The Fabulous Babe
Posted: June 29th, 2008 | Filed under: Baseball | 120 Comments »
Babe Ruth, naturally, is running away in our poll to determine a new First Class for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Well, sure he is. Ruth is a pretty clear choice as the best baseball player ever. He practically invented the home run. He may not have “saved†baseball after the Black Sox scandal in the purest sense but he sure took the game to a new level of popularity. He had a career 207 OPS+, which is so ridiculous it defies words — Ted Williams is second with a 191 OPS+. Or to put it another way, only nine players since 1900 have managed a 207 OPS+ IN A SINGLE SEASON.
Or to put it another way, Ruth’s .690 career slugging percentage is 56 points higher than ANYBODY ELSE IN THE HISTORY OF BASEBALL. It is 133 points higher than Mickey Mantle’s slugging percentage. If you want to take that to the next level, Mickey Mantle’s slugging is 133 points higher than Candy Maldonado and Mike Esptein. So Mantle is to Ruth as Candy and Superjew are to the Mick.
Or to put it another way, from 1919 to 1931 — excluding 1925 when he only played 98 games — Ruth led the league in slugging percentage every year, in OPS ever year, in OPS+ every year, in home runs every year, in runs eight times, in RBIs six times, in walks nine times, in on-base percentage nine times, in total bases six times, in times on base eight times, and so on, and so on, forever.
Then, for kicks, you throw on top his PITCHING, his long-held record for most consecutive scoreless innings pitched in the World, the year he led the league in ERA and shutouts, his pitching record of 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA (though to be perfectly fair, that is deadball era, so his ERA+ is only 122 — which is excellent but perhaps not as good as you might expect for a pitcher with a 2.28 ERA).
Then, finally, Ruth remains a towering figure almost 100 years after he made his Major League debut. He’s one of two baseball players I can distinctly remember reading about in my elementary school history books. He was such an overpowering American force that during World War II, years after he had retired, American soldiers reported Japanese yelling “To Hell with Babe Ruth.†He had so many stories told about him, so many books written about him (including the excellent “Big Bam†written by our good friend Leigh Montville) that Ruth really became part folk hero, part Johnny Appleseed, part John Henry … I can remember asking during the Aaron home run chase if Babe Ruth was real.
So I want to be clear up front that — even though I do not want to sway anyone (not that it would matter anyway) — Babe Ruth is also my first choice for this Hall class. He’s singular and unique and the king of all that is baseball …
BUT …
Oh yeah, here comes the but …
I have a hard question about the Babe. Well, it’s about more than just the Babe. And it really is a question, nothing more. As Mr. Potter said, “I have stated my side very frankly.†I love the Babe. My question is this: What are the chances that the single greatest baseball player of them all, the best of all time, played ball 80 years ago?
Wait for it. Don’t jump on me yet. This is not specifically about the poll, not yet. I would say most people believe Ruth is the best ever — and that includes a variety of opinions ranging from my mother, who used to answer “Babe Ruth†every time she got a baseball question in Trivial Pursuit, to Bill James, who has consistently put Ruth No. 1 on his Top 100 lists.
My question is: What is it about the game of baseball that could make the vast majority of people with very different levels of expertise and very different convictions believe that Babe Ruth, a troubled kid from an orphanage who learned baseball 100 years ago from Brother Mathias and played almost no minor league baseball, is the greatest ballplayer who ever lived? This could not happen in another sport. No way. No chance.
Look at the other sports. If I ask you to name the greatest football player of all time, how many would say “Red Grange?†Maybe a couple would say it to be argumentative. Every so often I hear an NFL Films type stand up for Grange … and there’s no question he was SIGNIFICANT. But the best ever? No way. Nobody believes that.
So, you say, that’s football. Athletes have gotten bigger, stronger, faster, so it’s hard to compare that era. But isn’t the same true for baseball? Let’s move on to other sports: How many people believe that Bill Tilden is the greatest tennis player of all time? He dominated tennis in much the same way that Ruth dominated baseball. I’m sure Tilden has his supporters, including his biographer and my hero Frank Deford, but I don’t really hear the “Tilden’s the best ever†argument much. Or ever.
How many people believe Jack Dempsey’s the greatest boxer ever? Do you ever hear that? Do you ever hear that he could have whipped Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano or Muhammad Ali or George Foreman? How many people stand up for George Mikan as the greatest basketball player ever? Does anyone? How many say Howie Morenz was the greatest hockey player ever? Or Wilbur Shaw is the greatest race car driver ever?
Then there’s golf, which has its similarities to baseball. They’re both, in the words of the late great George Carlin, pastoral games, and you don’t seem to need great size, superhuman strength or even that sort of Olympic athleticism to be a star (though these things don’t hurt either). I suspect that in golf there are some people who would hold out for Bobby Jones. But not many — it’s still Hogan and Nicklaus and Tiger for the most part. And I think even beyond the difference of eras, there’s an obvious and unspoken reason for this: There aren’t many people around today who saw Bobby Jones play golf in his prime. That’s part of the puzzle, isn’t it? There aren’t many people alive who saw Ruth in his prime either, and still he soars over players 80 years into the future.
Again, I probably need to clarify the question because this isn’t specifically about the Babe. The question is : Why baseball? What is it about this game that would allow people to believe that it has not evolved like the other games, that the smaller, poorer, less-trained players were, in fact, better than players today? Is it our love for statistics (and the fact they were so scrupulously compiled even then — it allows us so easily to compare Mark Teahen’s OPS+ to Wid Conroy’s from 1903)? Is it because history plays so much larger a role in baseball? Is it because the most passionate of fans really believe somehow, as Tom Boswell wrote, that time does begin on Opening Day?
Let’s take it back to the “First Class†list. This whole idea of yesterday and today was one of my points in doing this poll — I kind of wanted to see how people view baseball. I put together my the list of players based entirely on the votes of a 26-person panel … my opinion is not involved. But my opinion would not have changed much. It’s a good panel, I think, filled with a wide array of baseball fans. And I suspect that if I had asked a different 26-person panel, the list would have been more or less the same — sure there could have been a few changes. Maybe Musial gets on the ballot instead of DiMaggio, maybe Clemens gets in and Maddux gets out, maybe Satchel or Grove or Rose or Hornsby gets in somehow. But generally, It think this is the pool of players we’re dealing with.
And you will notice that this pool is DRAMATICALLY tilted toward yesterday. Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, Wagner, Johnson, Gibson, Young, DiMaggio, Williams — that’s nine of 15 — ALL began their careers before World War II. Jackie Robinson fought in World War II, Mantle, Aaron and Mays all began playing in the early 1950s — more than 50 years ago. And, other than Clemens and Rose, the complaints about absent players seem to be revolved around, yes those players of long ago. Where Speaker, Hornsby, Satchel, Foxx, Musial? How could people ignore Wagner and Cobb? And so on.
All of that leaves two on the whole ballot — TWO PLAYERS — who came of age in the last 50 years. And those two, Maddux and Bonds, are still active (or want to be). So it seems to me that people, generally speaking, believe baseball in some ways has devolved over the years, that the greatest players of the late 1960s, the whole 1970s, the whole 1980s, and in large part the 1990s and 2000s could not compete with the greatest players of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
And in any other sport — pretty much in any other context — that would be seen as LUDICROUS. Johnny’ Weissmuller set the world record in the 100-meter freestyle in 1922 — swimming it in 58.6 seconds. It was a phenomenon then. These days, Ian Crocker can swim the 100 meter BUTTERFLY eight seconds faster than that. In other words, Crocker — swimming butterfly — could beat Weissmuller’s freestyle by 15 meters.
In 1924, Harold Abrahams — with Vangelis music spurring him on — set the Olympic record in the 100 meter dash at 10.6. That time would have placed him eighth at the California 2002 High School State Meet. Though, admittedly, I haven’t researched it, that may have been a really loaded meet.
In the 1950s, Bob Cousy was a phenomenon, a changing force in basketball; he was viewed by many as the greatest player of all time (the time before Russell and Wilt) because of his remarkable court vision and groundbreaking behind-the-back passes. And I do not mean this as a knock because Cousy was all those things and more … he was terrific, and I’m a huge fan. But from what I could see the guy did not dribble with his left hand much. I’m not saying he COULDN’T dribble with his left hand. Of course he could. But he mostly didn’t, none of those guys did, at least on the highlights I’ve seen. When a player in the 1950s wanted to go left, he would likely dribble down then turn RIGHT and make a 270 degree turn, like a remote control robot. I fully believe Cousy had basketball genius and raised in today’s environment he would be a different and triumphant player. But he would have to be very, very different. Point is, the game doesn’t even look the same.
These advances are more or less accepted as fact in those other games. We all know that the NFL in the 1930s didn’t have five 300-pound men on the offensive line, and 240-pound linebackers who accelerate like Porsches, and 6-foot-5 wide receivers who could scale mountains without ropes. We all know the early NBA days didn’t have buildings with good feet and 6-foot-9 point guards. We all know that that today’s athletes are stronger, faster, better conditioned offered better technologies and given the most advanced training picked up over those 80 years.
And still, in baseball alone, when asked to name the greatest player who ever lived, we talk about a big guy with spindly legs and a tree log for a bat who learned how to play baseball at reform school. When asked to name the greatest players as a group, we go back in time, past Bonds (though, obviously there are circumstances there), through Griffey and Unit and Gwynn and Schmidt and Brett and Carew and Morgan and Bench and Seaver and Rose and McCovey — back to the Mays and Mantle days and then back even more, back to the time of Ruth and Wagner and Speaker and Hornsby and the Big Train.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s not. Nostalgia is beautiful. I’m just wondering why it only happens in baseball.
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That is the beauty, and tragedy, of statistics. We want to believe that a 207+ OPS is the same in the 1930’s as it is today. Despite technology changes in bats, gloves, shoes and EVERYTHING else. We look at “relative stats” as though the world doesn’t change.
I wonder if Babe Ruth is “a clubhouse” cancer in 2008 with the NY media hounding him. Does Mickey Mantle have to go into rehab mid-career and do even better? The truth is that the denominator has changed — we just don’t want to believe that to be the case.
I say all that, and Babe Ruth was the only sure thing on my five. Oh, well.
Oh it is clearly about nostalgia in baseball, and all the stories that we were all told as kids about the greats of the game. It has to do with the way baseball is ingrained into our culture the way football is only ingrained into our present. Would two football fans argue for hours about who should have won the 1941 MVP, the way fans STILL argue about DiMaggio vs Williams? Are there ever 5000 word pieces written about the all-time snubs by the Basketball Hall of Fame?
We know, deep down, that the competition today is much fiercer, that the learning curve is higher, and that the players are better. At the very least there is an honest and open competition, instead of only white men allowed to play. Despite this, we return to our demigods constructed from allegory.
And we let our nostalgia cloud or judgment, which is a shame, because the best hitter of all time played right in front of us. But because of some stupid vendetta against the man’s character, or his race, or his workout regimen, less than a quarter of the 1300 of us who’ve voted realize how great Barry Bonds is.
To me, it comes back to what you said when comparing Ruth to Mantle to Mike Epstein. Ruth may be no greater than Bonds or A-Rod in the long run, but because Ruth was SO MUCH better than his peers, that makes him seem even more extraordinary when looked at throughout history. Bonds and A-Rod are extraordinary talents that are definitely better than almost all of their peers, but they don’t stand out as transcendent players that belie belief. Ruth does. The man re-wrote the offensive record books of the game and still stands at or near the top for many of them eighty years later. There is something special in that which keeps people coming back to him time and again. How many of the other athletes that you mention continue to control the record books of their sports after the game has changed so often and so much? Ruth still does and will probably be at the top or near it for the rest of baseball history (until we get bionic implants, I suppose).
Wilt was, for all intents and purposes, the best basketball player ever. And he last played 35 years ago.
