SWC75
Bored Historian
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THE SULTAN OF SWAT
I grew up in the 60’s. As I learned more and more about baseball history I became frustrated that the numbers the heroes of my generation was putting up seemed to pale in comparison to those put up by the heroes of past generations. My favorite player was Roberto Clemente, who hit .317 lifetime- easily the best mark of his time, well over Hank Aaron, (.305), Willie Mays (.302), Mickey Mantle (.298) and Carl Yastremski (.285). When Clemente hit his career high of .357 in 1967 that was considered remarkable.
My older brother’s hero was Stan Musial, who hit .331 lifetime, .376 in his best season. Stan’s contemporary, Ted Williams, hit .344 lifetime, .406 in his best season. Ted’s favorite player growing up was Bill Terry of the Giants, who hit .341 lifetime, .401 in his best season. He was the last .400 hitter before Williams, doing it in 1930. But Bill’s numbers almost got lost in the shuffle in an era when Babe Ruth hit as high as .393 and 60 home runs, (in different seasons). Rogers Hornsby hit over .400 three times, once with 40 homers, Harry Heilmann hit only hit .400 once but hit .393 or better four times, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenburg both had 58 home run seasons and Hack Wilson once hit 56 home runs with 190 RBIs.
The numbers of my heroes looked kind of puny in comparison. The nadir was reached in 1968 when Yaz won the batting title by hitting .301, breaking Elmer Flick’s ‘record’ for the lowest batting average ever to win a batting title. Sports writers were speculating that there might not be any .300 hitters any more. What happened to baseball? Were all the best athletes playing the other sports that had become so popular?
The MacMillan Encyclopedia came out. I was able to see that Bill Terry hit .401 in a league that batted .303 and that Carl Yastremski had hit .301 in a league that batted .230. Terry was 98 points above his league’s average, Yaz 71 points above his. 27 points difference. This seemed more reasonable than to think that Terry was 100 points better. I felt that, if Yaz had played in the National league of 1930, he might have batted around .374 and if Terry had hit in the American league of 1968, he’d probably hit more like .328. People might even think that Yaz was better than Terry because he hit .374 to Terry’s .328. I felt it made more sense that the quality of the top players was more of a constant and the differences in the numbers of playesr of different eras was due to the difference in the conditions under which they played. (I was hardly the only one to come to this conclusion.)
I sent the next few weeks having fun adjusting batting averages. I figured out that the all-time composite major league batting average is .262, (it still is, by the way). I went through each year and noted the difference between each league batting average and .262 and applied that difference to the batting averages of all the batting champions and for year of certain individual player’s careers. I found my hero, Roberto Clemente was now a .324 lifetime hitter who really hit .370 in his best year. That was more like it.
I had so much fun “normalizing” batting averages, I decided to try the same thing with other stats. Naturally, I moved on to home runs. I figured out the number of home runs hit per team per 162 games throughout baseball history and then figured the same for each individual league each season and multiplied the home run total of the player I was interested in by the ratio of those two numbers. I was having fun getting “modern” home run totals for the top sluggers of the Dead Ball Era. Then I got to Babe Ruth. I had him hitting 121 home runs in 1920. I knew that couldn’t possibly be. Nobody, not even Babe Ruth, could hut 121 home runs in a season under any circumstances. I did the other seasons of his career and he “hit” over 100 home runs several times. I thought about it and realized my error: “normalization” only works if all players throughout baseball history have tried equally to do whatever you are measuring. During the Dead Ball Era, there was little point in most players trying for the fences: the ball was hard to see and didn’t carry far enough for that to be an effective strategy. Besides, the cricket concept that superior batsmen hit the ball between fielders, not over their heads, prevailed, at least in the early days of the game.
There’s a famous stat about Ruth in 1920: He hit more home runs than any other team in the league. That’s normally presented to suggest that Ruth had almost superhuman capabilities. What it really means is that nobody else was trying to place baseball like Babe Ruth: they were still playing the game they had played all their lives, just with a livelier ball. The AL composite batting average went up from .268 to .283 with the balls being replaced when they got dirty or scratched up. But they weren’t going over the fence all that much unless Ruth was at the plate.
When owners saw how fans reacted to Ruth’s game, they all wanted to get a Ruth of their own. Those were in short supply but some imitators sprang up. In 1922, Rogers Hornsby hit 42 homers for the Cardinals, (while hitting .401). Across town, Ken Williams became the first 30-30 man with 39 homers and 37 steals. Tilly Walker hit 37 homers for the 1922 Athletics. The next year, Cy Williams hit 41 for the Phillies. When the Yankees found Lou Gehrig, everybody wanted one of him, too. Eventually, most teams had at least one designated slugger in the middle of the line-up. The other players just tried to get on base and into scoring position, which resulted in prodigious numbers of RBIs, (the top 12 RBI totals in baseball history are from the 1920’s and 1930’s). The famous “murder’s row” 1927 Yankees hit 158 home runs, 107 for Ruth and Gehrig and 51 from the rest of the team. When TV came in, more and more players wanted to get on the highlight films and now everyone wants to hit home runs. 158 home runs would have been 11th in the AL of 2013.
The realization that normalization doesn’t always work left me with a taste for stats that reflect what actually happened, not what should have or might have happened. When I see the word “adjusted” next to a stat, I tend to move on. Fast forward to 2007. I’m preparing to visit my brother in Hawaii and need a book to read on the long plane flight. I see a book by Bill Jenkinson called “The Year Babe Ruth hit 104 Home Runs”. I bought it but did so with a smirk. Jenkinson had obviously made the same mistake I had, “normalizing Ruth’s numbers into something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or maybe he did what had been done with Josh Gibson, the famous Negro League slugger who had been credited with some for hitting up 90 home runs in year or 800 for his career. Those totals are for all games against all different levels of opposition, not just the games against Negro League opposition. Maybe Jenkinson had totaled how many home runs Ruth hit in spring training, during the AL regular season, in the World Series and in winter ball or barnstorming in a 12 month calendar year. But that’s not what Jenkinson had done.
Jenkinson started out the way I did. He was a 1960’s baseball fan whose big hero was Richie Allen, (as he was called then: he later insisted on being called Dick). Allen was similar to Reggie Jackson except he was a better all-around hitter but didn’t play for championship teams. Both hit tremendous home runs that awed the people who saw them. Members of Jenkinson’s family told him that Allen was good but could hardly compare to their heroes, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx and Babe Ruth. He vowed to prove them wrong. To do so, he decided to find out how far their home runs were hit and compare them to Allen’s.
