Babe Ruth

Never heard of him...

Seriously, one of my favorities quotes of all time is from Don Mattingly, who growing up thought Babe Ruth was a fictional character because of the stories that were told.

 

From Jeffrey Toobin story in The New Yorker on Stevens:

"On a wall in Stevens’s chambers that is mostly covered with autographed photographs of Chicago sports heroes, from Ernie Banks to Michael Jordan, there is a box score from Game Three of the 1932 World Series, between the Yankees and the Cubs. When Babe Ruth came to bat in the fifth inning, at Wrigley Field, according to a much disputed baseball legend, he pointed to the center-field stands and then proceeded to hit a home run right to that spot. The event is known as “the called shot.”

“My dad took me to see the World Series, and we were sitting behind third base, not too far back,” Stevens, who was twelve years old at the time, told me. He recalled that the Cubs players had been hassling Ruth from the dugout earlier in the game. “Ruth did point to the center-field scoreboard,” Stevens said. “And he did hit the ball out of the park after he pointed with his bat. So it really happened.”

Stevens has a reverence for facts. He mentioned that he vividly recalled Ruth’s shot flying over the center-field scoreboard. But, at a recent conference, a man in the audience said that Ruth’s homer had landed right next to his grandfather, who was sitting far away from the scoreboard. “That makes me warn you that you should be careful about trusting the memory of elderly witnesses,” Stevens said. The box score was a gift from a friend; Stevens noticed that it listed the wrong pitchers for the game, so he crossed them out with a red pen, and wrote in the right names."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all#ixzz0sSAQ6hzh

 

I think Babe Ruth is the greatest player ever to play baseball and more than that the greatest player in the history of American team sports. He was exponentially greater than any other player before. If Aaron broke his record by hitting 1500 career homeruns, Hank would still be thousands shy of duplicating Ruth.

The career record was 138 when Ruth broke it in 1921. Aaron and Bonds barely moved the needle, relatively.

As a pitcher he was 94-46 and a career ERA+122. twice having years in which his ERA+ was over 150, and led the league in ERA+ in 1916 with an ERA of 1.75.

His career post season OPS was 1.211. That 41 games and 167 plate appearances. Bonds may have a World Series OPS of 1.991, but that's for 1 7 game series. In 1928 Ruth's World Series OPS was 2.022. He hit .625 in that series, and unlike Bonds, Ruth 's team won.

What's most remarkable is that Ruth stopped pitching in 1921, until 1930. After 8 full seasons of not taking the mound in a game Ruth pitches a complete game victory in 1930 and once more in 1933.

 

Buck O'Neil said he heard three cracks of the bat in his lifetime which were unlike any he had ever heard. They had a distinct sound that stood out like no other.

The first time, it was Babe Ruth.
The second time, it was Josh Gibson.
The third time, it was Bo Jackson.

 

Now, what about pitching? Well, being that I like pitching more than hitting, I've always focused on Ruth the pitcher more than the average person. He was fast and actually pretty wild, but it was more in the category of effectively wild. His K/9, for the era, was terrific. His statistically most similar pitcher is a rather obscure fell who pitched for the 1900's Cubs named Carl Lundgren. But Babe was better than Lundgren. His similarity scores are skewed because of the few cameos he had with the New York Yankees. A better comparison might be Smoky Joe wood, of whom Walter Johnson said "No man alive can throw harder than Smokey Joe Wood." Wood was the ace of the early 1910's Boston Red Sox; in some ways, as a pitcher, he was Ruth's predecessor. However, unlike Babe, Smoky Joe Wood's brilliant career came to an end after an arm injury. He once commented that he threw so hard he thought his arm would come off. Wood's K/BB ratio is better than Ruth's and his K/9 is slightly better, but otherwise, you have two very similar pitchers.

Pre-arm injury Vean Gregg (whom you'll never hear of, unfortunately) is also a great comparison. He threw with a similar pitching motion to Ruth, had a similar repertoire, and had it not been for an arm injury, he'd have been a great pitcher. His peak years were with Cleveland in the early 1910's. He burned his arm out around 1914. 1915-1918 were lost years, but he wasn't done. He reinvented himself as a sinkerballer in the Pacific Coast League (which was good enough to be a Major League at the time Gregg played there) and made the 1925 A's, for whom he pitched well as an early relief pitcher. He kept on pitching in the Minors until about 1930, mostly because the pay was better (back then, the Minors had similar pay scales to the Majors...a reliever would get less than an everyday starter no matter what, which is why Vean Gregg probably chose the Minors over the Majors).

Although Smokey Joe Wood and Vean Gregg themselves are underrated, I believe both to be excellent comparables to Babe Ruth. A fellow with a longer career that might also be considered is popular 19th century Hall of Fame candidate "Parisian Bob" Caruthers, who, interestingly, was a two-way star like Babe Ruth. Only nowhere near as good as a hitter. But Caruthers almost certainly merits induction to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher. Since Ruth was so similar, I think his pitching is being downplayed. He wasn't moved to the outfield because he was a bad pitcher. Far from it. It was merely because he was that great a hitter.

 

Do you just go around copying and pasting this Babe Ruth stuff on message boards all across the Internet every couple of years?

 

Years ago I worked for a department store at the Eaton Centre in Toronto and it was hosting an exhibit from the Canadian Baseball Hall of fame that featured a Ruth bat.

I was helping the guy bring the stuff in and he let me hold the bat. I have never held a bat as heavy as that (the shaft seemed a lot wider than bats I was familair with) and have no idea how you would swing something like that. Unreal.

 

Was that when Vincent "Bo" cracked that bat over his leg in disgust a decade or two ago?

 

This sounds like a sock puppet thread. But okay.

 

Bo knows juice?

 

Bang.

Ruth was an amazing player who did amazing things... Calling his shot wasn't one of them.

 

He was so great, Lebanon named their capital city after him.