I think the fact that they still play (in the case of Fenway, Yankee Stadium – this season -and Wrigley) in the same stadiums on the same fields, pitching from the same mounds has something to do with it. There’s a singular continuity to baseball that doesn’t exist in other sports, even as baseball moves through its era’s its essential character remains. We didn’t see Williams hit but the seat his longest homerun landed in Fenway is still there, right in front of us – we can touch it.
Baseball is passed from parents to children like religion – I’m not saying it doesn’t exist in other sports – but the fact that the seasons are so long, as are the games – baseball seeps into your experience differently than the other sports, it’s one “season” spans three actual seasons – Spring, Summer and Fall – what other sport goes that long? Legends are passed down through generations and so they stay alive in our blood.
You share your life with baseball. Other sports, you watch.
Terrific post, as always. I was reading Baseball Between the Numbers, by the Baseball Prospectus team, the other day, and they consider a closely related question: who was better, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? Using a variety of statistical models far too complicated to get into here, they conclude that Barry Bonds was better, for some of the reasons you suggest. Since Bonds was playing in an era of superior training and nutrition, in addition to integration and the much more worldwide pool of talent we currently enjoy, his competition was much, much tougher. This means that his numbers, which are admittedly not quite as good, represent much more significant achievements.
However, they also calculate that had Ruth come up in 1984, in an integrated league and with access to contemporary nutrition and training methods, Ruth would have hit .309/.441/.682 with 913 home runs. For reference, Ruth’s actual stats are .342/.474/.690. Bonds’s stats, through last year, are .298/.444/.607. Although Ruth’s numbers are down, they’re still pretty eye-popping.
I totally voted for Ruth. And I would never, ever vote for Bonds.
The mantle (not Mickey) that we baseball fans love to wear, the one that we are so proud of, the one that we cling to is that baseball, as a game, remains largely unchanged since around 1900 or so.
That, of course, is an openly debatable statement. The ball, the bats, better gloves, night games, integration, the in-flux of players from Latin American and Asian countries. All of these have changed over the years. Even the strike zone and the height of the mound have changed.
Sure we have statistics to rate player performance against their contemporaries. But nothing to show how a player from the 1920’s would perform in today’s game.
And I’m glad we don’t. I think that the debate itself is one of the things that makes baseball the great game that it is. At least in the eyes of fans like myself.
And Babe Ruth was my only no-brainer on that list as well. Cobb was a close second, but I can see where some would disagree.
One interesting thing that has come out of this discussion for me is my perception of Willie Mays as one of the all-time greats. I think I leave him off, most of the time, because he is the only player on the list other than Maddux and Bonds who I say play. But I only remember the 1973 Mays. The one who batted .211. It’s not fair, but it is what it is. I will always, unfairly, think of the other great players on this list first before Willie. Gonna have to do something about that.
Wilt? Um, a guy named Michael Jordan can also lay claim to that title.
I think it’s because we don’t notice the change in baseball the way we do in other sports. If you watch a clip from a football game on NFL films, it looks VERY different from today’s game. Basketball’s evolution is even more dramatic. I don’t notice that big change in baseball. Players are still situated in the same formation on defense and the lineup still seems to follow the same rules (leadoff, contact, power, power, and everyone else). I think part of it is because visually the game still looks very similar to those old clips.
this goes along with what JUSTYO posted, but I think part of the reason baseball stands out from the other sports is the effect of seeing archival footage. with basketball, you have people shooting free throws underhand and no 3-point line; with football, you have no forward passes; with baseball, the game just looks the same. the pitcher, the batter, the fielders – they all look to be playing the same game we see today.
I feel like you’ve expanded on my post on the First Class thread.
It’s baseaball.
It’s the same game.
I think Cy Young pitched underhanded for a long time. He simply threw the ball where people couldn’t hit it. That’s still the point of the game for a pitcher.
Ty Cobb simply could hit the ball and go ninety feet from base to base. That’s still the object of the game.
We can play all sorts of what-if games. Could Cy Young have put the ball past Barry Bonds on a regular basis? I kinda think so, but who really knows?
Would Cobb collect a horse collar every time he faced Koufax? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Somehow I suspect Jim Brown would be an NFL superstar today. And I mean today, even though he’s what, 70 years old?
But baseball figured it out a long time ago. It’s the game. It’s 90 feet from base to base, that ball with the stitches and a bat made out of wood.
Perfect.
The answer, I think, has a lot to do with the fact that (a) Competitive professional baseball is older than most of those other sports. Ruth was playing a fully mature game. Cousy and Grange were not. And (b), Baseball has more, and better, statistics than any other team sport, mostly because its offense relies on individual achievement rather than teamwork. Each player’s contribution can, and is, separated out and he is given credit for it. Football and basketball don’t really work that way.
Another thing is: Those statistics show Ruth to be dominant in a way that most of the guys you mention weren’t. He dominated his sport to a MUCH greater degree than they dominated theirs. Mikan, Cousy — those guys don’t have the best stats of any NBA player in history. Wilt Chamberlain does. Mikan and Cousy don’t even have the 20th best stats. But Ruth, even though he played 90 years ago, does still have the best stats in baseball history.
So in summary, I think most of the players you mentioned aren’t seriously regarded as the greatest ever because either (a) they were playing a sport that wasn’t yet fully mature in terms of the way it was played, or (b) they played an individual sport where achievements can be objectively measured, and the’yve been clearly surpassed by modern athletes. (i.e. swimming, golf).
I can’t say this with certainty, but I believe that 80 years from now, we’ll still look at Gretzky’s stats and marvel. The fact that he had more assists in his career than anyone else had goals and assists combined, going along with his all-time goals lead and all the single-season records, the eight straight MVPs, etc. — might be even better against his peers than Ruth. If I live long enough to see someone challenge Gretzky’s records, I’ll be shocked.
I think we *want* the case to be that Baseball isn’t as fabulous as it used to be, so our subconscious naturally thinks players were better back then. We believe that the statistics of players past are legit out of self-preservation–that is, we use glory stories of the past to convince ourselves that baseball has the potential to capture our imaginations again.
Baseball has changed a bunch.
But Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth, right? Right?
If that’s not true, then what is?
I think it’s a combination of the relative continuity of the game (mentioned above) with the fact that baseball is competition between players. Sports like football and basketball have so obviously changed in the past 50 years. And champions in sports like swimming and track measure their success against the clock rather than their peers.
Golf is a good choice for a comparison to baseball and you do hear people talk about Bobby Jones as a choice for best ever – even if Hogan, Nicklaus and Tiger get mentioned more. Even though the equipment has gotten better, the players stronger and the field more inclusive, the game is still essentially the same one played 60 years ago. And (I would guess) the score relative to par is still pretty close to where it always was – so you don’t get the effect of Abrahams finishing eighth among CA high schoolers.
Joe, I’ve been reading your blog in its many forms for over a year, and that may be my favorite post. Thank you.
When I was little, I used to think Babe was THE best, but somewhere along the line I started feelin’ like he was overhyped or overrated. I look at his stats every so often and realize he was way way beyond his peers, and that’s why he belongs in the HOF. He changed the way players approach the game – swing for the fences. And even though his pitching numbers were in the deadball era, I still can’t think of another guy who could successfully hit and pitch in the majors consistently. Can’t even think of one who did it, but was pitchetic at it (pun intended).
That being said, I often wonder how the Babe would hit against pitchers throwing sliders, splitters, circle changes, and the variety of other pitches that came around after his prime. For that reason alone, I have to figure that even average players in our era, are probably better than the Babe. Yeah, that’s right. Better. Nobody would be able to put their bat on the ball squarely enough, as often as they did in the 1920’s.
Statistical evidence behind my conclusion? Just look at the increased K’s and disappearance of the .400 hitter since 1931. Despite Ruth’s era being an easier time to put your bat on the ball, Ruth became the all-time strikeout leader in 1926. Imagine how much more he’d have K’d with a higher variety of pitches thrown at him.
But that doesn’t take away from how far beyond his peers the Babe was. It doesn’t take away the fact he changes the game. It doesn’t take away the fact he was probably the most inspiring ballplayer in history even if he isn’t the best anymore. So I voted for Ruth.
I’m puzzled how Rickey Henderson, didn’t get onto this ballot. Any ballot for “starting over” the HOF, should at least have the all-time leaders in all key categories included. I’m not talking about SB’s (tho I love them!), but Runs scored, which is the most important in baseball history. Joe, did any of the people you emailed, mention Ricky at all?
Man, I was hoping I’d be the first to post “it’s older” as the reason for the favorites being further in the past. To me, it seems like Red Grange would be similar to George Wright or Cap Anson or someone; we’re pretty sure they were great, but it’s hard to say exactly how great, because the game was different and we don’t know quite as much about it back then. On the other hand, Jim Brown would be Babe Ruth – the game then was just about the same as the game now, at least in form, and they both just blew it apart. Or Russell or Wilt in basketball as compared to Mikan. And you’ll still hear lots of people argue for Brown as the best football player ever, or Russell or Wilt in basketball.
Not a very exciting reason – but it is a simple one.
Who is the greatest cricket player of all time? Don Bradman. Who is all of thirteen years and six months younger than the Babe. Incidentally, the Babe died during Bradman’s last Test match.
Few would dispute Bradman’s genius; he stands above other batsmen statistically to perhaps an even greater degree than Ruth does. Just two figures, first his average of 99.94 compares to a second best of 60.97 – if the Babe led by a comparable margin, he’d have an SLG of 1.039, and the other is that in just 80 innings he scored 12 double centuries; the second place here took 230 innings to get to 9.
The Don wasn’t just better than anyone else; you could take the next best two batsmen in the world and put them together and they couldn’t match him.
It’s interesting that there really is only one other sport where one man from the distant past dominates the imagination, and it’s the sport most like baseball.
I think the best way to judge players from different eras is to judge them relative to their competition. No one else was hitting 60 home runs when the Babe was in his prime. Chamberlain was the only one scoring 100 points in a basketball game. They are the most remarkable players because they are so far ahead of their time, and their peers. And as for nostalgia being a key factor, I just don’t buy it. Baseball has been around for over 100 years, it would be ignorant to expect all the most transcendant players (relative to their era) to play in the current era. It’s just shortsighted.
One sport I can think of that seems to have the same obsession with the past is college basketball. ESPN did a countdown this past year of the best 25 college basketball players in history, and I think of the 25, maybe only 1 or 2 played in the past 15-20 years…and they were all near the bottom of the list. It depressed me a bit (and I feel similarly about Joe’s post) to think that as much as I love watching baseball/college basketball that I haven’t seen any of the so-called “best ever.”
Devon Young
“That being said, I often wonder how the Babe would hit against pitchers throwing sliders, splitters, circle changes, and the variety of other pitches that came around after his prime. For that reason alone, I have to figure that even average players in our era, are probably better than the Babe. Yeah, that’s right. Better. Nobody would be able to put their bat on the ball squarely enough, as often as they did in the 1920’s.”
That ignores the fact that Ruth faced guys standing on a higher mound, throwing a doctored, “dead” baseball. Plus, the pitch speed would be closer to equivalent than one might think due to the fact that Ruth swung a much heavier bat which would take longer to get around than the exploding toothpicks players today use. The list of challenges that hitters faced then over now and vice versa could go on and on with one canceling out another.
All of that being said I do recognize that baseball has changed. I just think that these changes have balanced things more than your argument suggests.
[i]Incidentally, the Babe died during Bradman’s last Test match.[/i]
That must have been one exciting match.
Agree with 100%…HOWEVER, he gets my vote because he dominated his level of competition at a level noone ever has in any sport….that has to count for SOMETHING, right?