“Without knowing what I was doing or where I was going, I jumped into an exhaustive study of the great sluggers. It was a genuine labor of love and it led me directly to George Herman Ruth, The Babe. I knew that my father was a reliable source of information and I expected Ruth to have left a legacy of genuinely long home runs. But I was also a grounded individual who knew the difference between fact and fiction. I expected Ruth or Foxx to be the strongest of his time. That, in itself, would be impressive and validate the hindsight of my family But guys of those old eras couldn’t possibly compete on purely physical talents with modern athletes….men like Ruth and Foxx were the best of their era, but they predated the wonders of modern weight lifting and sophisticated strength training. Science and common sense propelled the presumption that they would fall short of the newer bionic types.” This is an important point: Jenkinson didn’t go into his extensive study of the issue as a Babe Ruth fan trying to defend him from fans of modern players. He was a fan of a modern, (to him) player trying to prove that Babe Ruth and his contemporaries were not as good as his hero.
“The more I learned about Ruth and Foxx, the better they looked, especially Ruth”. He gain respect for the old-time sluggers. In his follow-up book, “Baseball’s Ultimate Power”, he says: “My research has also consistently indicated that the strongest players from any past era are as strong as today’s muscle-bound behemoths. That has never made much sense to me, but it appears to be true nonetheless. After years of confusion, the answer is beginning to emerge. It lies in the more demanding physical lifestyles of prior generations and the effectiveness of so called repetitive function. Players in the same generation as Brouthers and Connor were often farmers or coal miners. They may not have lifted weights in a training center but the constant use of their musculature in repetitively demanding functions tended to develop prodigious strength.” I would add that hitting home runs is not just about strength but flexibility. The longest got ball hitters are not necessarily the most muscular. They are the most fluid, with the best body and hand-to-eye co-ordination. The same is true in other sports. Tiger Woods isn’t bulky but they had to lengthen courses to make them more difficult for him. Boxers like Alexis Arguello and Thomas Hearns were big hitters but were rather skinny. Hank Aaron was 6-0 180 but hit more home runs than anyone until Barry Bonds.
Jenkinson spent 28 year studying long home runs before he published his first book. He didn’t have film or tape for homes runs hit before the ESPN Era, (even when they were recorded not much was preserved and news-reel type clips didn’t tend to show where the ball landed). But he did have newspapers- a lot of them. Newspapers were, for decades the primary source of information about sporting events, (and everything else) and the major cities had many of them. New York City once had 18 dailies. The other big league cities had between 3 and 6. And games would not only be covered by the home team’s papers but also by the visiting team’s papers. And when a major slugger like Ruth or Foxx or Mantle came up, where he hit the ball was described in great detail. The fans hadn’t seen the game so the newspaper articles had to describe it for them. Articles were not just post game quotes and analysis. They covered events play by play. Jenkinson read all these articles, took note of any information about where balls were hit by the major sluggers, even if they weren’t home runs, and used photographs and diagrams of stadiums, as well as personal visits to locations to create an exhaustive record of long-ball hitting in the major leagues.
Among the things Jenkinson determined: that his hero, Dick Allen, had ten 500 foot home runs to his credit, the longest a 540 footer in Shibe Park in 1967 that went “over the third sign atop a roof in deepest left center field”. Reggie Jackson had four, the longest his homer in the 1971 All-Star game off the transformer in Detroit that also has been estimated at 540 feet if it had missed the transformer and proceeded to the street below. He also credits Mickey Mantle with ten 500 footers, the longest the one off the right field faced at Yankee Stadium in 1963. That’s the one Mickey always picked as his hardest hit ball ever, not the one in Washington in 1953 that supposedly went 565 feet. Jenkinson measure that one at as about 510 feet. A child was discovered holding the ball 565 feet from home plate but he surely didn’t catch it. Mickey is supposed to have hit a 643 foot home run in Detroit in 1960. Jenkinson has determined that that ball landed where the witness said it did after bouncing on the pavement at about 490 feet and then about 75 feet in the air, creating the illusion to the witness, (who had his back to it), that it had landed next to him on the fly. Jenkinson rates the one off the Yankee Stadium façade a 540 footer, tied for the 4th longest home run in history.
Jenkinson credits Mark McGwire with a dozen 500 footers, all after 1995. (His longest one prior to that was 455 feet). He has a couple of 535 foot shots- both in 1998. The one he hit off Randy Johnson In Seattle has been reported as his longest home run but Jenkinson says is was “only” 505 feet. Sammy Sosa has two 500 footers, both at Wrigley: a 501 foot shot “far over the bleacher sin left center” and a 520 footer in 2003 “over the bleachers and the street in left center”. Dave Kingman hit one “onto the porch of the third house past Waveland Avenue” in 1976. It was reported in some papers as going 630 feet but that was a misprint. It was 100 feet less than that. It was one of three Kong shots that traveled 500 feet. Darryl Strawberry’s homer off the rim of the Olympic stadium roof on opening day in 1988 was a 505 footer, according to Jenkinson. It was the Staw man’s only 500 footer, which surprised me. Other 500 footers by modern-day sluggers: Frank Robinson has 1, Bo Jackson 2, Jimmy Wynn 1, (in 1967 in Cincinnati: I’ve seen a clip of it bouncing onto a freeway: 507 feet), Mike Schmidt 1, Kirk Gibson 3, Andres Galaragga 2, George Foster 2, Mike Piazza 1, Ron Kittle 1, Cecil Fielder 2, Greg Luzinski 4, JD Drew 1, Wily Mo Pena 1, Manny Ramirez 1, Jim Thome 1 and Adam Dunn 2 Among the old timers, Hank Greenberg has 1, Larry Doby, (maybe the most under-rated player in history), 2, Eddie Mathews 1, Wally Post 1, Luke Easter 1, Norm Cash 1, Wally Berger 1,Lou Gehrig 2, Dick Stuart 2, Joe Adcock 3, Ralph Kiner 2, Ted Williams 3, Harmon Killebrew 4, Willie McCovey 5, Willie Stargell 10, Frank Howard and Jimmie Foxx at least 10 (Jenkinson only lists top tens for these players: Mantles and Stargell’s stop at 500 feet: both Howard’s and Foxx’s 10th longest home runs are 505 feet).
Among those who have never hit a 500 foot home run are: Barry Bonds, who came close with a 492 footer a mile high in Colorado in 2002, Jose Canseco, the “Johnny Appleseed of Steroids”, whose famous shot off the hard rock cafe in Toronto in 1989 travelled 484 feet, Hank Aaron, whose longest was 470 feet, Willie Mays (480), Fred McGriff (490), Boog Powell, (490), Jim Rice, (495), Albert Pujols, (477), Prince Fielder (475), Frank Thomas (495), Ryan Howard, (486)and Alex Rodrigues, (487).
