Babe Ruth – Great or The Greatest?

Babe Ruth – Great or The Greatest?

[paypal_donation_button]Great or the GREATEST?

How do you even talk about Babe Ruth? It’s a little like talking about Abe Lincoln. We all know the iconography. We can all recite, by rote, their greatest hits. We think of them (maybe, again, by rote) as The Greatest in their respective fields, although, we maybe wonder sometimes, secretly, if they might not be just a little overrated.

We’ll save Abraham Lincoln for a different day, on a different blog. For now, just google ‘Babe Ruth Overrated’. I’ll wait. Now Google ‘Babe Ruth Underrated’. I got 50,800 results for overrated and 213,000 results for underrated. Your mileage may vary. (For the record, ‘Abe Lincoln Overrated’ returned 67,500 results, so the Babe’s ahead on that scorecard). Other than being a fun exercise, that doesn’t really tell us much, except that in the internet’s court of public opinion, Babe Ruth is still much loved. It’s not just among the New York Yankees faithful, either. Ruth transcends New York, and Boston. He is a part of the larger consciousness in a way that no other ballplayer will ever be.

As far as Ruth himself goes, though, it is easy to get so lost in the images and the moments that we forget to consider him as an actual baseball player. We remember when he called his shot. We remember when he hit his 714th home run (though we don’t usually remember that it was in Boston, as a member of the Boston Braves). Add to this selective memory the fact of the iconic image of Ruth in his later years, heavyset and lumbering. Could this man, who barely looks like an athlete at all, really be the greatest baseball player of all-time?

One facet of the ‘Babe Ruth is Overrated’ argument which I find fascinating goes something like this:

‘Babe Ruth isn’t overrated because he’s not the greatest of all-time. He’s the greatest. No doubt about it. Rather, he’s overrated because he’s not the greatest by the insane margin that some fans, and even some experts, claim.’

The unexpectedness of this argument delights me, not least because it probably does have some truth to it. Ruth was far from the only deserving legend produced by baseball’s early decades. Demoting him to ‘first among equals’, however, feels at least as wrong.

People have written books on the subject, but let’s at least scratch the surface, with a few of the arguments people use to deny his greatness.

Argument: The overall quality of pitching wasn’t as high in those days, therefore his home runs don’t mean as much.
Rebuttal: Maybe, but the fences were much further back, in most cases, than today. He hit home runs that would carom out of today’s ballparks, and he hit fly balls that would’ve been gone today. Also, if the pitching was that bad, you’d think someone else might have hit more than the 11 he hit in 1918 when he lead the league.

Argument: The culture of the game at the time was slanted away from low batting-average ‘sluggers’, and towards great-hitting slap hitters. Other hitters could’ve produced similar power numbers if they’d wanted.
Rebuttal: This is just silly. Babe Ruth has a career batting average of .342, the tenth best of all-time, through all eras. He hit better than most of the ‘slap hitters’, and harder. This doesn’t even account for his 2060 career walks, which pushed his career on-base-percentage to .474.

Argument: Okay. He was a great hitter, and okay, his numbers probably hold up. He didn’t reach 20 HR or 100 RBI in a season until his sixth year in the big leagues. How do you explain that?
Rebuttal: That’s a deeply ungenerous assessment. Even if you want to count 1914, in which he played in 5 games as a 19-year old as his “first season”, he spent the first several years of his career primarily employed as a pitcher. Remember that?

Let’s talk about the pitching a bit. This is one of those things that is hard to overemphasize and simultaneously hard not to overemphasize. He only, really, pitched for the first five years of his career. By the time he was 24, he had won 89 games, and had produced a strong body of evidence that he would’ve been a Hall-of-Famer on the mound as well.

Babe Ruth ranks 17th in history with a career ERA of 2.27. Half-a-dozen of the guys ahead of him on the list pitched before 1900, when baseball was a very different game. That puts him on the cusp of the Top-10. That no active pitchers approach the upper reaches of this list (Clayton Kershaw comes closest at 34th, as of the end of the 2015 season) should serve as a reminder of how different the game is today than in Ruth’s era. He was not a powerful strikeout pitcher, either, amassing around 3 Ks per 9 innings.

This weird, under-explored, early phase to Ruth’s career occasionally leads people to question whether or not his pitching exploits should ‘count’ when assessing his career. That, of course, is hogwash. Even if it wasn’t, though, you have only to spend some time with his record as a batter to quell any doubts you might have about his status.

The more time you spend looking at baseball statistics, the more Ruth’s numbers look broken, like there must be something wrong with them. It’s not the 714 home runs. It’s not the batting average, either. It’s the on-base percentage of .474, the career slugging percentage of .690, the OPS of 1.164, or the OPS+ of 206. Those last three numbers are the best of all-time, and I find that especially interesting, because they’re the kind of “advanced” metrics which are supposed to discredit a lot of baseball’s old heroes and legends. Instead, this holy trinity of New Statistics just reaffirm an old truth:
The Great Bambino has no peers.