I’d just like to back up Richard Gadsen’s point about cricket. Unlike baseball, batting average in cricket is by some distance the best judge of a player. Here are the all time batting average leaders among players with more than 50 test appearances (and their debut year):
Don Bradman – 99.94 (1928)
Herbert Sutcliffe – 60.73 (1924)
Ken Barrington – 58.67 (1955)
Wally Hammond – 58.45 (1927)
Ricky Ponting – 58.37 (1995)
Garfield Sobers – 57.78 (1954)
Jacques Kallis – 57.14 (1995)
Jack Hobbs – 56.94 (1908)
Len Hutton – 56.67 (1937)
Mohammad Yousuf – 55.49 (1998)
In other words, Bradman is nearly 40 runs clear of the pack when just five runs cover the next nine all-time greats.
The century (100 runs in an innings) is the gold standard of a great batting performance. While Bradman’s 29 centuries place him just 8th overall on that list, he scored them in just 80 test innings. The next lowest number in the top ten is Matthew Hayden’s 167 innings (for 30 centuries) – they just didn’t play as much cricket in the 1930s, yet Bradman’s “counting stats” are still up there with the best.
In double centuries (200 runs in an innings), Bradman is amazingly still the all-time leader with 12 in 80 innings. Second is Brian Lara, with nine doubles in 232 innings. Bradman is also, along with Lara and Virender Sehwag, the only batsman in history with two triple centuries to his name.
Apologies for labouring the point, but it is pretty clear Don Bradman is a Ruth-esque freak.
Eric… good points. But he still was able to put his bat on the ball more often than he would now, due to pitching style changes. I’ve heard the ball became livelier around the start of the 20’s, about the time Ruth became Ruthian. I’m not entirely convinced the mound height made a big difference after ‘68, since the mound was the same height for decades but only seemed to start affecting hitters drastically in the 60’s… suggesting pitching style changed and gave pitchers a huge advantage.
Take a look at HBP career totals for the top 10 all-time sluggers. Notice how sluggers from the 20’s and 30’s barely got hit by pitches, but the sluggers from our day are hit significantly more often. I think that tells a lot about how the way pitchers threw to sluggers has changed dramatically since Ruth’s day. They obviously threw straighter or always outside. Ruth simply didn’t have pitchers challenging him inside as much as sluggers do in our era. He also didn’t have to figure out as many areas the pitch might go, with a more limited assortment of pitches available.
I think I exagerrated when I said an average player now would be better than Ruth in our era. The more I think about it, the more I think Ruth would be more like Ryan Howard, Adam Dunn, or …an excellent slugger, but hurts himself too often with K’s. He also wouldn’t have as high an SLG%, because many pitches he hit squarely in 1927, would be just a hair off. All because of the extra array of pitches now, compared to then.
I wish they would make more movies about Babe Ruth.
Richard Gadsden, thanks for bringing up Don Bradman. When I read this post, he’s the first I thought of and you’re right, virtually no one will argue the point that he is the greatest cricket player of all time. His stats are still insane just as Ruth’s are.
Snuckles, I get the joke but his last test was exciting: Bradman need only 4 runs to guarantee an average of over 100 for his career. He was out on the 2nd ball he faced without scoring even a single run.
Wait, how is it possible that the BP analysis says that if Babe came up in 1984 he would have beat Bonds numbers in BA, OBP, SLG, and HRs….and yet they conclude that Bonds is “better”??
I tend to believe that great baseball players of earlier eras could compete more effectively today than great old players in other sports. Mostly I just base that on comparisons of players within my own lifetime.
When I think about guys who were great baseball players when I was a kid – Schmidt, Brett, Carlton, Reggie, Parker, Bench – I have little to no doubt that they could walk onto a big league field today and excel.
But when you think about NBA players of the same era, personally I think even Dr. J would have a hard time penetrating against today’s athletes.
Think of the Steel Curtain that I grew up with. I believe that most if not all of today’s NFL offensive lines would destroy that vaunted front four.
Only in baseball do I think the stars of my childhood could be stars today. That’s a span of 30 years since I was old enough to be a fan.
Well, if George Brett 1980 could be a star in 2008, doesn’t it stand to reason that Ted Williams 1941 could have been a star in 1978? And if Williams could have been a star in 1978, couldn’t Ruth and Wagner have been stars in 1941, or 1978, or this season? To a much greater degree than in other major sports I think the answer is yes.
It’s my own sense that when people say Babe was the greatest, they don’t mean that he would be the best player in MLB if he stepped onto the field today as a 28 year old Babe. Rather, it’s a function of him having been exponentially better than his peers. I mean really, those numbers are Nintendo RBI Baseball numbers (the edition with the 1987 stats, where, through some glitch, Tom Brookens, with his 13 HR for the year would always launch one out…).
So it’s a product of luck really. Babe didn’t have a choice as to when he played, but he did the best he could at the time he did.
This brings me to something I meant to mention about your post on Jackie Robinson. I absolutely *don’t* mean this to be in any way a negative comment on Jackie Robinson, but I wonder if Joe’s comments about his impact on the game were overstated. Obviously, he was the first black player to play, and he did so with tremendous courage, skill, sportsmanship and professionalism in the face of virulent racism. The way he handled the backlash against his integration certainly made it *easier* for other black players to follow him. But that’s not the same as saying that he integrated baseball. Because without Jackie Robinson, there would have been someone else. It might not have happened in 1947, but it would have happened. (to put it another way, the Boston Red Sox didn’t have a black player until 1959, 3 years *after* Robinson was out of baseball…can Pumpsie Green really say that without Jackie Robinson he wouldn’t have played for the Bosox?).
Want to echo what some of the other commenters said. The sheer age of baseball would
Babe Ruth was easily my number one, and it was based on the numbers. But it wasn’t based on the presumption that you could take the Babe Ruth from 1921 and plop him down onto Yankee Stadium and within a season or two he’d be the absolute best player on the field. Even giving him the advantages that todays players have, he still wouldn’t dominate to the extent that he did in the 20’s, although I do think that he’d be an excellent, HOF worthy player no matter what era he was in.
Now, if you took an All-Star (let’s say Albert Pujols) from today and placed him at the beginnings of the lively ball era, he’d absolutely DESTROY the league. It’d be like he was playing with an aluminum bat.
In order to make these kind of comparisons, we have to make the assumption that a 142 OPS+ is the same across all times, and the only corrections we have to make are ones of game context (park, level of offense) variety and not so much one of a time variety. Other wise, the arguments for the greatest player would be intra rather than inter generational. And what kind of fun is that?
I think the rise in HBP in recent years may have something to do with the body armor a lot of players wear to the plate, not to mention batting helmets (popularized in the 1950s). Since they’re so well protected, they sit on top of the plate with reduced worry of a significant injury from a pitch. I know that isn’t an original idea, but I thought I’d bring it up.
Oops.. forgot to finish my first sentence.. it’s supposed to read- The sheer age of baseball as a professional sport means that it had the opportunity to work out most of its developmental kinks in the mid to late 1800’s. By the time basketball and football caught up, baseball had been played under the same basic rules and styles for a much longer time.
Joe, I think you’ve made a fundamental error in your analysis here. Voting for the HOF isn’t about which player would be best on some sort of objective scale. It’s about history. Babe Ruth was the most dominating player ever in the game. It is literally impossible for any player to dominate as much today because a) we have twice as many teams; b) the game is more uniform and it’s harder to rise above the pack.
I believe this is the reason best of lists tend to dominated by older players. Because the league was smaller and less uniform so it was easier to stand out. Bill James said that when he was a kid he could learn all the names of the HOF by heart in a day. Today, it would take a week, if you were really devoted. And you’d probably still forget about Rube Marquard or somebody.
Our love older players is a love a simpler, smaller America where less was vying for out attention.
“Why baseball? What is it about this game that would allow people to believe that it has not evolved like the other games, that the smaller, poorer, less-trained players were, in fact, better than players today?”
I don’t know. What is it about men’s javelin throwing that has allowed Finland to produce 19 Olympic medal winners to 5 for the United States? Why has Hungary won 67 Olympic medals in canoeing and kayaking while the United States has won only 16? History has shown that small, devoted populations can produce a disproportionate number of high-class athletes.
An interesting book on the subject is titled (if I remember correctly) “The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs”. The author’s contention is that Ruth played in much larger ballparks than players today. Many of the long F8s and F9s of Ruth’s era would be home runs 20 rows up today.
He makes some other contentions I’m not quite sure I buy. For example, the caliber of pitching Ruth saw was every bit as good … if not better … than what’s out there today. He bases it on the fact baseball was THE No. 1 sport of the time, which meant all the top athletes played it as opposed to basketball and football siphoning off talent today. He also uses this to “defeat” the “baseball wasn’t integrated” argument.
Bottom line, it’s an interesting read and it certainly left me with a better appreciation for how awesome Ruth was. How would he fare if he were plunked into today’s game. Pretty damn well, I imagine. His biggest problem, I think, would be the scrutiny of the media. He would probably be a Charles Barkley type of figure … but could easily become a Terrell Owens where the negatives begin to outweigh the positives. In fact, that might make an interesting column, as well — take out some of the incidents of Ruth’s career (going into the stands after a fan … being suspended by the manager for an extended period for insubordination, etc.), take away his name and see what the reaction would be. I somehow doubt it would be so easily glossed over today.
There are so many thoughts bouncing around my head right now I had to take a minute and let them settle a bit before attempting to articulate them.
So much is made about the major sports “competing” for fans these days, but when Ruth played there was baseball, which had been pro for about 50 years, an infant NHL and even younger NFL, and that was it. I don’t know much about golf, but I think Bobby Jones was an amateur, as were Olympians (according to Chariots of Fire) and tennis stars, and so on. So as far as pro athletes went, and as they were pretty much the only ones competing into adulthood, baseball had the lions share of the publics attention. The spotlight was undiluted by Gatorade and Super Bowls.
Of course baseball players still have for the most part much longer careers than those who play the other team sports. And they play much more, twice as many games as hockey or basketball, and ten times as many as football, so we are exposed that much more to baseball players, and I think that makes them that much more familiar. Do kids today even remember Barry Sanders? Or even Emmet Smith as a dominant player?
I agree that it is not so much could the ‘27 Yankees hang with the ‘98 Yankees so much as man, NOBODY else in ‘27 could touch the Yankees, and I think for the most part when people partake in the former (and similar) arguments, they are more frequently comparing relative dominance than athletic abilities. I think many people, from Ruth to Kruk to Wells have proven that baseball is not necessarily about athleticism. But I do think that the parts of the game that are subject to athletic virtues have remained an fairly even ground. Unlike the swimming example, Nolan Ryan’s fastball was clocked at only 2 mph faster than Feller’s, and inexact as the calculations may have been, it seems that there has been enough overlap that someone would have faced Johnson and then Lefty Grove, then someone else would have faced Grove and Feller, then Feller and, well, you get my point, and while there may be an overall evolution of speed like there is of increasing tallness, it’s not on the same scale as the other sports, where they run faster, jump higher, wear bigger clothes and have greater muscle mass.
I wonder also how much the more regimented styles of coaching in other sports hinders the evolution of the games, as I also wonder about what seems to me more interference/adjustments by the respective leagues of the rules for sports like football and basketball. And while it’s true that gloves have improved and gotten bigger, balls are generally manufactured to a higher quality, and bats are lighter (though that was more of a macho thing, Ted Williams knew the advantages of a lighter bat and used one), the equipment advances in most other sports are far more significant.
I love the cricket points, I had one myself, but I don’t know if it makes sense, but it seems that a common element to the two games is the kind of competition that they both have, where it is very much a one on one confrontation, followed by a collective effort of a bunch of people to keep a much smaller number from “scoring”. They are the only two sports (I think) where the defense controls the ball, not the offense. And despite advances in physical conditioning, people don’t seem to really throw the ball that much faster or be able to hit it that much farther. Wasn’t Ruth the only person to hit one out of Forbes Field, and at the very end of his career to boot? Maybe that’s just a limit of physics, and maybe the difference between .6 seconds and .58 would mean more if it were in any way apparent to me, but I think that those unchanging elements add much to the continuity of the game.
