meadows took the defeat. The Giants won the second game also, 7 to 1. The crowd was variously estimated, by those who had time to count it, at from 14,000 to nearly 20,000.

The quick games have been the fashion all month. A week ago Sunday the Cubs beat the Braves at Chicago in fifty-eight minutes, and there are those who think the practice of hurrying through the last games of a settled season is not doing the game any good.

Fred Luderus of the Phillies was given a day at Philadelphia last Wednesday, with a gold watch and a diamond stick-pin. Luderus passed what was held to be Eddie Collins’s modern record for consecutive games played early in August and has not missed one since.

The Carl Mays case is where it was. Mays walked off the mound at Comiskey Park on July 13 and refused to play again for the Red Sox. On July 30 Boston sold him to the Yankees for two players and $40,000, and President Johnson of the American League at once suspended him, holding that the league could not permit a player to desert his club and be rewarded with a better one. The Yankees went to court and obtained a temporary injunction, and Mays has pitched for New York under its protection since August 7. No final decision has been reached. The club owners of the American League are divided on the question, and the division is not a secret.

Ray Caldwell has had a month that no writer of fiction would dare to invent. In his first game for Cleveland, at League Park on Sunday, August 24, a bolt of lightning came into the park just as he began to pitch to the last man in the ninth. A deafening clap of thunder followed, and when the crowd looked around, Caldwell was on the ground. The same bolt knocked the mask and cap off O’Neill, the catcher, and the cap off Harry Davis, coaching at third, and Billy Evans, the umpire, said afterward that he could feel the shock running through his legs. “It felt just like somebody had hit me on the top of the head with a board and knocked me down,” Caldwell said. He got up, retired the batter, and won the game, 2 to 1.

On September 10 at the Polo Grounds he pitched a game without a hit against the Yankees, beating Mays, 3 to 0, before some 18,000. Only two New York men reached first base, one on a pass and one on an error. With two out in the ninth the crowd went silent while Peckinpaugh batted, and when Chapman threw him out it broke into cheers.

Compiled to the close of play Sunday, September 28. Clubs have played unequal numbers of games, postponed games not having been made up. New York and Philadelphia of the American League have one game still to play.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

NATIONAL LEAGUE

THE LEADERS

Batting, stolen bases and Cravath’s home runs are on the Associated Press averages to the games of Wednesday, September 24. Ruth’s home runs and the games won are brought to the close. The table of the five leading batsmen printed in the New York Times on Saturday does not include Cravath or Thorpe, and puts Roush first in the National League at .320. The official averages will be issued by the leagues during the winter and may differ.

Baltimore won the International League pennant by eight games over Toronto, with 100 victories against 49 defeats, and is the first club in the history of that league to win a hundred games in a season. Jack Dunn has built a club in Baltimore that would give some major league teams a hard afternoon.

St. Paul, under Mike Kelley, has won the American Association pennant. The Pacific Coast League is still playing, and its season will run into October.

Jack Dempsey, who took the heavyweight championship from Jess Willard at Toledo on the Fourth of July, has not had a glove on in earnest since, and the sporting writers of the country have been filling the interval by matching him with every big man on two continents.

The champion is at present doing a turn on the vaudeville stage. A United Press dispatch from New York last week put his salary at fifteen thousand dollars a week, for about twenty-two minutes a day behind the footlights, and Jack Kearns, his manager, says that Dempsey does not like it. The same dispatch reported that the British fans want Dempsey to meet Joe Beckett, the English heavyweight, and Kearns says he has been offered 175,000 dollars to take his man across the ocean for the purpose. The writer of the dispatch put no faith in the offer, and not much more in Beckett, whom he rated a second-rater. No acceptance has been announced.

The name most often heard, however, is Carpentier’s. The Frenchman knocked out Dick Smith in Paris in July for the heavyweight and light-heavyweight championships of Europe, he served through the war with distinction, and there are promoters on both sides of the water who see a fortune in bringing him against the American champion. Not every one agrees. Robert Edgren, writing in the New York Evening World on Saturday, argued at length that there is no right, decency or sport in the match, and that Dempsey’s fighting fury would make a needless mess of a French war hero.