According to Bill Jenkinson, Babe Ruth hit 45 home runs that went at least 500 feet. He hit 198 home runs that went at least 450 feet, (he credited Mark McGwire with 74 such shots: I don’t know about the others). Jenkinson has a list of the 100 longest home runs in major league history. Of those hundred longest home runs, Babe Ruth hit 29 of them, (the 100th longest home run is a 509 footer). Foxx, Howard and McGwire are tied at 8. Everybody else is behind them. Ruth has the three longest and two fo the six shots tied for 4th, including his last home run, which travelled 540 feet over the right field roof in Pittsburgh, another 540 footer he hit in Boston in 1926, a 545 foot shot “high over the bleachers” in Comiskey in 1921, a 550 footer “over two rows of houses in right field” in Shibe in 1930 and the longest home run ever hit in a major league baseball game, a clout at Navin Field in Detroit on July 18, 1921 that Jenkinson said must have traveled at least 575 feet.
“The ball soared soared toward the corner of Cherry Street and Trumbull Avenue in dead center and landed in the middle of the intersection. The groundskeeper immediately produced stadium blueprints proving that the ball had left the premises 560 feet from home plate…How far beyond that corner did the ball land? Sadly, on this issue, we can’t be certain. We know that the concrete wall which the Babe’s homer cleared, was 15 feet in height. On the matter of clearance, the newspapers, (18 of them) disagreed. The estimates ranged from 5 feet over the wall to 10 feet. On the matter of the exact landing point, the Detroit News suggested that the ball probably landed on the car tracks which passed through the middle of the intersection.” Others suggested that it cleared the street. If it did, it would have gone 600 feet. Jenkinson’s estimate is intentionally conservative. Harry Heilmann had hit a 512 foot home run then days before in the same park that was judged to be the longest anyone had ever seen. But then Babe came to down…
People think that Ruth’s home run totals were inflated by the short fences down the line at Yankees Stadium, including 296 feet to right field. In the Polo grounds it was only 257. But the greatest power hitters aren’t pull hitters. They don’t have to be. They are spray hitters. Short porches don’t help them as much as deep center fields hurt them. Ruth hit 347 home runs at home, 367 on the road. Ruth hit the only 500 foot opposite field home run ever, which landed on a garage roof over the left center field fence at Fenway Park on 7/23/28. It went 515 feet. He had at least a dozen balls hit to left field that exceeded 475 feet. Only 23 of Ruth’s 714 home runs traveled less than 330 feet, the normal distance down the line in modern ballparks. The average length of his 714 career home runs was 416 feet, (farther than deepest center field in most modern ballparks). In his greatest year, 1921, it was 434 feet. #713 went 500 feet and #714 went 540 feet. This man hit the 4th longest home run in history for his last ever home run.
In Ruth’s day, players were judged by their nicknames as much as by their statistics. The Babe had more of them than anyone else. The best ones have an alliterative flair: The Behemoth of Bust; The Caliph of Clout; The Human Howitzer; The Jumbo Jouster; The Khedive of Klout; The Maharajah of Mash; the Monarch of Maulers; The Potentate of Pounders, the Titan of Thump; the Wali (or Wizard) of Wallop and the Wazier of Wham. But the one that stuck was “The Sultan of Swat”
Doctors in his time tried to determine how he did what he did. They determined that he had “abnormally thick wrists and forearms, high co-ordination, superior eyesight, hearing and “nerves”, (reactions), and a high degree of “perceptual intelligence”. His chest, when expanded, was 7 inches wider than normal. The average is 2 inches. That’s supposed to be a sign of natural strength. Regarding “perceptual intelligence”, I would use another term modern sport commentators often use: I think the game “slowed down” for the Babe and he was able to do things other people could not due as a result.
Ruth is often derided as a “fat man” who could not have been that much of an athlete. Jenkinson has obtained Ruth’s beginning of the season weights for certain years of his career: When he first joined the Red Sox in 1914, he was 185 pounds on a 6-2 ½ frame. He was up to 195 in 1915, 217 in 1922, 205 in 1923, 230 in 1924, 250 in 1925, (the year of his ‘bellyache’), 226 in 1926, 223 in 1927, 224 in 1928, 230 in 1929 and 1930, 228 in 1931 and 235 in 1934. He was never “ripped” but he was never really fat, either. John Goodman in that movie was at least 100 pounds heavier than the Babe ever was. There are numerous pictures of Babe Ruth early in his career and even in the mid-20’s in which he looks svelte and athletic.
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He had the face of a fat man but not the body of one, at least not when he was in top shape. One clue: the Yankees started using numbers in 1929. Ruth was given #3 just because that his spot in the batting order. If you see a clip of him wearing #3, it’s at least 1929 and he’s at least 34 years old.
Then there’s the subject of Babe’s bats. In his time it was assumed that the bigger the bat, the more powerful the drives off it would be. And that’s true- if the bats can be swung at the same speed. Ted Williams discovered that a lighter bat could be swung more quickly and that more than made up for the reduced heft. Since then, hitters have been suing smaller and smaller bats. In Babe’s time, bigger was assumed to be better. The bat Babe used in 1921 was an amazing 54 ounces, 4 ½ pounds! He later cut down to use a 44 ounce bat in 1927. Mark McGwire used a 35 ounce bad when he hit 70 home runs in 1988. Barry Bonds used a 32 ounce stick to hit 73 three years later. How many home runs would Babe Ruth have hit with a 32 ounce bat?
Then there are the balls. Yes, the balls were given cork centers in 1911. Yes, it was decided for health reasons to ban the spitball and replace damaged balls for the 1920 season. But the replacement of balls started slowly and has accelerated over the years. Jenkinson: “If Alex Rodriguez looked at the balls thrown at Mike Schmidt, he’d be surprised. If Mike Schmidt looked at the balls Ted Williams played with, he’d be dismayed. If Ted Williams looked at the balls Babe Ruth had to hit, he would have been horrified.” Also, the Babe never wore all the amour hitters display today so they can lean in over the plate. Barry Bonds looked like a medieval knight:
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Babe Looked like a baseball player.
Ruth also faced a bigger strike zone. In Ruth’s time, the strike zone was called pretty much as the rules describe: from the letters to the knees. Now anything above the waist is “high”. Ted Williams once had trouble with pitcher Ellis Kinder, a former teammate. He finally hit a home run off Kinder and attributed it to Kinder making the mistake of getting the ball down instead of “chest level”. Ted said he ”could not hit the ball squarely” if it were at chest level. But in those days a chest level pitch was a strike. Now it’s a ball.
People also have the image of him being a one-dimensional slugger. He hit .342 lifetime with 136 triples and 123 steals, (Mickey Mantle had 72 and 153). The Babe had 7 inside the park home runs and stole home 10 times. Tris Speaker called him “One of the greatest defensive outfielders I have ever seen.” Jenkinson read many accounts of great defensive plays Ruth made. And, of course, he’d started out as one of the best pitchers in the game. Most of the old film clips just show the Babe trotting around the bases after a home run. He was capable of much more than that.