Or maybe baseball just has much nicer weather.
But I have British friends that go on about footballers of yesterdays, so maybe it’s just that baseball really is the national pastime. It does have much larger attendance figures than other sports, and though it is helped by stadium size and schedules, I don’t think football could keep up the intensity that it creates for a baseball type season, nor basketball on a daily basis, never mind that the players would start to have limbs fly off if they played everyday.
I love this blog. Thank you.
Oh, and they did still have the spitter in the 20’s, legally (for a few).
I did not think we were voting for the best baseball player ever. I thought we were voting for first class Hall of Fame.
I think that people DO argue for older stars being the best in the other major sports, just not guys as old as Mikan and Grange. But, in the same way, no one argues that Cap Anson and Noodles Hahn are among the best players ever, either.
The rule changes in football and basketball, the three-point shot and the shot clock and the forward pass and all that, those are equivilent to the change from underhand pitching to overhand pitching, fielders wearing gloves instead of their bare hands, being able to call a high/low pitch, the number of balls it took for a walk and so on. There are absolutely people out there who will argue for Jim Brown as the greatest football player ever, or Wilt as the greatest basketball player ever, even though there are certainly guys today who are bigger and stronger than Wilt and Jim.
That list you rattled off at the end- Gwynn, Unit, et al., made me realize that the last twenty years were at the very least, no worse than what came before it. I think baseball has a sort of storytelling culture that mythologizes the greats and makes them demigods. The closest thing to it that I can think of is presidents. It’s hard not to get into specific bills and policies once you really get going, but when you think of the “great presidents,” for me, and I feel for most, Washington, Lincoln and FDR jump out in a similar way that Ruth, Aaron and Mantle do (and the others). I bet someone could convince me in 10 minutes that, for example, Mantle might not crack the top 5 centerfielders today or that Dimaggio couldn’t hold a candle to ARod or Manny, but when I think of the baseball greats, all the old names immediately pop into my head. Ruth was definitely my #1, and I originally had Maddux, but I bounced him in favor of Hank and Honus (Willie and Jackie were my other two). Also, I love the new look.
Mikey, you ask:
“Wait, how is it possible that the BP analysis says that if Babe came up in 1984 he would have beat Bonds numbers in BA, OBP, SLG, and HRs….and yet they conclude that Bonds is “betterâ€??”
Because the “1984 Ruth” numbers assume access to 1984 training and nutrition that the actual Ruth did not have access to (as well as 1984-level competition, which is why 1914 Ruth outperforms 1984 Ruth). The claim that Bonds is better than Ruth is based on Bonds’s actual numbers, produced in a tougher environment, in spite of the fact that a hypothetical Ruth would have outperformed the actual Bonds.
I think that this is a great question and may not be able to be fully explained with objective variables. For some it could just be because. After thinking about this, and pardon me if I’m restating others here, I have come up with the following.
It involves the athlete’s size, strength, and the equipment they used as well as the similarity of yesteryear’s stats to today’s. It also involves how a player dominated his sport during his time.
With size, strength, and equipment. With football you just can’t realistically fathom a player from 70 years ago playing against the behemoths of today. They would have no chance and you know it and it’s therefore impossible to compare the two. With individual sports, like track, the world records of yesterday aren’t even close to today’s. That’s because of strength or speed. You could apply the equipment of today’s golf with that of yesterday and there is no similarity whatsoever. You see the wooden rackets of tennis and can’t imagine how they would compete against the oversized rackets of today.
One thing about equipment, look at it this way. when looking at the hitters you are still dealing with wood baseball bats. Very little change other than the ones today shatter instead of crack. Now look at fielding. Who would pick there greatest fielders of all time from that period? I wouldn’t. There would be Ozzie, and Brooks Robinson, and Bench, Maddux, and Say Hey would maybe be the oldest of them all. There were good ones back in the day but I don’t know how many would be included in our top five.
Finally, we also take into account how the numbers have lasted. Baseball records last forever in some cases. This is off the top of my head but I think Earl Webb’s doubles record still stands and no one has gotten close. No one seems likely to break Hack Wilson’s RBI record anytime soon as that approaches 80 years. That doesn’t exist in almost any other sport. Especially those that are individual sports.
If I had to pick a sport closest to baseball it would probably be tennis but even that has it’s inadequacies. In most sports, either their bodies get beaten or their numbers gets beaten or their equipment gets beaten and in baseball you see none of that when looking at stats or photographs.
First, I’d like to apologize for the unedited, second grade level writing of my previous post.
Second, I’d like to mention one more thing. Today, you don’t see players dominating baseball like you did years ago. You do see it in other sports though whether it be Jordan in basketball or Lance in bike racing, or Tiger in golf. The ones that you do see dominating baseball in a similar way are scarred by the image of steroids and being overpaid.
What clinches it for Babe Ruth is, as Joe mentioned, he wasn’t just the best hitter of his or possibly any era, but he was also a phenomenal pitcher. Simply put, there will never be another player who could come along who could do that. Bonds can hit all the homers he wants, but the Babe can always play the ‘ace pitcher’ card. It would be like if Howie Morenz had also been a star goalie of his era, then people might still consider him as a singular great in hockey.
Old football players, btw, have the added advantage that many were two-way players, so they have their own answer to excelling in two facets of the game as Ruth did. But, as many have noted, football has evolved so much that it’s just a different sport.
Another older sport that hasn’t been mentioned….soccer. I think you’d get more people arguing that Pele, Dixie Dean or Stanley Matthews were the greatest footballers of all time than you would people arguing in favour of Cristiano Ronaldo or David Beckham.
Eh, if you had asked that same question with football players or basketball players, I think you’d get similar answers — older legends. You said “First Hall of Fame Class”, not “best ever”. Hall of Fame engenders a sense of history, especially when you tack on “first”. The Babe is a freak of nature though, he’d make both lists.
If it had been basketball HOF, I’d have probably said something like Bill Russel, Bob Cousy, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, and Wilt. If you had asked best ever, my anwer would have been different. Perhaps MJ, Wilt, Magic, Hakeem, and Shaq. (The forwards get no love)
Chess is strange like that too. If you said HOF, the answers would be older than baseball, but if you asked best ever, my list would have at least three guys who played since the 1970s.
Someone mentioned soccer. Soccer was a big, well-organized, professional sport from around the same time as baseball (ie from the 1890s).
Baseball went through a fundamental tactical change with the beginning of the lively ball era in 1920. For all that we revere giants of the past, only Cy Young and Honus Wagner are pre-lively ball.
Soccer’s revolution came around 1960 with the beginnings of the fourth back. Before then, scoring was massively higher than today. We can’t compare Dixie Dean’s 60 goals in a season (in 1927-8) to any modern player – there were an average of more than four goals a game back then, where it’s about two-and-a-half now.
It was a tactical change – playing with four defensive players instead of three – but it transformed soccer into today’s low scoring game.
Only a handful of the pre-1960 greats still get mentioned, and the statistics, though kept, are quite impossible to compare.
Richard, I would include Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson in that list of those of the pre-lively ball era. While parts of their careers were played after 1920, it was only about a third of their entire careers. Ty Cobb won the triple crown in 1909 with 9HRs.
It’s simple to me – No other sport tracks statistics like baseball. It is VERY easy to see who hit the most HR, who had the highest batting average, who won the most games – and almost all the answers are from players in our past.
In truth, it is because the competition was scarce ‘back then’ and it was easier to separate the great from the average. But I personally don’t think you can hold that against someone like Ruth or WJ.
Two important points I haven’t seen mentioned yet-
1.) Just finished reading Robert Creamer’s bio of Babe, and the point is made along the way that the fact that Babe started as a pitcher allowed him to learn/develop as a hitter in a totally different way. Don’t forget, his “swing for the fences” style was unheard of back then, and many were appalled at how often he struck out. (A style, by the way, VERY MUCH like today’s great sluggers…)
2.) The idea that if you just plopped Babe in today’s game or plopped Bonds/Pujols in Ruth’s is just silly. Of course Pujols or Bonds would stand out in the 20’s and the 30’s, just for their physiques. But that works both ways- Babe had numerous injury problems, and a general lassez faire attitude about his body. If he came up in today’s game, you would have to assume he would be in MUCH better shape, and probably even stronger. Just the same way Barry Bonds in 1927 wouldn’t have the benefit of his “weights.” In fact, he would look much more like the Barry Bonds from the 1990’s that was hitting 30 HR’s a year in SMALLER ballparks. Wouldn’t he?
Good to see cricket and the Don feature in the discussions and it’s universally accepted that Bradman is the greatest Test batsman of all time. But the guy from that sport with most in common with Ruth is W G Grace, who transformed cricket from a pastime for those with time on their hands into England’s pre-eminent spectator sport . . . a position it held from mid-Victorian times until the 1960s. He was “the best known Englishman of his time”.
The other sport which holds its past champions in higher regard than today’s performers is horse racing. In Australia (which I submit as the greatest sporting nation on the planet), Phar Lap, who raced from 1929 to 1932, is revered like no other hero. In England, Eclipse, foaled in 1764, is still talked about as the greatest ever.
I dunno. For my money Jesse Owens circa 1932 is still the greatest track athlete of all time. And he’s a Cleveland guy too!
I don’t think people necessarily think Ruth is the absolute greatest of all time. I think people think he was the greatest of all time at the game in the time he was playing it. He was the greatest in relation to his peers. If he played today, assuming he could (and would) take advantage of modern conditioning techniques and diet, I think he would be a tremendous player, though of course not with a 207 OPS+. When you pick the Hall of Fame, I think you have to look at how they did on the field compared to their contemporaries with regards to creating wins for their teams, and there Ruth has it over everyone, except maybe those pre-1900 pitchers who threw 600+ innings.
Imagine this – the Cleveland Indians convert CC Sabathia (ERA+ 115, 106-71 record) to an outfielder. He then goes on to have a dozen seasons hitting like Barry Bonds circa 2001, ending his career with the most home runs ever, by a margin of at least 3 to 1.
Basically, that’s Babe Ruth.
“But the guy from that sport with most in common with Ruth is W G Grace, who transformed cricket from a pastime for those with time on their hands into England’s pre-eminent spectator sport . . . a position it held from mid-Victorian times until the 1960s. He was “the best known Englishman of his timeâ€.”
Sounds more like George Wright than Ruth.
//in baseball alone, when asked to name the greatest player who ever lived, we talk about a big guy with spindly legs and a tree log for a bat//
This is a tad unfair. We are familiar today with Ruth as we see him in newsreel footage, late in his career, but he was an outstanding athlete and by all accounts a maginficent physical presense in his youth. That he was able to continue playing at the high level he did in later years is a testament to his talent.
Bottom line, IMHO Ruth was simply a freak of nature (and I don’t mean that disparagingly), a combination of physical and mental skills perfectly suited to playing baseball. I think era has nothing to do with it.
I loved the stat about Ian Crocker and Johnny Weismuller. Amazing. Also, I think this proves that baseball fans are smart. They seem good for the most part at comparing players from one era to another and understanding where those players fit in. Whose to say Babe wouldn’t be healthier and in better shape as a player today? Also, baseball seems to be the one sport that hasn’t really changed that much on the field compared to others. The James Earl Jones speech in Field of Dreams seems to apply here.
Thanks Justin. I guess I’ll have to read the BP essay. I’m still not totally following the logic.
That they project the hypothetical Ruth to rate lower than the actual Ruth on ba/obp/slg but much higher on HRs suggests to me that today’s environment is different but not necessarily tougher.
Imagine the following headlines, most of which might be repeated numerous times, and how they would affect the public’s view of the ballplayer today:
X punches umpire
X threatens to throw manager off train
X suspended for insubordination
X in car accident while drunk
X seen leaving infamous bordello
X threatens to jump team during pennant race
X reports out of shape
X breaks curfew and threatens to “punch the shit out of manager” when suspended and fined. Refuses to apologize
X’s cheating drives wife near to insanity
X violates federal law carousing in speakeasy
I voted for Ruth in this poll; he was tied for my first choice. But I do not understand how some others of you did.