Willard is not out of the reckoning. James J. Corbett, writing last Thursday, says that Dempsey is eager to fight and the public is keen to see him, and that the talk of a return match with Willard began with remarks by Ray Archer. Corbett repeats the claim, heard often since Toledo, that Willard had not really trained for the July fight. Willard’s friends make that claim; Dempsey’s friends have an answer to it that took three rounds to deliver.

LEONARD AND DUNDEE: THE WRITERS DIVIDE

Benny Leonard, the lightweight champion, fought Johnny Dundee eight rounds at the Newark armory on September 17, before some 8,000, and the newspaper men at the ringside did not agree. Most of them gave the bout to Leonard. By their account Dundee jumped about swinging wildly while the champion boxed a waiting fight and countered, landing two blows for every one of Dundee’s, and neither man was ever in distress. The man from the New York Sun saw it the other way. He gave Dundee four rounds to Leonard’s three, with one even, had Dundee fighting the champion off his feet in the eighth, and wrote that Leonard had been adjudged the loser for the first time since he won the title. The Sun adds that Dundee had the bigger cheer.

It was Leonard’s second bout of the month; he had met Johnny Clinton at Syracuse on the eighth.

Mike O’Dowd, the middleweight champion, gave Soldier Bartfield a hard beating in ten rounds at St. Paul on the nineteenth. Bartfield, ten pounds the lighter, was in distress over the last two rounds, and the wire accounts have O’Dowd driving him to the ropes at least a dozen times. O’Dowd meets Augie Ratner tonight at Jersey City. The New York Sun puts the bout at the Armory A. A.; other announcements have given the place differently, and we give the Sun’s. Ratner is rated one of the cleverest boxers in his class.

THE LAW AND THE GAME

The reader who wonders why so much of the East’s boxing is done in Jersey City and Newark will find the answer in Albany. The Frawley law, under which ten-round bouts without a decision were permitted in New York State, was repealed in 1917 and expired in November of that year, and nothing has been passed to take its place. What boxing remains in the State is confined to the membership clubs, and the big shows have gone across the river. In New Jersey the Hurley law of March, 1918, allows bouts of not more than eight rounds, forbids a decision, requires gloves of not less than eight ounces and an examination by a physician, and bars liquor from the premises. The result is the newspaper decision, in which the writers at the ringside do what the referee is forbidden to do, and the fans read the next morning who won.

Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight champion, is in Mexico, where he has lived since he left Havana in the spring.

HAVRE DE GRACE, Md., Sept. 27.—Commander J. K. L. Ross’s Cudgel, carrying 129 pounds and ridden by Loftus, came from last place to beat Exterminator in a hard drive for the Havre de Grace Handicap at a mile and an eighth this afternoon, and the time, 1:50, is a new record for the track. Sir Barton, the Ross horse that won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Withers and the Belmont in the spring, was third, with The Porter and Slippery Elm behind him. The race was worth $7,200 to the winner.

It was a Ross afternoon from the start. Billy Kelly won the Susquehanna Handicap from Bill McCloy and set a new track record for six furlongs, and His Choice won for the stable later in the day, so that the Ross colors were first past the post three times. The Daily Racing Form reported a week ago that the Ross stables had already won more than $150,000 in stakes and purses this year, and the figure is higher now.

Sir Barton’s season has been a curious one since the summer. He was beaten by Purchase in the Dwyer in July and did not start again until September 11, when he finished second to his stablemate Billy Kelly in the Hip Hip Hooray Purse. Two days later he won the Potomac Handicap here, with Billy Kelly and Milkmaid, both of the same stable, second and third. On Saturday he was beaten by both Cudgel and Exterminator.

The week at Havre de Grace was a good one for the Canadian sportsman in other ways. On the twentieth his Constancy won the Eastern Shore Stakes, $10,000 added, by half a length from Hobey Baker, before what the Racing Form called the largest crowd the track has seen, some 10,000 persons.

MUSGRAVE KILLED IN A SPILL

The meeting had its sorrow as well. In the sixth race on Friday, as the field entered the backstretch, Dolina fell with Schuttinger up, and three horses behind her went down over her. Phil Musgrave, who had the mount on Silk Bird, never recovered consciousness. One account has him dying before he could be carried from the field; another has him taken to the hospital still unconscious. Schuttinger was first reported to have broken a leg, but it proved that he had only been badly shaken, as were Bernard and Obert. Cain Spring had to be destroyed.

