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Even casual baseball fans can quote from memory the key numbers in home run history, like Hank Aaron's career record (755) and Barry Bonds's season record (72). But ask even the most die-hard fanatic which slugger in baseball history hit the longest home runs and you'll probably be greeted with a blank stare. Who hit the longer longballs? Sosa, McGwire or Bonds? Or, to jump among eras, Ruth, Mantle or Bonds?

Baseball writer Bill Jenkinson breaks out the tape measure in his engaging new book, The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger. This fascinating, in-depth study of Ruth's career (based on 28 years of research!) argues that the famously rotund slugger hit baseballs farther than any man in the game -- ever. Jenkinson dates the "tape measure" home run era to 1915, to when Ruth hit a ball 475 feet out over the right field bleachers and across the street outside St. Louis's Sportsman's Park. Without ever getting monotonous, Jenkinson delves into minute detail to examine Ruth's most monstrous shots over the decades: a ball that sailed out of Chicago's Comiskey Park, a 510-foot jack in Philadelphia and a 575-foot homer at Navin Field in Detroit which Jenkinson argues is the longest home run ever hit in MLB history.

The book's title comes from Ruth's 1921 season, which Jenkinson argues was actually better than the Bambino's legendary 60-home run 1927 campaign. In 1921 -- if you look at long fly balls that would have been home runs in modern-era parks with shorter outfield fences -- Jenkinson contends that Ruth hit 104 "home runs." He supports this with an array of statistics and "spray charts" that document\s Ruth's career home runs, as well as where long extra base hits and flyouts that would be home runs today landed. Looking at Ruth's career as a whole, Jenkinson predicts that in modern parks with shorter outfield fences, Ruth would have hit an astounding 1,158 dingers. Try to match that, Bonds. You may not agree with Jenkinson's methodology or conclusions, but this barnstorming romp through the career of baseball's most mythic power hitter is the perfect way to stoke your 2007 case of baseball fever.