Was Babe Ruth the Best Baseball Player Ever? by Christopher Sean

 

Any debate over whether Babe Ruth was the greatest ever is eventually going to boil down to how much more competitive one thinks the game is today as compared to Ruth's day. I know many of you already have strong opinions about this and couldn't give a **** what I think, but here it is anyway.

For me, I find it impossible to believe that Ruth's game was as competitive as today's game. I have always believed that Ruth, Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Wagner, Cobb, etc., were very talented individuals who were able to exploit the relative lack of talent in their leagues to put up numbers that, when adjusted for era, have them standing further away from their peers than any modern player could ever hope to achieve. Simply put: the easiest way to appear great is to play against crappy competition.

I base this belief on several things:

First: Racial and geographic factors once limited the population pool from which players could be selected. You'll find more major league talents in a population of 4 million than you will in a population of 500,000. No black, Latino, or even white players from the West Coast would have limited the talent pool in Ruth's day, enough to offset any diluting factors that modern league expansion has wrought.

Second: Scouting then was less sophisticated than it is today, and so it would have been more difficult to identify the best players from the population pool, further limiting the level of competition. (When Ruth was a rookie, the American League was only 10 years removed from the time where, if a team ran out of players, they'd go into the stands, ask if there were any ball players in the stadium, and slap a uniform on a semi-pro player who happened to be in the crowd. That's major league baseball?)

Third: The lack of a breeding-ground minor league farm system (the minors then were independent and not yet slaves to the major leagues) would have made it impossible to "funnel" and consolidate all the best talents into the majors, as is the situation now.

Fourth: Medical science can now save the careers of top talents that would otherwise have been lost forever. Players back then got hurt too, just like players today. You never heard of them, because they got hurt and never played again and went back to the farm or the coal mines and died in obscurity. How many talents were lost that could have been saved with today's medicine? Take just Tommy John surgery alone, for example. Something like 1 in 9 pitchers in the big leagues today have had Tommy John surgery for torn ligaments - an injury that, prior to 1972, would have flat ended anybody's career. How many mysterious "dead arms" of the past could have been saved? Pitchers can now come back as good as new - in fact, often even BETTER than they were before - about 80% of the time with Tommy John surgery.

Fifth: Look at team winning percentages then and now. The standard deviation of winning percentages has been decreasing over time, and is smaller, now, than it has ever been. There is less of a gap in winning percentage between the best teams and the worst teams, now, then there has ever been in times past. It's true; get out a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia, look up team winning percentages year by year since 1872, plug those into Excel, and graph it out.

So, I really don't think that it is just idle speculation that the league is more competitive than it used to be - it seems to be a statistical reality. All this in an era when the financial gap between the richest and poorest teams is bigger than it has ever been. And in an era of free agency - non-existent in Ruth's time!

So now, we have a situation where the richest teams are richer than the poorest teams by the greatest margin in history - AND we have a situation where the richest teams are free to gobble up the best players like no other time in history. By all rights, there should be the biggest gap ever in team winning percentages - we should be living in the LEAST competitive baseball era ever - yet the exact opposite is true.

If that doesn't convince you that today's players are more tightly clustered than ever in terms of talent and ability, then I got little left to convince ANYONE, honestly!!!!!

Anyway, I don't know for certain how MUCH worse the league was then than it is now. Who does? I will say this - the gap between Ruth and his contemporaries is bigger than for any other player ever. Well, Barry Bonds... but Bonds has only opened the gap between himself and his peers in the last 4 years, whereas Ruth's CAREER value was always leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the league.

How much of that was due to the lack of competition? I don't know. Maybe I overestimated how much more competitive things are today. Maybe, even after adjusting for the relatively less stiff competition, Ruth was STILL so much better than his peers that he is still the greatest ever. I don't know for sure. Who does? Nobody.

I will say this. I balk at choosing any player pre-1950 as the greatest ever. I don't look at a minor league player who batted .380 and wonder, "Is he better than Tony Gwynn, who batted .338 in the majors? Well, let's see. Gwynn had a higher level of competition to succeed against. But HOW much higher? Is it possible that a .380 average, after adjusting for the weaker league, is a more impressive accomplishment?"

I don't ask these types of questions because it seems to me that a minor leaguer shouldn't even be compared to a major leaguer. You compare a major leaguer to a major leaguer. Let Joe .380 succeed at the highest level of competition, THEN we'll evaluate him. If you want to be the best, you must beat the best. Obliterating second-rate foes is great, but I don't want to start trying to figure out how much weaker the second-rate foes are than the first-rate foes, and then start trying to figure out what the performance WOULD have been against top-shelf competition, if only it had been available.

So, for me, I'd start with post-1950 players, because that's when the league became fully integrated, and the modern farm system was in full effect. I'd pick guys like Mantle, because he was the best player of the 50's; Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, because they were the best players of the 60's; Mike Schmidt, because he was the best player of the 70's and 80's (yeah that's right, Mike Schmidt!); and Bonds, who was the best player of the 90's - even before his steroid-fueled transformation.

One last thing I want to say... you can who toss out my argument about level of league competition and pick Ruth as the best ever, but then you need to explain why Josh Gibson WASN'T the best ever. He had better numbers than Ruth did, in the Negro Leagues. How about 800 home runs and a .350 average in 17 seasons? Or 80 home runs and a .400+ average in 1936?

"Hey, no fair arguing that the Negro Leagues wasn't as competitive as the major leagues!" Arguing level of competition supports MY argument. Toss out league competitiveness and you're pigeon holed into accepting that Gibson was better than Ruth. Anyhow, lots of white players saw Gibson and said he was Ruth's equal as a hitter - and these were the 1930's, so there was no political correctness at work when they made these statements. They simply gave their honest evaluation.

Ruth's "Trump Card" is that he was also a very good pitcher - for 4 years. But did I mention that Gibson was a CATCHER? Wrap your head around that one. He played the most important defensive position on the diamond, and the most physically exhausting one, for 17 years. Does that trump Ruth's 4 years as a pitcher? Hard to say, but a very good argument could be made. You might wonder how much better Ruth might have been had he lived a more disciplined lifestyle. No dice. Gibson was an alcoholic, and a heroin addict later, who died at age 35.

 

(Slightly off topic: according to the book "Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball" (a very interesting read!) Ruth (or his ghost writer) says that after the 1925 season - his worst ever, at the age of 30 - Ruth put an end to his excesses of partying and drinking. Ruth (or his ghost) says that he had been able to get away with all that debauchery without his play suffering on account of his youth; but by age 30, it finally caught up with him, and he had his worst season ever. Amidst rumors that he was washed up, Ruth spent the entire winter in the gym boxing and doing aerobics and calisthenics, and bounced back to top form in 1926. 1927 you all know about. Ruth says after that, he stopped overeating and partying and has always spent the offseason exercising. So, maybe he wasn't as undisciplined as we think. He was productive all the way to age 37, you know.)

-Christopher Sean