Coincidence?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.