Musgrave was a veteran who had been restored to good standing only a month ago, after being kept from riding since 1913, and was under contract to Samuel Ross of Washington. His body left Havre de Grace on Saturday for burial in Indiana; the Racing Form gives the place in one paragraph as his old home at Mount Vernon and in another as Vincennes. The flags on the grandstand were at half-mast. At Aqueduct the jockeys have taken up a collection for flowers.

AT AQUEDUCT

The Hildreth stable has been the power at Aqueduct. Lucullite won the Edgemere Handicap on Saturday in 1:50, ridden by L. Fator, and the Hildreth entry went to the post at 1 to 20, the shortest price offered on any race this year. On Thursday Hildreth bought Krewer from O’Toole for $6,000, and the same afternoon the colt won the Oakdale Handicap with Fator up in the Hildreth colors. How the bargain was struck depends on which paper one reads. The Sun describes a deal in the paddock just before the first race: Hildreth watched the colt warm up, asked O’Toole his price, heard six thousand dollars, and closed on the spot. The Tribune says only that he bought the colt at noon. The Racing Form has him buying Krewer at the sale of horses held before the races, where the colt was the star of the offering, and adds that O’Toole had refused $10,000 from Hildreth only a week before. Thunderclap beat Over There in a two-horse race for the Roslyn Handicap on Tuesday.

MAN O’ WAR IN WINTER QUARTERS

Samuel D. Riddle’s two-year-old Man o’ War, which won the Futurity at Belmont Park on September 13 and is regarded on every hand as the best colt of his age in the country, has gone into winter quarters at the Glen Riddle Farm in Berlin, Maryland. He has started ten times this year and won nine. His only defeat was at Saratoga on August 13, when he finished second to Upset in the Sanford Memorial.

ELSEWHERE

Col. Taylor won the Autumn Handicap at Latonia on Saturday by a head from American Ace. The Latonia meeting is on, with twenty-two days of racing planned. Laurel opens on Wednesday, the same afternoon as the world’s series, and Pimlico follows on November 1; the two Maryland meetings between them will offer purses of about $400,000.

It is announced that Al Koenigsberg has been ruled off for offering and making a present to a jockey, and the Racing Form reports that the license of jockey L. McAtee has been revoked.

The football season opened on Saturday, and the scores were what opening scores usually are, with the big elevens using their smaller neighbors for practice, but with a difference that every coach in the country has been talking about since the first call for candidates. The men who went into the service are coming back, some of them older and heavier than when they left, and the colleges that played informal schedules or none at all in 1917 and 1918 are playing regular football again.

Harvard is the most notable of these. The Crimson played what were called informal teams during the war and returns this fall to regular varsity football under Bob Fisher, in his first season as head coach. Harvard beat Bates, 53 to 0, at the Stadium on Saturday.

The largest score of the day was made at Danville, Kentucky, where Centre College beat Hanover, 95 to 0. Centre has Bo McMillin at quarterback and as captain, and a squad that includes several players from Fort Worth, Texas, and Charley Moran is in his third season as coach. At Atlanta, Heisman’s Georgia Tech beat Furman, 74 to 0.

SATURDAY’S SCORES

The Presbyterian College score is the surprise of the list. South Carolina was beaten at home.

THE BIG ONES WAIT

Pittsburgh, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, Navy and Notre Dame did not play on Saturday, and most of them open next week. Pop Warner’s Pittsburgh eleven has been in training camp at Windber since September 8, with seven letter men from last year and several players back from military service. Warner has been quoted as warning that those who predict another clean sweep for Pittsburgh are taking a great deal for granted.

Army and Navy will meet again this fall, the game having been dropped in 1917 and 1918. At Notre Dame, Knute Rockne begins his second season as coach with Leonard Bahan as captain.

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

The professional clubs of Ohio are reported nearly ready. Canton opens next Sunday against the independent eleven of Pitcairn, Pennsylvania; a dispatch from Canton says the game will be played there, and the schedule given out by the manager in New York puts it at Pitcairn. Jim Thorpe will again lead the Canton team. He goes to it from the Boston Braves, and he stands second among the batsmen of the National League on the latest averages, at .331 to Cravath’s .336, which is a fair record for a man better known as a halfback.

