The 50 Club

In all baseball history only four men--Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, Hack Wilson and Hank Greenberg--had hit 50 home runs in one season. Last week, with eight games of the season still left, a tall young ex-Navy pilot named Ralph Kiner became the fifth. He banged No. 50 into the left-field Scoreboard at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, which put him one up on the New York Giants' Big John Mize (TIME, Aug. 25) in the race to be 1947's home-run king. Mize became the sixth to make the 50 Club two days later.

New Mexico-born Ralph Kiner, 24, had done for the seventh-place Pittsburgh Pirates what Hank Greenberg was hired--at a reported salary of nearly $100,000--to do. At 36, and in his first season with the Pirates, Hank was pretty much of a flop, even though Pittsburgh's left-field fence had been brought in closer to help him. But Greenberg bunked with young Kiner on road trips, talked while his protege listened, practiced with him. On Hank's advice, Kiner stood closer to the plate, spread his feet a little more, learned to relax instead of freezing when the count got to two strikes against him. By August, Ralph Kiner had almost doubled his 1946 homer production (as a rookie last year he led the National League with 23). Says Greenberg: "He's a much better hitter than I ever was."

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