Thanks Justin. I guess I’ll have to read the BP essay. I’m still not totally following the logic.
I get that they believe today’s era to be a tougher environment, but if they project the present-day Ruth to outhit Bonds, adjusting for differences between their eras, then it seems like the conclusion is that Ruth was just a better hitter.
Anyway, I’ll read the story.
For those who take the view that Babe Ruth’s deeds should be downgraded because he played in a less-competitive era, an era of less intensity than today, of lower over-all skill than today, of lesser physical specimens than today, consider this . . .
England of the late 1500s was a fairly insignificant adjunct to Europe, its population something around the four million mark. Dramatic entertainment in the form of plays, staged at dedicated venues, was a recent phenomenon, replacing small touring groups putting on religious performances and wealthy amateurs entertaining themselves in grand houses.
Into this new environment came William Shakespeare, a butcher’s son from the provinces, with an education that ended when he left grammar school at age 14 or so. Four hundred years later, he’s the undisputed master of his craft — considered so globally and so far ahead of the competition that it’s no race.
He’s the Babe Ruth of words.
Or, conversely, Ruth is the Shakespeare of swat.
Sam: “If he came up in today’s game, you would have to assume he would be in MUCH better shape, and probably even stronger.”
Just throwing this out there: he might also be Ponson-esque, and kicking around the league as someone’s perennial “diamond-in-the-rough” candidate because of all the innate talent the scouts say the kid has, but unable to hold it together because of his renegade spirit.
How about a latter day Joe Charbonneau?
Oy. Sorry about the multiple posts above. Should not post via blackberry, ever.
I admire the restraint you all have demonstrated by not rehashing that old, probably apocryphal story about Ty Cobb.
Alas, I am not strong.
The story takes place in the 1950s or 60s and a sportscaster asked Cobb how he thought he would hit would hit under “modern” conditions. Cobb answered, “Oh, I’d hit .310, .315.” The interviewer was shocked. “But Mr. Cobb,” he protested, “you hit over .400 three times! Why would you only hit .300 now?” Deadpan, Cobb replied, “Well, you have to remember. I’m 72 years old now.”
My Clevelandness requires me to point out that you discussed the all-time greats for the major sports and Jim Brown was not mentioned.
I comfort myself with the realization that he is the best ever, and played 50 years ago, so was probably omitted because he provides a counter-example to your point that it only happens in baseball.
Still, let’s not let this happen again, umkay?
I was just doing the arithmetic and weare only 8 votes shy of having every responder count to five correctly. That’s pretty good when you think about it.
Brings to mind George Carlin’s line
“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!â€
Everyone has the right to their opinion, but if you didn’t vote for Willie Mays I don’t think I want to be your friend…
I think the eras translate pretty well. Babe didn’t do so badly barnstorming against players who were excluded from the American League or in all-star games. He faced all sorts of odd pitchers in exhibitions and set records for home run distance in fields everywhere. Wherever and however it came from, he had unmatched power WITHOUT any modern advantages in nutrition, equipiment or medicine. If you aren’t getting a lot pitches to hit with Gehrig batting behind you, how WOULD you manage to get a strike to swing at? He’d only pitch in blowouts in today’s game, and have five more years of stats.
What about drive?
Love or Hate Barry Bonds, most will not argue that he has been one of the more driven men in baseball. We talk about plopping in baseball players from era’s past into today’s game and automatically assign them the modern advantages of training and nutrition. Would Mantle or Ruth have given up the boozing and the women and the cigars? Would they have spent the offeseason in a weight room? How can we know?
On the comparison to golf and baseball greats, the golf comparison is Tiger is Babe Ruth. He is dominating in a way no player ever has including Nicklaus who is more comparable to Hank Aaron. In 80 years, people will speak of Tiger as they speak of Ruth now. They have/are transcending their sport.
Regarding the inclusion of Hogan on the list of greatest golfers ever, I have a question: How many majors, of his 11, did Hogan win when Byron Nelson was an active player? One. Nelson is your fourth in the list of greatest golfers ever. His scoring average record (68.33) was set in 1945 and was bested 55 years later by Tiger, playing with much better technology.
Mikey,
1984 Ruth has more home runs–a lot more–because the parks he would have been hitting in were smaller in the later era, not because the competition was any easier.
Bob R makes a terrific point. This is why I am a little wary of applying the character clause to exclude Bonds, since once you do that, it is hard for me to see how you don’t also impugn Cobb or Ruth or Mantle or Mays (for amphetamines)…
One item that was referenced in your blog but not elaborated on was the timelessness of college football. Certainly, most people would not say Red Grange was the greatest college football player of all time, but if they were asked “If you could start all over again, who are the first five players you would induct into the college football hall of fame?” I think you would get a very balanced list of players from different era. Players like Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, and Sammy Baugh would be balanced with Vince Young, Tommie Frazer, and Herschel Walker.
First of all, I agree with everyone who posted that today’s players are clearly stronger, faster, and more disciplined than ever before. That said, I think we can still draw comparisons between players today and yesterday because baseball has probably changed less than any major sport. Not so much because of style or, clearly, player fitness, but because of the very limits of human capability.
There is compelling evidence that the furthest a baseball can be possibly hit without wind assistance is between 450 and 470 feet (http://www.slate.com/id/2095/). While players today may hit more shots that far, we know, albeit from anedoctal evidence that Ruth, Foxx, Gibson, etc. could hit balls that far in the 20s and 30s.
There is further evidence that the human arm cannot withstand the stress it would take to throw a baseball much faster than 100 mph (http://www.slate.com/id/2116402/). Sure, storytellers surely exaggerated about Walter Johnson’s or Satchel Paige’s fastballs, but we’ve all see the footage of Bob Feller’s fastball matching the velocity of a speeding motorcycle (going around 98 mph, if I recall correctly).
Again, it’s impossible to know how Ruth would have fared in today’s game and seems awfully likely that if Bonds could travel back in time, and for some reason was allowed to break the color barrier, he would have dominated Ruth’s era. But given the limits of what people can do, Ruth’s performance so outdid his contemporaries that I feel safe considering him the best ballplayer ever.
Justin – I would retract my first post if I could. I didn’t intend to send it as it was written. I see that the BP analysis is based on a premise that modern competition is tougher.
There is only one other sport that I can think of, in which the past is conjured up with such enthusiasm, and “The Greatest” with such unequivocal reverence.
My roomate is from Ahmedabad India. He has little idea of who Babe Ruth is, and is still confused how one team can score more than one run on a home run. If you are to ask him who the greatest sportsman of all time is, he will, along with I would venture about 99% of those who are in the know, name without batting an eye, Sir Donald Bradman; the greatest Cricket Batsman ever.
Saying that Bradman is the Babe Ruth of Cricket is an understatement. Most cricket fans would say that Ruth is the Bradman of Baseball.
He put up numbers in the 30’s and 40’s that would make your head spin. Somebody once calculated (I have no idea how, and can’t at the moment find where) that the stats that he put up would be equivelent of a baseball player hitting .650…FOR THEIR CAREER.
Batsmen have come since. Sachin Tendulkar has more international runs, and holds the current title, according to my roomate, of “The Michael Jordan of Cricket.” Defensive strategy and positioning have improved. The use of the googily has come more into fashion. But still, Bradman is head-and-shoulders above the rest.
And I think the reason why is for the same reasons that baseball of the past is so revered. Watching cricket is fascinating. There is a simple elegance to it. A man with a bat hits a ball that is hurled at him. Simple. It has not chaged in a century. The statstics are still relevant to the discussion, and the lore of which we speak of them is still applicable today.
This discussion of the greatest accross sporting lines just got me thinking about The Don. He really is a towering figure, and I encourage all of you to take a look at him some time.
Here’s an article by Dave Kindred of The Sporting News:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_17_225/ai_73827978/pg_1
Wow, where to begin? This post was quite thought-provoking. I think it’s valid to say that football/basketball in their very early days were not yet completely developed sports, similar to 19th-century baseball. That’s why you never hear anyone say Cap Anson was the greatest player of all-time. But it’s not fair to compare Ruth to those early stars from other sports, because the game he played (at least as far as the rules) was basically the same as it is today. I think the other factors that helped inflate his performance (day games, segregation, bullpen specialists, etc.) are at least somewhat negated by other factors. Today, many of the best athletes play football or basketball instead of baseball. And all that advanced training and better science in the field of athletic development would have to help Ruth as well, were he playing today. So maybe he wouldn’t put up a 207 OPS+ in the modern era, but I don’t see why he wouldn’t be around 170-190 – still a dominant hitter with numbers much like Bonds’s.
To continue the Bradman/Ruth subthread, there’s one other interesting comparison: The Don was a deeply religious man, and in his personal habits had the reputation of something of an ascetic. Almost entirely single-minded, his relationship with the press and his teammates was far closer to Ted Williams than the Babe.
This is an argument I’ve had with a friend who insists that Babe Ruth today would be a glorified Cecil Fielder.
That’s patently ridiculous, but his arguement is much the same that Joe posits. Today’s training regiments, technology, level of athleticism, etc make the athletes of yesteryear obsolete. That, of course, is hooey, based on random speculation.
If we are going to suppose all the modern advantages for todays athlete, it’s not fair to not also account for yesterday’s athletes disadvantages.
For example, we can assume that Ruth, if born today would have been afforded every luxury of training and become an even more imposing force on the diamond. Is that a fair assumption? Probalby not, but no more unfair that assuming today’s pampered athlete could hack it in an athletci world where you needed a “regular” job in the offseason to make ends meet.
The only fair way of evaluating players across eras is to compare them to their contemporaries, and in doing that one can see how fantastic players like Bonds, Williams, Aaron, and Mays (and Blylevin!) are.
So because in the sample size of 6 other sports, we don’t talk about a guy from 80 years ago as the best player ever, it’s impossible to do so in baseball?
I find your sample size lacking.
Also, you’re acting as if nobody even has a shot. If A-Rod puts up 10 more years of gargantuan numbers and finishes with 900 homeruns, don’t you think he’d at least make a solid argument that he’s the best ever? I think he’s already in the top 10 ever, and he’s 32 years old.
If Albert Pujols stays healthy, is really only 28, adds 12 more years of his current – absolutely insane AND unappreciated by his contemporaries – production, won’t he make that a solid argument?
I think it’s also the combination of AND a great pitcher AND the best hitter of his time that puts him over the top. How many guys have ever done that? (zero). How many guys have ever been the top offensive player in football for 15 years AND been one of the best defensive players at the same time? (zero.)
So, yeah, I wonder why there’s so much respect for the Babe.
Besides, we all know Buck Bokai will be known as the greatest player ever by the time the sport stops being played.
Btw, I started thinking about the greatest in other sports. Are the greatest in other sports really all guys from today? Some sports I could think of quickly off the top of my head.
Baseball – Ruth.
Football – Hard to define, because you have to make a difference by position. But if we go by QB, a lot of people will say Johnny Unitas. (though Boston fans will all bleat Tom Brady, even though Brady has now been beaten by Jake Plummer AND both Manning brothers in do or die playoff games.)
Tennis – Pete Sampras is a fine choice. Roger Federer will most likely take that crown from him, though he still has to do it, and a lot of people are already saying that Federer isn’t facing 1/4th the quality of opposition that Sampras faced. And there will be a strong outcry for Bjorn Borg, or even John McEnroe. I personally will say Rod Laver.
Golf – Well, that’s Nicklaus until Tiger catches up with him.
Basketball – Michael Jordan.
Soccer – Lots of arguments you can have here, but most people will at least nod and agree with you that it’s pretty hard to argue against Pele.
Speed Skating – Can be debated. Nobody was ever as dominant as Eric Heiden.