It’s also been complained that the Babe never faced a black pitcher: he was accomplishing all these things in a segregated game. But Ruth, in his post-season barnstorming, played 55 games against teams made up of Negro League players, (which is why the racist Commissioner, Judge Landis, suspended him: players had barnstormed for years but they weren’t supposed to put their reputations on the line against black players). He hit .455 in those games with 12 home runs, one of which left Satchel Paige “speechless” according to Buck O’Neill.
Josh Gibson was “The Black Babe Ruth”. There had to be one. When you are excluded from the major leagues and have to organize your own leagues, whoever is your greatest player is going to be compared to the greatest player who is allowed to play and you will want your man to be considered at least the equal of that player. Baseball reference.com has Gibson with 107 home runs in Negro League games, (they don’t have the number of games, for some reason). He had 1987 plate appearances, 1,825 official at bats and 638 hits. If he had 648 plate appearances, (162 games X4), he would have had 595 official at bats, 208 hits and 35 home runs. 16.8% of his hits were home runs 5.9% of his official at bats resulted in home runs and 5.4% of his plate appearances. Ruth had 10,622 plate appearances in the major leagues with 8,399 official at bats, 2,876 hits and 714 home runs. Per 648 plate appearances, he had 512 official at bats, 175 hits and 44 home runs. 25.1% of his hits were home runs. He hit a home run in 8.6% of his official at bats and 6.8% of his plate appearances. Josh Gibson was the greatest African-American home run hitter of the 60 year period during which his people were not allowed to play in the Major leagues. That means he was a very great power hitter indeed, one of the greatest in baseball history. But even he wasn’t Babe Ruth.
For many years his 714 home runs and 60 in a single season was considered unassailable. Both records have now been broken multiple times. But 714 was never a number that represented the maximum extent of Ruth’s talents. Remember that he started out as a pitcher in the Dead Ball Era. Hank Aaron had 13,941 plate appearances, 12,364 official at bats and 3,771 hits. If he had 648 plate appearances he’d have had 575 official at bats, 175 hits and 35 home runs, (Gibson was the greatest home run hitter of the 60 years of apartheid, Aaron of the 60 years after that and they averaged the same number). 20% of Aaron’s hits were home runs. 6.1% of his official at bats and 5.4% of his plate appearances resulted in home runs. If Babe Ruth had had Aaron’s number of plate appearances, he’d have hit 937 home runs. If he’d had the number of hits Hank Aaron had, he’d also have 937 home runs. And, If he’d had Aaron’s official at bats, (been walked no more than Aaron was), he’d have had 1,051 home runs.
Let’s do Barry Bonds, who had 12,606 plate appearances, 9,847 official at bats, 2,935 hits and 762 home runs. Per 648 plate appearances he had 506 official at bats, 151 hits and 39 home runs. He actually exceeded Ruth in the percentage of his hits that were home runs, 25.8%. 6.0% of his plate appearances resulted in home runs and 7.7% of his official at bats.
Now let’s talk about the title of Jenkinson’s first book: how does he come up with Babe Ruth hitting 104 home runs? Jenkinson looked at the stadiums Ruth played his games in and compared them to modern stadiums. In Ruth’s time the ballparks were primarily downtown parks built to conform to city blocks. That gave them short dimensions down the line in a lot of places but incredibly long dimensions in other places, often center field or maybe left center. The parks built in the 50’s and 60’s tended to be suburban parks with regular dimensions, usually 330 down each line, 375 to left and right and 410 to center field. The “retro” parks built in the 1990’s and 2000’s tended to be smaller than that with various quirks built into them that were intended to be homages to the famous parks of the past but they didn’t cover as much territory. They were clearly designed to help the hitters.
Overall, according to Jenkinson, the average distance to the outfield walls in Ruth’s time was about 28 feet farther than the average distance today. And the walls were between 10 and 40 feet high. Now they tend to be about 8 feet. In Ruth’s day, many balls would have bounced off those fences instead of clearing them, if they ever made it that far. Jenkinson also charted the balls Ruth hit that didn’t make it that far, (as he could because of all the vivid newspaper descriptions). This gave him a good idea of how many of Babe’s drives that resulted in outs or extra base hits would have gone over today’s fences.
There have been three rule changes that also impact what Babe Ruth’s home run totals would be today. (1) What would now be called a ground-rule double- a ball that hits on the playing field or the top of the wall and hops over it- was considered a home run in Ruth’s time. Jenkinson found no account of Ruth being credited for a home run on such a play in his entire career. (2) A walk off home run only counted as a home run if that run was needed to win the game. Otherwise, the batter was credited with however many bases he’d taken when the winning run scored, (which terminated the game). Jenkinson thinks Ruth lost 4 home runs in his career because of this rule. (3) The foul poles were used as a guide to the umpires as to what is foul and what is fair, not a terminus point, after which it no longer mattered. If a ball was fair when it went over the fence but curved foul after that, it was judged a foul ball. If it left the stadium, as Ruth’s shots sometimes did, the umpire had to guess where it landed. Jenkinson thinks Ruth lost at least 50 career home runs that would have counted now because of that rule. In other words, without even accounting for distance, Babe Ruth actually hit 768 home runs that would have counted how. That alone puts him back in first place for career home runs.
Jenkinson focused on Babe’s greatest season, when he was at the height of his powers. No, not 1927. 1921, a year when he hit .378 and slugged .846, (compared to .356 and .737 in 1927). In 1921, Babe hit 59 actual home runs. Jenskinson said that Babe didn’t lose any to the rule that the game ended when the winning run was scored that year but he did lose at least 4 of them to the “fair/foul” rule. That gets him up to 63 home runs. The Babe also hit drives off the distant fences that would be home runs now, so now he’s up to Barry Bonds plateau with 73. Then there are the drives that fell into the spacious outfields of the time that produced doubles and triple or even long singles but would have been over any modern day fence. Jenkinson believes there were at least 26 of them. Now we are at 99 home runs. By multiplying that by 162/154, (although the Babe played in 152 games that year), he arrives at the 104 home runs in the title of his book. He regards that as a conservative estimate.
He did the same sort of study for the other season of Babe’s career. He thinks Babe Ruth, playing in modern ballparks under modern rules for 162 games, would have hit at least 91 home runs in 1927, 86 in 1920, over 70 in 1924, 1926, and 1928-1930 and over 60 in 1919, 1922, 1923 and 1931. He estimates Babe would have a career total of 1,158 home runs playing in this era. Those totals I came up with in my ill-fated “normalization” study of decades ago may not have been too far off, but for a different set of reasons.
Jenkinson reversed the process for Bonds, but, unfortunately, he didn’t choose 2001, the year Bonds hit 73 home runs. Instead, he chose Bond’s last good year, (2004). Jenkinson decided that Barry, hitting in the old ballparks under the old rules of Ruth’s time for 154 games, would have hit 27 home runs, rather than the 45 he actually did hit If 2001 has a similar differential, then Barry, in his greatest year, would have hit 44 home runs in Ruth’s time.