Jim Barnes won the championship of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America at the Engineers Country Club, Roslyn, Long Island, on September 20, beating Fred McLeod in the thirty-six-hole final by 6 up and 5 to play, though one account gives the margin as 3 and 2. Barnes won the first championship of the association in 1916, and there was no tournament in 1917 or 1918, so he has held the title since its beginning. It was match play all the way, thirty-six holes a round, among thirty-two qualifiers, and Jock Hutchison went out in the quarter-finals. The winner’s share of the purse was $500.

WOMEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP OPENS TODAY

The women’s national championship of the United States Golf Association begins today at the Shawnee Country Club, Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, and will run through Saturday. It is the first since 1916, when Miss Alexa Stirling won, and the war has kept the best players of the country from meeting for two seasons. We shall report the result next week.

The amateur championship, played at Oakmont in August, went to S. Davidson Herron, who beat Robert T. Jones, Jr., of Atlanta, 5 and 4 in the final on his home course. Young Jones is seventeen.

The tennis season in the East is over, and it belonged to William M. Johnston of San Francisco, who won the national singles championship at Forest Hills early this month, beating William T. Tilden, 2d, of Philadelphia, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 in the final. Johnston first won the title in 1915. He also beat Tilden in the clay court championship in July. Mrs. George W. Wightman won the women’s championship at Philadelphia in June from Miss Marion Zinderstein, 6-1, 6-2. The Australians Norman Brookes and Gerald Patterson took the men’s doubles from Tilden and young Vincent Richards in five sets.

Gaston Chevrolet, driving a Frontenac, won the 150-mile race on the Sheepshead Bay board speedway on September 20. It is his second victory of the season at the Brooklyn track, where he won the Independence Day race in July. The accounts of the Uniontown race on Labor Day do not agree on whether Chevrolet drove the whole distance or shared the car with Joe Boyer, and we leave the question open until it is settled.

The Bethlehem Steel team, holders of the National Challenge Cup, continue their tour of Sweden and Denmark, the first ever made abroad by an American club. The cables report that the Bethlehem men beat a picked All-Sweden team, 3 to 2, at Stockholm on September 21, three days after beating All-Stockholm, 1 to 0. In thirteen matches since the tour opened on August 10 they have won seven, drawn four and lost two, the defeats coming at Malmo and Gothenburg early this month.

At the national championships of the Amateur Athletic Union at Franklin Field, Philadelphia, on September 13, Joie Ray won both the half mile and the mile, Pat McDonald won the shot and the weight, and Pat Ryan won the hammer. William Hayes won the 100 yards in 10 1/5 seconds and Henry Williams the 220 in 21 4/5, with Loren Murchison second in both. Six men cleared six feet in the high jump, and John Murphy won it with a new record for the meeting.

Miss Ethelda Bleibtrey’s 440 yards in 6 minutes 30 1/5 seconds, swum at New York in August, stands as the world’s record for women.

The Stanley Cup was not awarded this year. The series between the Montreal Canadiens and Seattle was stopped in April with two games won by each side and one tied, when influenza broke out among the players, and Joe Hall of the Canadiens died of it at Seattle.

THE WORLD’S SERIES BY WIRE. Every play shown on our Electric Diamond as fast as the operator receives it. Harmon Hall, 43d Street near Broadway. Doors open at 1 o’clock each day of the series. Admission 25 cents, plus war tax. Ladies’ gallery.

FOOTBALLS, HEAD HARNESS, JERSEYS AND SWEATERS. Complete outfits for school and college elevens. Send for our fall catalogue. GARRITY & VOSS, Athletic Outfitters, 118 Nassau Street, New York.

TO CINCINNATI FOR THE SERIES. Special sleeping cars leave New York Tuesday evening. A limited number of berths remain. Apply at once. AMES TOURIST BUREAU, 14 East 42d Street.

THE PRACTICAL GOLFER. A plain book of instruction for the player who wants to lower his score and has no time for theory. One dollar and a half, postpaid. THE LINKS PUBLISHING COMPANY, Boston.

FOR THE MAN WHO GOES TO THE GAME. Soft felt hats in the fall shades, $4 and $5. Caps for motoring and the grandstand, $1.50. KEMBLE, Hatter, 212 Fulton Street, Brooklyn.

THE SPORTING CHRONICLES is published every Monday. Subscription, $2.50 a year; single copies five cents. Correspondence on matters of sport is invited, and will be answered in these columns.