Gymnastics – Nadia Comaneci.
So, while your argument is that guys swim 20 seconds faster nowadays and have better training and are more athletic and are maybe even more BRED to be fantastic at sports, you’ll find that in many sports, the GREATEST of all time don’t play NOW. They played anywhere between 10-50 years ago.
And if those people had lived in today’s age and competed in today’s age, they would have used today’s training regimens, and today’s nutritional supplements. And they would have been just as dominant as they were back in their day.
I don’t think that baseball’s outlier of The Best played 80 years ago is all that remarkable. And sure, we talk a lot about those greats from yesteryear, but that’s mostly nostalgia, isn’t it? I can wax poetically about Stan Musial for hours, but in all likelihood, Albert Pujols is actually a better player. He doesn’t have the same mystique as Musial, though.
If you made a list of say, the 50 best ever, there’d be quite a few guys in it who played last decade, or in the 80s, or in the 70s. Some of them would probably crack the top 10 (I think A-Rod definitely would.)
I really don’t find it that weird.
Will Rogers once said, “A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.” That and a bunch of horses running around a racetrack. And some pretty unshakable faith. Or maybe it was Mark Twain who said it. At any rate, I like the different opinions. It would be terribly boring if everyone agreed on everything. Imagine a world where there was a single undisputed national champion in college football every year. Where’s the fun in that? What are you going to argue with your buddies about then? Also, Bert Blyleven so belongs in the Hall of Fame. In addition to all the pitching stats in his favor, he set more shoes on fire than any player in modern history. A guy like that deserves enshrinement.
Oh, and while guys swim a lot faster nowadays, Mark Spitz still won the most gold medals in one olympics, and it still hailed as probably the greatest ever. (if he swam against Michael Phelps, he’d need a speedboat to keep up.)
Margaret Smith Court, if she played one of the Williams’ sisters today, might not win a game. But she’s still considered maybe the greatest female tennis player ever. (Though I say it’s Steffi Graf.)
I’m gonna stop now. I think I made my point.
I voted for Babe as number one and would so a thousand times over. The thing about figures like Cousy (or maybe Mikan, more properly), Tilden, Jones, Weissmuller, etc. is that they came into sports that were either new or unpopular, dominated, and became the first superstars. Baseball on the other hand was THE game and had been for decades when Ruth started to go nuts. Chamberlain and Tiger are the only athletes who might lay claim to a similar feat.
Advanced hitting statistics are very stable across eras (though not perfect of course), and they all say that Ruth was among the best three hitters of all time. Smart people who analyze swing mechanics say that his efficient, powerful, ultra-rotational swing is remarkably alike those of great hitters in later generations. He is iconic and transcendent and his very name evokes more to more people than any other athlete in history.
There were tens of thousands of baseball players clamoring to reach the Major Leagues when Babe came around; he was orders of magnitude better than them all. Anything that would have given him an advantage over his latter-day counterparts (no slider, no splitter, no night games, shorter schedule, etc.) was available to all of his contemporaries, yet he dominated.
Forget about his pitching, which would almost certainly be nothing special in the modern game, and you still have the biggest figure in baseball’s history. He’s the first player in the Hall of Fame, and there just isn’t a reason he shouldn’t be.
If he came up in today’s game, you would have to assume he would be in MUCH better shape, and probably even stronger.â€
On the flipside, the Barry Bonds of 2002-2004 would never have even existed in the 1920, because they had no Elephant Steroids back then.
Ruth > Bonds.
“If he came up in today’s game, you would have to assume he would be in MUCH better shape, and probably even stronger.â€
I don’t think you can make this assumption. It might be valid on the average, but it isnt a given with superstars.
It’s like saying “If Miguel Cabrera had the work ethic of A-Rod, he’d be the better third basemen”…OK, well, he doesn’t. And how can we know who would and who wouldn’t?
…How meaningful is that 207 OPS+ anyway? When was OPS+ invented? Is it possible that Ruth was just one of the few who was playing the game the right/productive way, the way we currently understand it should be played?
Even in posts regarding Joe Morgan it has been revealed that Joe was criticized for walking too much….that was in the late 60’s! How much credit does the Babe deserve for walking and driving bombs when everyone else was bunting for hits and hittem em where they aint? (I think a lot!) As time went by, and more players starting thinking like this the gap between best and second best was never as pronounced. Ty Cobb supposedly said he could have hit 30-40 HR a year if he thought that was how you won ball games.
I’m just amazed JoePo has so many readers that are knowledgeable about cricket.
“Ty Cobb supposedly said he could have hit 30-40 HR a year if he thought that was how you won ball games.”
I have to think that, with the exception of Dusty Baker, there has never been ANYONE in baseball who was stupid enough to think that a basehit was somehow more valuable than a homerun.
One last Bradman point which really tells us all we need to know about comparing sportsmen across eras:
In his later years, the Don was asked about one of the numerous abysmal teams England sent to Australia to be ritually slaughtered around the country. Specifically, how he thought he would get on against the miserable English bowling “attack” (think the Washington Nationals’ rotation). His reply was that he thought he could average about 50 or 60.
The questioner expressed surprise, wondering how Bradman could average almost 100 in his career yet would only make 50 or 60 against the woeful England bowling of the modern era. Bradman replied “well you have to bear in mind I am nearly 90.”
In any sport, the more people play it and get good training in it, the higher the average performance should become at the pro level. And as everybody in MLB now has to get through a rigorous set of hurdles in the minor leagues and gets the training to make them the best they can be, there seems to be much less variance in ability at the top level than there was in olden times. Back in 1920 there were probably a lot of people who could have been almost as good as the Babe, but never got discovered or taught to refine their raw skills. This made it much more possible for one man to be WAY better than everyone else, hitting more homers than almost any TEAM.
So, mean performance has presumably increased a lot over the years at the pro level, but variance seems to have dropped a lot relative to the mean. That makes it much harder to put up 207 OPS+ numbers these days. Other sports generally lack anything like OPS+ that tells you how Ruth was SO much better than his contemporaries. So we might hear legends about Red Grange, we can’t statistically prove that he left his contemporary football players behind in the way Ruth did.
These thoughts actually give me much more respect for Barry Bonds’ relative amazingness in recent years, despite the fact that I really dislike the guy.
One poster said that the greatest college basketball players wouldn’t be from recent years, which is correct, but is because the greatest rarely stay four years, and one or even two great years just cannot stack up against what Oscar (pick any all-time great) did in four years.
Joe D over Musial, Morgan, and Hornsby? Are we gonna make him dramatically overrated again?
Somebody suggested Pete Rose? Aw, criminee – next it will be Steve Garvey or Derek Jeter!
No surprise about the first three (Ruth, Williams, Mays), but Barry Bonds 10th? There are intelligent baseball fans that really think Barry would be the 10th player taken in an all-time draft? And not in the top 3? Or at least top 5? And from what I read many are saying Barry is not even in the top 50 and shouldn’t be in the HoF. Where are these people when I want to make a bar bet? They remind me of when I could trade my railroads to my little brother for complete sets of properties in monopoly.
Factor #1: rate of failure. I saw Barry Bonds fail plenty of times. No way that guy could be #1. Heck, even in his best season, he almost failed as much as he succeeded!
But, far as I know, Walter Johnson never failed. Not even once. I know this, because in every story I ever heard about him, he was totally untouchable.
And Babe? He was so good he would tell you where he was hitting the ball before he hit it. He probably couldn’t even fail a paternity test!
Not only would he not fail a paternity test, he never would have turned one down either!
Someone will correct me, or I could correct myself if I wasn’t too lazy to look it up, but I think that Babe held the career home run record once he hit his 128th homer. That means the next 586 bombs were just for show. That is beyond a Beamon-esque breaking of a record. It simply blows me away.
I think that there are few reasons.
1) The stats are there. There are so many of them, and most of the news one can be calculated for days of yore. So the stats make baseball difference from tennis, for example.
2) The discrete nature of hitting makes the stats very representative of the game itself. Stats in other team sports don’t capture as much of the game. For example, setting screens in basketball or checking in hockey. Or speed in just about any (other?) sport. Note that poorly defense mattered in this poll. I voted for Mays over Williams and Bonds because Mays was a superlative defensive player. But defense has never been captured well in the stats. So it is minimized in these rankings. Do we ever penalize Ruth for his defense, in our minds?
3) The same stats apply to everyone. There are pitchers and hitters, and all hitters have the same stats. These kinds of things are generally broken up into pitchers and hitters, or there is some kind of arbitrary decision about how to split up the list. I decided on a 3/2 split. But in other sports, how do you compare the greatest in different positions? Jim Brown v. Jerry Rice? We can compare any hitter of any era to any other hitter of any other era. That’s not true in football or hockey. (Though hockey has goalies who are like pitchers, in that they are different from everyone else.) Plus, the stats in many other sports leave out important positions entirely. Linemen in football? Defensemen in soccer or hockey?
4) Baseball allows us to ask players to do it all (offensively, at least). Frankly, the best hitters must have power and patience. Add speed to that and you get Mays and Bonds, right? Well, in what other sport can players have it all? In roundball you pass OR you rebound. On the gridiron, you catch the ball OR you run the ball OR you throw the ball.
5) Baseball stats can easily be compared to their eras, making it possible to just players across eras based on their dominance in their eras. With every hitter/pitcher each season well represented in comparable stats against the same competition, it is really easy to say that a player…well, you did it for Ruth above. That does not work as well in other sports, for the above reasons. And so, even though Ruth probably couldn’t hit Maddux or Clemens, and Bonds would have driven Walter Johnson out of baseball, we can compare across eras. If there’s a clock, that feels shallow. But in tennis we don’t have a good way to compare seasons across time.
6) We are under the illusion that baseball has not changed. We know that football players are bigger, faster, stronger and better prepared. We also know that offenses are more complicated. And we know that this makes modern football entirely different from 50 years ago. Tennis is faster and more powerful. Basketball is now above the rim. But baseball? Sure, we mention the Deadball Era, but we don’t really take it seriously. We mention the Year of the Pitcher, but don’t really adjust for that era in our heads. Baseball looks the same. Your throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Same stats. Still lower scoring than football and higher scoring than hockey. Same bats. Same balls. Even if none of that is true, we think like it is. We don’t really think about “inferior competition,” even though we briefly acknowledge that blacks were not in the majors.
So, “best players of all time” actually mean “best relative to his peers of all time.”
***************************
But when it comes to the first class of the hall of fame, that’s actually the right question. Who were the most dominant in their era. That is not about who would be picked first to play in 2008.
“I think Ruth would be more like Ryan Howard, Adam Dunn, or …an excellent slugger, but hurts himself too often with K’s.”
Yeah maybe, if Ryan Howard was ALSO one of the best LH pitchers in the game. Ruth had a whole other level of greatness that Bonds and the rest never could– pitching. It’s part of his ability and is always ignored when people try to say that some other hitter was better or as good as Ruth as a baseball player. They might be equal or arguably (everything is arguable) better than Ruth as a hitter, and better defensively and on the bases (though Ruth was reportedly better at both than he looked) but put ‘em both on the mound and see what happens. Ruth would be so much better at perhaps the most important position in the game, starting pitcher, that no one could compare with him.
You put Ruth in today’s game, he is a starting pitcher every 5th day and a DH the rest of the time. So maybe he’d go 16-8, 3.35 on the hill and dominate at the plate at the same time. No one’s going to match that.
Speaking of Ruth and cricket, this is from Time magazine Feb. 17, 1947: “When Babe Ruth tried his hand at cricket in a visit to England in 1935, he swatted the ball so hard that he broke the bat. He glowed: “I wish they would let me use a bat as wide as this in baseball.”
Someone (I believe Carlos Gomez) once synced a clip of Ruth and roided Bonds swinging. With a heavier bat, Ruth had a slightly faster swing. The swing mechanics were extremely similar.