As I’ve said, I don’t think much of adjusted stats since games are won and lost based on what actually happened but Jenkinson’s research is impressive. The one big counter-argument is that the quality of opposition Ruth would have had in the 1920’s must surely be less than it is now. Players are bigger, stronger and faster. The talent pool is much greater now. Pitchers have developed more pitches, (although they can’t use spitballs, which any pitcher who was using them in the major leagues in 1919 was allowed to continue to use for the remainder of their careers). In how many sports is the greatest player considered to be someone who played in the 1920’s? Of course, in the 1920’s, baseball was by far the major team sport and the best athletes were playing it if they could, because that’s where the money was. How many great baseball talents are playing other sports today? Maybe the talent pool isn’t all that much bigger after all..
I think that when you consider everything, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter and greatest baseball player of all time. Looking at other sports for an example of a player who had a similar impact on his sport as Ruth did on baseball, I really couldn’t find one. You could argue that Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Wayne Gretzky were as statistically prolific but I don’t know that they changed the way their games were played, at least not nearly as much as Ruth. Bill Russell in basketball may have changed his game as much, turning it from a half-court game where you fed the ball to your star into a full court game that started on defense and was all about hitting the open man. But Bill himself wasn’t statistically prolific, except as a rebounder. You could combine Chamberlian with Russell and get some idea of the impact Ruth had on baseball. But Wilt and Bill were opposites: Wilt started winning championships when he started playing more like Bill. But then he wasn’t “Wilt” any more. And Bill could never have put up Wilt’s number even if he’d wanted to. And neither had the impact on his age Ruth did. With his extraverted showmansship and his appetite for life, Babe Ruth came to symbolize the 1920’s. The best comparison in that regard would be Muhammed Ali, also arguably “The Greatest” in his sport and an extraverted showman who, being a rebel, became the image of the 1960’s. Both Ruth and Ali, as times changed and their eras became a memory, became beloved figures. Both were impacted by serious illnesses and became figures of great sympathy. Both had rough edges that got polished off by these circumstances. So to find an equivalent of Babe Ruth, you’d have to somehow combine Wilt Chamberlain with Bill Russell and blend in Muhammed Ali. That was the Babe.
A sport doesn’t reach its full maturity until it becomes international. Then you find out who the greatest players and teams are. Soccer did that decades ago. Basketball has begun to reach a similar level. Hockey is probably limited to the northern hemisphere but is pretty internationalized. I think American football will probably remain a regional passion. But I think baseball, which has shown it can prosper in poor areas, can go global in this century. It has flourished in certain places in the Caribbean, Latin American and around the Pacific rim but I see no reason it can’t go beyond that. When it does, we’ll be in a better position to judge who the greatest baseball player will be. But I still think it will be the Sultan of Swat.
I grew up in the 60’s. As I learned more and more about baseball history I became frustrated that the numbers the heroes of my generation was putting up seemed to pale in comparison to those put up by the heroes of past generations. My favorite player was Roberto Clemente, who hit .317 lifetime- easily the best mark of his time, well over Hank Aaron, (.305), Willie Mays (.302), Mickey Mantle (.298) and Carl Yastremski (.285). When Clemente hit his career high of .357 in 1967 that was considered remarkable.
My older brother’s hero was Stan Musial, who hit .331 lifetime, .376 in his best season. Stan’s contemporary, Ted Williams, hit .344 lifetime, .406 in his best season. Ted’s favorite player growing up was Bill Terry of the Giants, who hit .341 lifetime, .401 in his best season. He was the last .400 hitter before Williams, doing it in 1930. But Bill’s numbers almost got lost in the shuffle in an era when Babe Ruth hit as high as .393 and 60 home runs, (in different seasons). Rogers Hornsby hit over .400 three times, once with 40 homers, Harry Heilmann hit only hit .400 once but hit .393 or better four times, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenburg both had 58 home run seasons and Hack Wilson once hit 56 home runs with 190 RBIs.
The numbers of my heroes looked kind of puny in comparison. The nadir was reached in 1968 when Yaz won the batting title by hitting .301, breaking Elmer Flick’s ‘record’ for the lowest batting average ever to win a batting title. Sports writers were speculating that there might not be any .300 hitters any more. What happened to baseball? Were all the best athletes playing the other sports that had become so popular?
The MacMillan Encyclopedia came out. I was able to see that Bill Terry hit .401 in a league that batted .303 and that Carl Yastremski had hit .301 in a league that batted .230. Terry was 98 points above his league’s average, Yaz 71 points above his. 27 points difference. This seemed more reasonable than to think that Terry was 100 points better. I felt that, if Yaz had played in the National league of 1930, he might have batted around .374 and if Terry had hit in the American league of 1968, he’d probably hit more like .328. People might even think that Yaz was better than Terry because he hit .374 to Terry’s .328. I felt it made more sense that the quality of the top players was more of a constant and the differences in the numbers of playesr of different eras was due to the difference in the conditions under which they played. (I was hardly the only one to come to this conclusion.)
I sent the next few weeks having fun adjusting batting averages. I figured out that the all-time composite major league batting average is .262, (it still is, by the way). I went through each year and noted the difference between each league batting average and .262 and applied that difference to the batting averages of all the batting champions and for year of certain individual player’s careers. I found my hero, Roberto Clemente was now a .324 lifetime hitter who really hit .370 in his best year. That was more like it.
I had so much fun “normalizing” batting averages, I decided to try the same thing with other stats. Naturally, I moved on to home runs. I figured out the number of home runs hit per team per 162 games throughout baseball history and then figured the same for each individual league each season and multiplied the home run total of the player I was interested in by the ratio of those two numbers. I was having fun getting “modern” home run totals for the top sluggers of the Dead Ball Era. Then I got to Babe Ruth. I had him hitting 121 home runs in 1920. I knew that couldn’t possibly be. Nobody, not even Babe Ruth, could hut 121 home runs in a season under any circumstances. I did the other seasons of his career and he “hit” over 100 home runs several times. I thought about it and realized my error: “normalization” only works if all players throughout baseball history have tried equally to do whatever you are measuring. During the Dead Ball Era, there was little point in most players trying for the fences: the ball was hard to see and didn’t carry far enough for that to be an effective strategy. Besides, the cricket concept that superior batsmen hit the ball between fielders, not over their heads, prevailed, at least in the early days of the game.
There’s a famous stat about Ruth in 1920: He hit more home runs than any other team in the league. That’s normally presented to suggest that Ruth had almost superhuman capabilities. What it really means is that nobody else was trying to place baseball like Babe Ruth: they were still playing the game they had played all their lives, just with a livelier ball. The AL composite batting average went up from .268 to .283 with the balls being replaced when they got dirty or scratched up. But they weren’t going over the fence all that much unless Ruth was at the plate.
