1911 World Series on the West Coast). With the sixth and final game being played on October 26, this was also the latest-ending World Series by calendar date until the 1981 Series. With a perfect top of the first, Christy Mathewson set the record with 28 straight shutout innings in World Series play, a record that would be broken by Boston Red Sox Babe Ruth with 29 2/3 innings in the 1918 World Series. Mathewson's postseason record for consecutive scoreless innings against one team would not be broken until 2013 when the Detroit Tigers' Justin Verlander shut out the Athletics (now playing in
Babe Ruth fans. In Cobb's case, the incidents were sometimes marked by violence. Ruth's biographers agreed that he benefited from the timing of his ascension to "Home Run King". The country had been hit hard by both the war and the 1918 flu pandemic and longed for something to help put these traumas behind it. Ruth also resonated in a country which felt, in the aftermath of the war, that it took second place to no one. Montville argued that Ruth was a larger-than-life figure who was capable of unprecedented athletic feats in the nation's largest city. The Babe became an icon