Comparing NFL offensive lines pre- and post-steroids is just ludicrous in the context of Babe Ruth, because Ruth was every bit as big as the biggest steroid star. He was about 225 as a pitcher, 250 in 1927 — and he was in pretty good shape after he started working out in a famous boxing gym of the day. It was only when he got old that he really blimped out.
So let’s turn this question around. Barry Bonds *on steroids* was about the same size as Babe Ruth and had similar bat speed. He dominated the league in a way which nobody had done since … Babe Ruth. Why the heck wouldn’t that kind of bat speed and hand-eye coordination work just as well in today’s game as it did for Bonds? The ball doesn’t do anything it didn’t do back then — with spitters illegal, it does less.
Ugh, the awful movie with John Goodman as the Babe was on HBO yesterday, what a piece of junk… how could the 2 worst baseball movies ever both be about Babe Ruth??? Joe, you should write the screenplay for a good one… Gandolfini can play him
Bradman? more Ruth than Ruth!
changed the game like Wilt: “Bodyline”
international incident
Baseball is different, because the speed at which a human can throw a baseball has not changed in the past 80 years. Long story short, the human body can’t physically throw a baseball any faster than the average major league pitcher does. I’d even argue that the average pitcher back then had the same breaking pitches and off-speed stuff.
So, really, you could make an argument that Barry Bonds is facing the same kind of pitching that the Babe did. That makes for an even playing field.
Whereas, Bob Cousy faced much different competition than did Kobe Bryant.
“the human body can’t physically throw a baseball any faster than the average major league pitcher does.”
I’m sorry, but I disagree with you. Lots of people throw baseballs faster than the average major league pitcher, such as Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, etc.
“you could make an argument that Barry Bonds is facing the same kind of pitching that the Babe did.”
No, you can’t. The Babe did not see any sliders, for one thing. For another, he played in a non-integrated league, so he didn’t face any black pitchers, some of whom were among the best in the game.
The playing field is not even at all. On average, pitchers are much, much better now than they were when the Babe was playing. The game looks the same, but it’s not.
Babe played at a time when there was far more organized baseball than today. If you read about players of his time, it’s amazing how many of them got their start in semipro town ball — doesn’t exist nowadays. Minor leagues down to class D — also don’t exist. They collapsed in the early ’50s with the onset of television. It’s far from clear that integration made up for the collapse of the minor leagues. People studying shifts in league talent suspect the level is higher nowadays, but the data doesn’t come out and poke you in the eye.
Look at it this way: the Negro Leagues didn’t have organized feeder leagues. All of their talent — and there was a lot of it — came from teams and leagues that don’t exist any more.
On average, pitchers are much, much better now than they were when the Babe was playing. The game looks the same, but it’s not.
If you can prove this, publish it. Talent levels over time is one of the classically unsolved problems of sabermetrics.
On average, pitchers are much, much better now than they were when the Babe was playing. The game looks the same, but it’s not.
If you can prove this, publish it.
I can’t prove it, but I can point to some evidence. Among other things, advances in training and nutrition strongly suggest that pitchers are better now. Put another way: why would the universal upswing in human athletic achievement have left baseball behind? Why wouldn’t the fact that almost everyone is bigger and stronger now have an effect on the quality of major-league pitching?
For another thing, as I mentioned before, pitchers now throw sliders. I suspect that makes a difference.
Also, Stephen Jay Gould has demonstrated that the fact that the average batting average has remained constant over the years while variance in batting average has consistently shrunk strongly indicates an increase in average performance across the board–both in hitting and pitching. This explains why there are no more .400 hitters and no more 500 game winners.
Also, according to the Baseball Prospectus book I mentioned in an earlier post, in 1930 the ratio of MLB players to their potential talent pool was 1 to 300,000. In 2005, the ratio was 1 to 900,000. The vast increase in the talent pool, in spite of league expansion, is due to the increase in population of the US, the integration of the league, and the opening of Latin-American and Asian markets. If you have numbers that show that the effect of the collapse of the minor leagues is greater than this, I’d be interested to see them.
The problem with the population argument is similar to the minor leagues argument. Tiny populations which have exceptional dedication to the game have produced numbers of major leaguers far out of proportion to their population. Hasn’t San Pedro de Macoris produced dozens of major leaguers? And there are high schools that produce draft picks year after year. On a larger scale, look at the fraction of Major Leaguers that come from the tiny Dominican Republic, in proportion to the huge United States.
The disappearance of large fluctuations from the mean is a reasonable argument and has some validity, but could be caused by other factors. One possible reason could be an overly stereotyped approach to coaching the game — people deciding that this is what a right fielder looks like, this is what a shortstop looks like, you can’t have a left handed catcher, first basemen have to be slow sluggers, etc. Ichiro is quite far from the mean in many dimensions, but his overall production is similar to other All Stars.
Also, I’m not sure Gould’s argument holds for the Steroid era. There you saw a huge variation in statistics that was associated with a small fraction of the population getting dramatically better, not the whole population getting worse. Regardless, I think you would want to study this issue with similarity scores.
The training and nutrition argument leaves me cold. Japan has radically different training and nutrition, and their players have had a lot of success. Cuba and the Dominican Republic produce huge numbers of ballplayers despite terrible nutrition and access to medical care.
Finally, there’s the fact that pitchers throw with close to their full velocity well before the professional leagues ever touch them. They add a few miles per hour due to physical maturation, but it’s not like major league teams draft guys throwing seventy and train them to throw 95. Some people say that power pitchers lose velocity in their early 20s because the tendons in their arms stretch out. If you have kids throwing in the high 90s in high school, why wouldn’t that translate into the major leagues just as well in the 1920s as today?
Zach,
It was Carlos Gomez, and the focus of the piece did center on bat speed. But their mechanics differ greatly in their strides and loading of the hips. I found it very startling to see in such detail the exaggerated stride of Babe Ruth–I had never realized a hitter could throw his body at the ball in that manner, and have any sort of consistent success. I actually wrote Carlos and asked him if anyone current is successful with anything similar, and he answered, “Sheffield and Ichiro are the only ones that come to mind, and even those guys aren’t as aggressive as Ruth.”
I know this isn’t conclusive, but I do not think Ruth would’ve come close to dominating the game as he did. I do think he could’ve been Bondsian, without any help, for a longer period of time than Bonds was.
If Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, ARod, et al, had ever won 20 games in a season and was generally acknowledged as their team’s best pitcher (as Ruth was at the time for the Red Sox), then I would consider their cases for number one choice into the “New” HOF. But they haven’t. No other player has, and that is why Ruth is my automatic first choice.
It took a lot of guts for the Red Sox to make Ruth a hitter when he was already an established pitching star and proven postseason performer. An earlier post used an analogy with C.C. Sabathia — and I couldn’t agree more.
I would take it further and say: Imagine if the Indians made Sabathia an everyday outfielder, and then in his first season, he hit 73 home runs. Then imagine if he had followed up that season by hitting about 130 home runs in one year. That’s how much Ruth redefined the game in 1920.
Ichiro is quite far from the mean in many dimensions, but his overall production is similar to other All Stars.
Ichiro’s variance from the mean isn’t at all close to that displayed by Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Rogers Hornsby, or Ty Cobb, for example. He’s great and stuff, but he doesn’t dominate the way those guys did. Ichiro’s OPS+ is consistently in the 120 range, with a high of 130. Williams’s numbers are way, way better. The lowest OPS+ of his career was 114, in 1959. He was back to 190 in 1960. He had 8 seasons above 200 (not counting 1952, when he posted a 272 but missed 148 games while serving in Korea). So are Hornsby’s — between 1916 and 1929, Hornsby never had an OPS+ of less than 136, compared to Ichiro’s career high of 130. Cobb’s is a similar story. Between 1906 and 1927, Cobb never had an OPS+ of less than 131, which posted did twice. He had two seasons at 200 or better, three in the 190s, a bunch more above 170. Ichiro is a good hitter but not dominant. Not like they used to be.
The question is, why? Because a) Ichiro (along with all other contemporary players besides Bonds) is vastly inferior to the old-timers, or b) because the average competition is better now that it was then, which makes it harder to dominate? I think it’s (b).
Also, I’m not sure Gould’s argument holds for the Steroid era
Why? I get that Bonds is a great player, and for a few years he dominated the way Babe did. But we know it was because of steroids, and we know that Rogers Hornsby did not take steroids. So the question is, why were the Babe et al. able to dominate their eras like that without steroids? We know that the average major leaguer did not forget how to play baseball in 1998 — we know that the quality of competition remained approximately constant (maybe it got a little better) over the last 10 years, that the increased variance was due to steroids, and that the variance was still less than it was in the past. For example, McGwire’s career OPS+ is an eye-popping 162, but is still 29 points less than Williams’s 191.
Put another way, why did it take the best players taking the best steroids to dominate contemporary baseball, when people used to dominate all the time without drugs?
Cuba and the Dominican Republic produce huge numbers of ballplayers despite terrible nutrition and access to medical care.
If you dont’ think that things are better in Cuba and DR now than they were in the 20s, which would create an increase in I don’t know what tot tell you. If you don’t think that the Cubans and Dominicans have a contemporary understanding of how to feed and train ballplayers, I don’t know what to tell you. I know they’re not rich countries, but they’re not hunter-gathering out there. They’re producing good ballplayers. And if you don’t think that Japan has a 21st century understanding of training and nutrition, I definitely don’t know what to tell you.
If you have kids throwing in the high 90s in high school, why wouldn’t that translate into the major leagues just as well in the 1920s as today?
Because of better hitters.
It does NOT happen only in baseball. If baseball’s history stretches 150 years or so, then the babe played at the midway point right? Well, you’d get a LOT of people arguing that Jim Brown, who played at about the midway point of football’s history, is the greatest ever, by a wide margin. And at what point did the qb position change to become so critical in football? When the forward pass was instituted. You’d get plenty of people arguing that Johnny Unitas was the greatest ever, and once again, he’s playing in the early part of “modern” (meaning the use of the forward pass consistently) in football’s history.
Certainly boxing is different because it’s been around for just about forever, but we’re missing a small point here: you brought up Joe Louis with Ali, and last time I checked, Louis’s career ascension started in 1935 . . . or just around the time that the Babe was wrapping up his career 70 years ago. 70.
Basketball didn’t really start to take off until right around when Mikan was playing (NBA formed in 1946) so within 60 years, you’d get arguments about Bill Russell and the Stilt, who begain their careers in 1956 and 1959 respectively, Larry and Magic, who started 30 years ago, which sadly enough IS the halfway point thusfar, and Michael, the greatest, who began his career 23 years ago. Yes, that’s TWENTY-THREE years ago when the NBA was formed 62 years ago.
And what about track? Some guy named Jesse Owens. Or swimming? Some guy named Mark Spitz, perhaps to finally be overtaken by this Phelps fella.
What I’m trying to say is this: baseball’s history simply stretches back further, along with boxing’s. But when you look at it, relative to histories, i don’t think there’s as much difference as you’d like to make it out to be.
Hey, sorry about how long my previous post was, and sorry about the weird incomplete sentence in the Cuba paragraph. Have a nice night.
Ichiro’s variance from the mean isn’t at all close to that displayed by Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Rogers Hornsby, or Ty Cobb, for example. He’s great and stuff, but he doesn’t dominate the way those guys did.
This is one of the places where Gould really dropped the ball. He confuses a productivity stat (batting average) with a similarity stat, which is what he really wanted to measure. He looked at batting average, which is a terrible proxy for total value. Also, averages were historically high in the early 30s — it was an extremely high average era driven by high averages. Finally, batting average, as with most baseball statistics, is not normally distributed. I don’t think he even tried to fit a distribution to it.
To make his point — that higher level of play yields players more similar to one another — Gould should have used some form of similarity score. There are several periods in league history when I suspect the diversity of the league was increasing with time measured in this way — pretty much, every time an era changes, you would expect the diversity of the league to increase, as the players from the earlier era mix with the players from the later era. Hence the Ichiro example — Ichiro is not so much better than the league as he is extremely different from the other players. The diversity of the league would increase without the quality being affected too much.