When owners saw how fans reacted to Ruth’s game, they all wanted to get a Ruth of their own. Those were in short supply but some imitators sprang up. In 1922, Rogers Hornsby hit 42 homers for the Cardinals, (while hitting .401). Across town, Ken Williams became the first 30-30 man with 39 homers and 37 steals. Tilly Walker hit 37 homers for the 1922 Athletics. The next year, Cy Williams hit 41 for the Phillies. When the Yankees found Lou Gehrig, everybody wanted one of him, too. Eventually, most teams had at least one designated slugger in the middle of the line-up. The other players just tried to get on base and into scoring position, which resulted in prodigious numbers of RBIs, (the top 12 RBI totals in baseball history are from the 1920’s and 1930’s). The famous “murder’s row” 1927 Yankees hit 158 home runs, 107 for Ruth and Gehrig and 51 from the rest of the team. When TV came in, more and more players wanted to get on the highlight films and now everyone wants to hit home runs. 158 home runs would have been 11th in the AL of 2013.
The realization that normalization doesn’t always work left me with a taste for stats that reflect what actually happened, not what should have or might have happened. When I see the word “adjusted” next to a stat, I tend to move on. Fast forward to 2007. I’m preparing to visit my brother in Hawaii and need a book to read on the long plane flight. I see a book by Bill Jenkinson called “The Year Babe Ruth hit 104 Home Runs”. I bought it but did so with a smirk. Jenkinson had obviously made the same mistake I had, “normalizing Ruth’s numbers into something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or maybe he did what had been done with Josh Gibson, the famous Negro League slugger who had been credited with some for hitting up 90 home runs in year or 800 for his career. Those totals are for all games against all different levels of opposition, not just the games against Negro League opposition. Maybe Jenkinson had totaled how many home runs Ruth hit in spring training, during the AL regular season, in the World Series and in winter ball or barnstorming in a 12 month calendar year. But that’s not what Jenkinson had done.
Jenkinson started out the way I did. He was a 1960’s baseball fan whose big hero was Richie Allen, (as he was called then: he later insisted on being called Dick). Allen was similar to Reggie Jackson except he was a better all-around hitter but didn’t play for championship teams. Both hit tremendous home runs that awed the people who saw them. Members of Jenkinson’s family told him that Allen was good but could hardly compare to their heroes, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx and Babe Ruth. He vowed to prove them wrong. To do so, he decided to find out how far their home runs were hit and compare them to Allen’s.
“Without knowing what I was doing or where I was going, I jumped into an exhaustive study of the great sluggers. It was a genuine labor of love and it led me directly to George Herman Ruth, The Babe. I knew that my father was a reliable source of information and I expected Ruth to have left a legacy of genuinely long home runs. But I was also a grounded individual who knew the difference between fact and fiction. I expected Ruth or Foxx to be the strongest of his time. That, in itself, would be impressive and validate the hindsight of my family But guys of those old eras couldn’t possibly compete on purely physical talents with modern athletes….men like Ruth and Foxx were the best of their era, but they predated the wonders of modern weight lifting and sophisticated strength training. Science and common sense propelled the presumption that they would fall short of the newer bionic types.” This is an important point: Jenkinson didn’t go into his extensive study of the issue as a Babe Ruth fan trying to defend him from fans of modern players. He was a fan of a modern, (to him) player trying to prove that Babe Ruth and his contemporaries were not as good as his hero.
“The more I learned about Ruth and Foxx, the better they looked, especially Ruth”. He gain respect for the old-time sluggers. In his follow-up book, “Baseball’s Ultimate Power”, he says: “My research has also consistently indicated that the strongest players from any past era are as strong as today’s muscle-bound behemoths. That has never made much sense to me, but it appears to be true nonetheless. After years of confusion, the answer is beginning to emerge. It lies in the more demanding physical lifestyles of prior generations and the effectiveness of so called repetitive function. Players in the same generation as Brouthers and Connor were often farmers or coal miners. They may not have lifted weights in a training center but the constant use of their musculature in repetitively demanding functions tended to develop prodigious strength.” I would add that hitting home runs is not just about strength but flexibility. The longest got ball hitters are not necessarily the most muscular. They are the most fluid, with the best body and hand-to-eye co-ordination. The same is true in other sports. Tiger Woods isn’t bulky but they had to lengthen courses to make them more difficult for him. Boxers like Alexis Arguello and Thomas Hearns were big hitters but were rather skinny. Hank Aaron was 6-0 180 but hit more home runs than anyone until Barry Bonds.
Jenkinson spent 28 year studying long home runs before he published his first book. He didn’t have film or tape for homes runs hit before the ESPN Era, (even when they were recorded not much was preserved and news-reel type clips didn’t tend to show where the ball landed). But he did have newspapers- a lot of them. Newspapers were, for decades the primary source of information about sporting events, (and everything else) and the major cities had many of them. New York City once had 18 dailies. The other big league cities had between 3 and 6. And games would not only be covered by the home team’s papers but also by the visiting team’s papers. And when a major slugger like Ruth or Foxx or Mantle came up, where he hit the ball was described in great detail. The fans hadn’t seen the game so the newspaper articles had to describe it for them. Articles were not just post game quotes and analysis. They covered events play by play. Jenkinson read all these articles, took note of any information about where balls were hit by the major sluggers, even if they weren’t home runs, and used photographs and diagrams of stadiums, as well as personal visits to locations to create an exhaustive record of long-ball hitting in the major leagues.
Among the things Jenkinson determined: that his hero, Dick Allen, had ten 500 foot home runs to his credit, the longest a 540 footer in Shibe Park in 1967 that went “over the third sign atop a roof in deepest left center field”. Reggie Jackson had four, the longest his homer in the 1971 All-Star game off the transformer in Detroit that also has been estimated at 540 feet if it had missed the transformer and proceeded to the street below. He also credits Mickey Mantle with ten 500 footers, the longest the one off the right field faced at Yankee Stadium in 1963. That’s the one Mickey always picked as his hardest hit ball ever, not the one in Washington in 1953 that supposedly went 565 feet. Jenkinson measure that one at as about 510 feet. A child was discovered holding the ball 565 feet from home plate but he surely didn’t catch it. Mickey is supposed to have hit a 643 foot home run in Detroit in 1960. Jenkinson has determined that that ball landed where the witness said it did after bouncing on the pavement at about 490 feet and then about 75 feet in the air, creating the illusion to the witness, (who had his back to it), that it had landed next to him on the fly. Jenkinson rates the one off the Yankee Stadium façade a 540 footer, tied for the 4th longest home run in history.
Jenkinson credits Mark McGwire with a dozen 500 footers, all after 1995. (His longest one prior to that was 455 feet). He has a couple of 535 foot shots- both in 1998. The one he hit off Randy Johnson In Seattle has been reported as his longest home run but Jenkinson says is was “only” 505 feet. Sammy Sosa has two 500 footers, both at Wrigley: a 501 foot shot “far over the bleacher sin left center” and a 520 footer in 2003 “over the bleachers and the street in left center”. Dave Kingman hit one “onto the porch of the third house past Waveland Avenue” in 1976. It was reported in some papers as going 630 feet but that was a misprint. It was 100 feet less than that. It was one of three Kong shots that traveled 500 feet. Darryl Strawberry’s homer off the rim of the Olympic stadium roof on opening day in 1988 was a 505 footer, according to Jenkinson. It was the Staw man’s only 500 footer, which surprised me. Other 500 footers by modern-day sluggers: Frank Robinson has 1, Bo Jackson 2, Jimmy Wynn 1, (in 1967 in Cincinnati: I’ve seen a clip of it bouncing onto a freeway: 507 feet), Mike Schmidt 1, Kirk Gibson 3, Andres Galaragga 2, George Foster 2, Mike Piazza 1, Ron Kittle 1, Cecil Fielder 2, Greg Luzinski 4, JD Drew 1, Wily Mo Pena 1, Manny Ramirez 1, Jim Thome 1 and Adam Dunn 2 Among the old timers, Hank Greenberg has 1, Larry Doby, (maybe the most under-rated player in history), 2, Eddie Mathews 1, Wally Post 1, Luke Easter 1, Norm Cash 1, Wally Berger 1,Lou Gehrig 2, Dick Stuart 2, Joe Adcock 3, Ralph Kiner 2, Ted Williams 3, Harmon Killebrew 4, Willie McCovey 5, Willie Stargell 10, Frank Howard and Jimmie Foxx at least 10 (Jenkinson only lists top tens for these players: Mantles and Stargell’s stop at 500 feet: both Howard’s and Foxx’s 10th longest home runs are 505 feet).
Among those who have never hit a 500 foot home run are: Barry Bonds, who came close with a 492 footer a mile high in Colorado in 2002, Jose Canseco, the “Johnny Appleseed of Steroids”, whose famous shot off the hard rock cafe in Toronto in 1989 travelled 484 feet, Hank Aaron, whose longest was 470 feet, Willie Mays (480), Fred McGriff (490), Boog Powell, (490), Jim Rice, (495), Albert Pujols, (477), Prince Fielder (475), Frank Thomas (495), Ryan Howard, (486)and Alex Rodrigues, (487).
According to Bill Jenkinson, Babe Ruth hit 45 home runs that went at least 500 feet. He hit 198 home runs that went at least 450 feet, (he credited Mark McGwire with 74 such shots: I don’t know about the others). Jenkinson has a list of the 100 longest home runs in major league history. Of those hundred longest home runs, Babe Ruth hit 29 of them, (the 100th longest home run is a 509 footer). Foxx, Howard and McGwire are tied at 8. Everybody else is behind them. Ruth has the three longest and two fo the six shots tied for 4th, including his last home run, which travelled 540 feet over the right field roof in Pittsburgh, another 540 footer he hit in Boston in 1926, a 545 foot shot “high over the bleachers” in Comiskey in 1921, a 550 footer “over two rows of houses in right field” in Shibe in 1930 and the longest home run ever hit in a major league baseball game, a clout at Navin Field in Detroit on July 18, 1921 that Jenkinson said must have traveled at least 575 feet.
“The ball soared soared toward the corner of Cherry Street and Trumbull Avenue in dead center and landed in the middle of the intersection. The groundskeeper immediately produced stadium blueprints proving that the ball had left the premises 560 feet from home plate…How far beyond that corner did the ball land? Sadly, on this issue, we can’t be certain. We know that the concrete wall which the Babe’s homer cleared, was 15 feet in height. On the matter of clearance, the newspapers, (18 of them) disagreed. The estimates ranged from 5 feet over the wall to 10 feet. On the matter of the exact landing point, the Detroit News suggested that the ball probably landed on the car tracks which passed through the middle of the intersection.” Others suggested that it cleared the street. If it did, it would have gone 600 feet. Jenkinson’s estimate is intentionally conservative. Harry Heilmann had hit a 512 foot home run then days before in the same park that was judged to be the longest anyone had ever seen. But then Babe came to down…
People think that Ruth’s home run totals were inflated by the short fences down the line at Yankees Stadium, including 296 feet to right field. In the Polo grounds it was only 257. But the greatest power hitters aren’t pull hitters. They don’t have to be. They are spray hitters. Short porches don’t help them as much as deep center fields hurt them. Ruth hit 347 home runs at home, 367 on the road. Ruth hit the only 500 foot opposite field home run ever, which landed on a garage roof over the left center field fence at Fenway Park on 7/23/28. It went 515 feet. He had at least a dozen balls hit to left field that exceeded 475 feet. Only 23 of Ruth’s 714 home runs traveled less than 330 feet, the normal distance down the line in modern ballparks. The average length of his 714 career home runs was 416 feet, (farther than deepest center field in most modern ballparks). In his greatest year, 1921, it was 434 feet. #713 went 500 feet and #714 went 540 feet. This man hit the 4th longest home run in history for his last ever home run.
In Ruth’s day, players were judged by their nicknames as much as by their statistics. The Babe had more of them than anyone else. The best ones have an alliterative flair: The Behemoth of Bust; The Caliph of Clout; The Human Howitzer; The Jumbo Jouster; The Khedive of Klout; The Maharajah of Mash; the Monarch of Maulers; The Potentate of Pounders, the Titan of Thump; the Wali (or Wizard) of Wallop and the Wazier of Wham. But the one that stuck was “The Sultan of Swat”
Doctors in his time tried to determine how he did what he did. They determined that he had “abnormally thick wrists and forearms, high co-ordination, superior eyesight, hearing and “nerves”, (reactions), and a high degree of “perceptual intelligence”. His chest, when expanded, was 7 inches wider than normal. The average is 2 inches. That’s supposed to be a sign of natural strength. Regarding “perceptual intelligence”, I would use another term modern sport commentators often use: I think the game “slowed down” for the Babe and he was able to do things other people could not due as a result.
Ruth is often derided as a “fat man” who could not have been that much of an athlete. Jenkinson has obtained Ruth’s beginning of the season weights for certain years of his career: When he first joined the Red Sox in 1914, he was 185 pounds on a 6-2 ½ frame. He was up to 195 in 1915, 217 in 1922, 205 in 1923, 230 in 1924, 250 in 1925, (the year of his ‘bellyache’), 226 in 1926, 223 in 1927, 224 in 1928, 230 in 1929 and 1930, 228 in 1931 and 235 in 1934. He was never “ripped” but he was never really fat, either. John Goodman in that movie was at least 100 pounds heavier than the Babe ever was. There are numerous pictures of Babe Ruth early in his career and even in the mid-20’s in which he looks svelte and athletic.