[Gould] confuses a productivity stat (batting average) with a similarity stat, which is what he really wanted to measure.
I don’t have the article in front of me, so I could be way off base. But I thought that the question he was trying to answer was, why are there no more .400 hitters anymore? Since the topic of the question is batting averages, it doesn’t seem to me to be a mistake to discuss batting averages.
In any case, you’ve lost me. I was citing Gould’s work to show that the fact that mean performance has remained constant over the years, while variance from the mean has diminished dramatically, is evidence that the overall quality/skill of the average ballplayer in the league has increased. Standout players don’t dominate the way they used to because the environment is tougher, so it’s tougher to dominate, and this is true whether you look at BA, or OBP, or SLG, or OPS+.
Also, I don’t see why you need similarity scores in order to know who is dominating the league at a given time. Productivity stats should show dominance as well or better than similarity stats. I don’t see why you’ve brought up league diversity in a discussion of overall league quality.
And I guess I’m not sure what the point of the Ichiro example was supposed to be. I was arguing (in part) that overall variance from the mean has decreased. I thought you brought up Ichiro to rebut that claim: you say that “Ichiro is quite far from the mean in many dimensions…” But he’s not that far from the mean. Not like Williams. But maybe I’m confused. I hope you’ll set me straight.
The diversity of the league would increase without the quality being affected too much.
What’s the upshot of this, in terms of the overall quality of the league over time? Does it show that the league has been stable in quality since the 20s? If so, you’ve left out some steps of the argument. I don’t get it.
Three links on changes in league quality:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/measuring-the-change-in-league-quality/
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/measuring-the-change-in-league-quality-part-two/
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/measuring-the-change-in-league-quality-part-three/
Quality of the league in the 20’s was at about 85% of what it is today. That’s significant. That would turn a 207 OPS+ into a 176 OPS+, or a 1.164 OPS hitter into a .989 hitter. That’s putting Bonds around the level of (unadjusted) Ted Williams or Barry Bonds. Maybe Albert Pujols.
There’s also this interesting article:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-baseball-time-machine-greg-ruth/
It’s about ‘what if’ Babe Ruth had been born in today’s era instead. The final totals would be:
706 HR, .297/.424/.595 totals over 18 seasons, 2543 games, and 8808 at-bats.
Food for thought, and probably not far off the mark.
The greatest golfer of all time was Simon McEagle, 1641-1717, who was so good that he was the first golfer ever to hit an eagle, which they promptly named after him.
Now that’s a joke, and yet has some serious though behind it. There has been golf for centuries. How do we know the greatest golfer of all time wasn’t around in the 1500’s? Or 1700’s? We don’t.
Babe Ruth was arguably the first sports superstar in the era when we have moving pictures as well as sound recordings of announced games. But Ruth defied normal description. It wasn’t just that he played the most popular sport of his day better than it had ever been played before. It isn’t that he was perhaps the most recognizable person in America who wasn’t a movie star (so everybody sees them on the screen) or President (so everybody sees their pictures all the time). It’s the legends of Ruth, many of which are probably true, which persist to this day. It’s the called shot. “I had a better year.” Babe epitomized the American dream, that even a kid from an orphanage could achieve greatness. It’s the ease with which he did almost everything in the sport and did it well. Ty Cobb was never a full time pitcher, nor Ted Williams, nor Barry Bonds.”
Ruth led the league in OPS and OPS+ thirteen straight seasons, and probably would have done so more than that if he’d had enough at bats while pitching. Is it hard to conceive how far ahead his counting records would be if he hadn’t spent so many years as a pitcher? His OPS+ for 1915-1918 was 189, 121, 162, 194. How many more homers would he have? At least 100, I would think, plus he’d have climbed the hitting curve a lot faster if he’d been hitting more often. And Ruth played in a shorter season, all the time.
In other sports, the argument’s harder. Cousy was a great ball handler. But he only shot 37%, so he can’t be the best of all time (even if shooting percentage was normalized to league average). Mikan was great from the early days, but nobody who saw Mikan and Chamberlain could imagine that Chamberlain wasn’t better. Heck, plenty of folks ignore Chamberlain’s incredible scoring records (without much help around him, he averaged 50 PPG one season) and pick Russell as the best big man because of all his titles. But Jordan had a ton of titles, too. But Jordan never averaged a triple double like Oscar Robertson. The arguments are so hard because there are too many different skills.
The same applies to football. Was Jim Brown the best? Maybe. I think the best football player I ever saw was Dick Butkus, and he played on the other side of the ball. And I’d find it hard to argue with somebody who wanted to pick Peyton Manning, or John Unitas, or Barry Sanders, or Jerry Rice. The skills are just too different.
So anybody trying to compete with Babe Ruth is fighting crippled. He was also a competent or better pitcher. In the four seasons where he pitched a lot his ERA+ was 114, 158, 128, 121, and then he set it aside to be a hitter. Maybe he wouldn’t have been a HOF pitcher, but you can’t be sure. You *know* all his counting stats deserve to be better from years spent pitching, from the short season, from the lack of conditioning. You *know* he was so famous they named a candy bar after him (even though they didn’t). His last season, at the age of forty, fat and slow, he still had an OPS+ of 118 in limited at bats; the year before, it was 161. People were as amazed by his strikeouts as hit homers. And he did it while guzzling beer instead of the clear, eating hot dogs between innings. He was like every fan in the stands, only he was also this incredible talent. And he did it in the biggest city in the country, on the biggest stage,
Will Ruth always be thought of as the best ball player of all time? I dunno. I picked Alex Rodriguez until Derek Jeter’s refusal to put the team ahead of his ego forced the better fielder off from shortstop. Albert Pujols is incredible. Bonds would deserve consideration if he’d accomplished his last several years as the fast whippet he started as. There are a *lot* of pitchers who deserve consideration.
But the Babe has it all; great pitching (his seasons after he became a part timer hurt his ERA+), great hitting. Sold tickets. His barnstorming team is the stuff of legends, and stories are still told by Garrison Keillor about the time Ruth came to Lake Woebegone. And at a time when the country really needed heroes with the Great Depression going on, Ruth was there, the kid from the orphanage, hitting close to Cobb (.340 or higher in 1929-1932) with all those homers (40 or more each of those years). And those weren’t his best years, none in the top seven in OPS+ for his career. He gave people hope who really needed it. He became larger than life, and still is.
What is astonishing to me is not that 95% of the voters picked a guy from 80 years ago in your poll. What astonishes me is that 5% didn’t. Every other candidate on the list has flaws that could be held against him, maybe not a high enough batting average, maybe not enough power, too short a career, and pitchers and defensive wizards as a group seem to have been short changed. But what could you hold against Ruth? That he didn’t face Negro League ball players? He didn’t control baseball; his barnstorming teams would play anybody; he quite possibly broke some ground for integrating the majors because Ruth would face Negro league players; and MLB tried repeatedly to stop him from barnstorming.
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/sport/tygiel.html is one citation of Ruth’s facing Negro league players.
Was he a perfect human being? Heck no. But he was the ballplayer, the fan, the rags to riches story all in one. And 5% of you really need to study the history of baseball.
Regarding the HBP rates, I think the body armor, etc. is one piece, but theree two other major changes that are impacting these rates that have nothing to do with pitchers of Ruth’s era not throwing inside.
One is the elimination of retaliation by warning pitchers and then quickly ejecting them. The umpires have eliminated the street justice, creating more incentive to hit the batter first, before the warning happens.
Most importantly, I think, however, is the idea of being able to hit opposite field home runs. Until the last 20 years, or even less, it was accepted wisdom that you couldn’t drive the outside pitch over thee fence, you had to try to guide it for a hit over the IF. I remember darryl strawberry hitting a few HR to left when he first came up, and announcers gaping at his ability to go the otehr way with so muich power — now it’s just an accepted part of the game. The fact that players now try to do this has them much farther over the plate, looking to whack the outside pitch, and the body armor only emphasizes this.
An article on the HBP explosion:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-hbp-explosion-that-almost-nobody-seems-to-have-noticed/
The main three reasons for it:
- Policing against ‘brushback’ pitches
- Body armor
- Crowding the plate
Note it also corresponded with an offensive explosion.
And unlike everyone citing Babe Ruth’s success as a pitcher as a plus, I think it’s an obvious minus. It shows that the talent was much more diluted as the gap between a great pitcher and a great hitter was much smaller.
How many people have done that in recent years? I can only think of Rick Ankiel. Are there others?
Two issues I haven’t seen addressed.
Night Baseball – hitting a ball at night is a lot harder
Relief Pitching – any idea of how many of Ruth’s HR’s/Hits were late in games against pitchers who wouldn’t still be in the game today.
That said, Ruth is my #1 as well, mostly because of the difference from his peers.
Re: Jackie Robinson: The only thing Jackie Robinson fought in WW2 was racism. He never went overseas due to an injury.
I’ve got to disagree with Sal Paradise about two way players. I think it likely that Micah Owings (career OPS+ 122) or C. C. Sabathia (career OPS+ 110) would have been given shots as hitters if they weren’t pitchers. If anything, more players are pushed to pitch than to hit these days. Why? Because expansion and the DH. Expansion guaranteed that whole team’s worth of new pitching staffs had to come up from folks that weren’t good enough to make a major league roster. But some of the hitters that came up were guys that could hit well enough but not field well enough to make the majors, and the DH brought up hitters regardless of fielding ability. Many major league rosters now carry 11 pitchers as opposed to those days of 10 or even 9 I remember from my youth.
As for the specifics of Babe Ruth, he was a good pitcher, maybe even a very good pitcher. But few people would have picked him as the best pitcher of his time. He had a HOF worthy 1916, and was solid in 1917 and 1918, finishing 1st, 7th, and 9th respectively in ERA in those three years; he looked like he might someday be a HOF pitcher, if they built a HOF someday, but he’d need to have more 1916s to do so, given that Walter Johnson was in the league.. But Ruth’s OPS+ in 1915 was 189, in 1916 his OPS+ was 121; in 1917 it went 162, and they started to notice, and in 1918 he played some outfield and his OPS+ was 194. His ERA+ didn’t compare to his OPS+. In 1918, splitting time, he was an excellent pitcher, but the best hitter in baseball going by OPS+, just edging Ty Cobb (nobody in the NL came close). Ruth’s ERA+ was 93 points behind Johnson’s.
So I think it’s pretty clear: the Red Sox (and Yankees) had a choice between a solid innings eater, a guy who might have been the ace of their staff but certainly not of their league, or they could have the best hitter in baseball.
And yeah, Ruth didn’t have to face Negro Leagues pitchers in games that counted, and he didn’t face relief specialists, and he didn’t have any night games. But neither did anybody else Ruth competed against, and those guys didn’t self handicap by eating hot dogs and drinking beer between innings. He also had long train rides instead of much shorter plane rides, a shorter season in which to build counting stats, no arthroscopic surgery, no real notion of diet or exercise. Normalized stats adjust skill level to league averages. Ruth was better by more than any other hitter in baseball history.
In baseball, Jimmy Foxx and Babe were contemporaries, and Babe is clearly > Foxx. Ted Williams and Foxx were about equal
in 39 & 40, when Foxx was near peak, so Babe > Ted.
In 57 & 58, Ted leads majors in OPS (when he is old), so Ted is better than Mantle, Mays, Aaron
So Babe is clearly better than Williams, Mantle, Mays, Aaron.
How can he not be the best ever?
In baseball, the long careers and the overlaps makes the comparisons seem possible.
The greatest stars of every sport are all born under the astrological sign of Aquarius. Jim Brown and Michael Jordan even have the exact same birthday (Feb. 17). Gretsky, Nicklaus, the Babe…all Aquarians.
Coincidence?