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He had the face of a fat man but not the body of one, at least not when he was in top shape. One clue: the Yankees started using numbers in 1929. Ruth was given #3 just because that his spot in the batting order. If you see a clip of him wearing #3, it’s at least 1929 and he’s at least 34 years old.
Then there’s the subject of Babe’s bats. In his time it was assumed that the bigger the bat, the more powerful the drives off it would be. And that’s true- if the bats can be swung at the same speed. Ted Williams discovered that a lighter bat could be swung more quickly and that more than made up for the reduced heft. Since then, hitters have been suing smaller and smaller bats. In Babe’s time, bigger was assumed to be better. The bat Babe used in 1921 was an amazing 54 ounces, 4 ½ pounds! He later cut down to use a 44 ounce bat in 1927. Mark McGwire used a 35 ounce bad when he hit 70 home runs in 1988. Barry Bonds used a 32 ounce stick to hit 73 three years later. How many home runs would Babe Ruth have hit with a 32 ounce bat?
Then there are the balls. Yes, the balls were given cork centers in 1911. Yes, it was decided for health reasons to ban the spitball and replace damaged balls for the 1920 season. But the replacement of balls started slowly and has accelerated over the years. Jenkinson: “If Alex Rodriguez looked at the balls thrown at Mike Schmidt, he’d be surprised. If Mike Schmidt looked at the balls Ted Williams played with, he’d be dismayed. If Ted Williams looked at the balls Babe Ruth had to hit, he would have been horrified.” Also, the Babe never wore all the amour hitters display today so they can lean in over the plate. Barry Bonds looked like a medieval knight:
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Babe Looked like a baseball player.
Ruth also faced a bigger strike zone. In Ruth’s time, the strike zone was called pretty much as the rules describe: from the letters to the knees. Now anything above the waist is “high”. Ted Williams once had trouble with pitcher Ellis Kinder, a former teammate. He finally hit a home run off Kinder and attributed it to Kinder making the mistake of getting the ball down instead of “chest level”. Ted said he ”could not hit the ball squarely” if it were at chest level. But in those days a chest level pitch was a strike. Now it’s a ball.
People also have the image of him being a one-dimensional slugger. He hit .342 lifetime with 136 triples and 123 steals, (Mickey Mantle had 72 and 153). The Babe had 7 inside the park home runs and stole home 10 times. Tris Speaker called him “One of the greatest defensive outfielders I have ever seen.” Jenkinson read many accounts of great defensive plays Ruth made. And, of course, he’d started out as one of the best pitchers in the game. Most of the old film clips just show the Babe trotting around the bases after a home run. He was capable of much more than that.
It’s also been complained that the Babe never faced a black pitcher: he was accomplishing all these things in a segregated game. But Ruth, in his post-season barnstorming, played 55 games against teams made up of Negro League players, (which is why the racist Commissioner, Judge Landis, suspended him: players had barnstormed for years but they weren’t supposed to put their reputations on the line against black players). He hit .455 in those games with 12 home runs, one of which left Satchel Paige “speechless” according to Buck O’Neill.
Josh Gibson was “The Black Babe Ruth”. There had to be one. When you are excluded from the major leagues and have to organize your own leagues, whoever is your greatest player is going to be compared to the greatest player who is allowed to play and you will want your man to be considered at least the equal of that player. Baseball reference.com has Gibson with 107 home runs in Negro League games, (they don’t have the number of games, for some reason). He had 1987 plate appearances, 1,825 official at bats and 638 hits. If he had 648 plate appearances, (162 games X4), he would have had 595 official at bats, 208 hits and 35 home runs. 16.8% of his hits were home runs 5.9% of his official at bats resulted in home runs and 5.4% of his plate appearances. Ruth had 10,622 plate appearances in the major leagues with 8,399 official at bats, 2,876 hits and 714 home runs. Per 648 plate appearances, he had 512 official at bats, 175 hits and 44 home runs. 25.1% of his hits were home runs. He hit a home run in 8.6% of his official at bats and 6.8% of his plate appearances. Josh Gibson was the greatest African-American home run hitter of the 60 year period during which his people were not allowed to play in the Major leagues. That means he was a very great power hitter indeed, one of the greatest in baseball history. But even he wasn’t Babe Ruth.
For many years his 714 home runs and 60 in a single season was considered unassailable. Both records have now been broken multiple times. But 714 was never a number that represented the maximum extent of Ruth’s talents. Remember that he started out as a pitcher in the Dead Ball Era. Hank Aaron had 13,941 plate appearances, 12,364 official at bats and 3,771 hits. If he had 648 plate appearances he’d have had 575 official at bats, 175 hits and 35 home runs, (Gibson was the greatest home run hitter of the 60 years of apartheid, Aaron of the 60 years after that and they averaged the same number). 20% of Aaron’s hits were home runs. 6.1% of his official at bats and 5.4% of his plate appearances resulted in home runs. If Babe Ruth had had Aaron’s number of plate appearances, he’d have hit 937 home runs. If he’d had the number of hits Hank Aaron had, he’d also have 937 home runs. And, If he’d had Aaron’s official at bats, (been walked no more than Aaron was), he’d have had 1,051 home runs.
Let’s do Barry Bonds, who had 12,606 plate appearances, 9,847 official at bats, 2,935 hits and 762 home runs. Per 648 plate appearances he had 506 official at bats, 151 hits and 39 home runs. He actually exceeded Ruth in the percentage of his hits that were home runs, 25.8%. 6.0% of his plate appearances resulted in home runs and 7.7% of his official at bats.
Now let’s talk about the title of Jenkinson’s first book: how does he come up with Babe Ruth hitting 104 home runs? Jenkinson looked at the stadiums Ruth played his games in and compared them to modern stadiums. In Ruth’s time the ballparks were primarily downtown parks built to conform to city blocks. That gave them short dimensions down the line in a lot of places but incredibly long dimensions in other places, often center field or maybe left center. The parks built in the 50’s and 60’s tended to be suburban parks with regular dimensions, usually 330 down each line, 375 to left and right and 410 to center field. The “retro” parks built in the 1990’s and 2000’s tended to be smaller than that with various quirks built into them that were intended to be homages to the famous parks of the past but they didn’t cover as much territory. They were clearly designed to help the hitters.
Overall, according to Jenkinson, the average distance to the outfield walls in Ruth’s time was about 28 feet farther than the average distance today. And the walls were between 10 and 40 feet high. Now they tend to be about 8 feet. In Ruth’s day, many balls would have bounced off those fences instead of clearing them, if they ever made it that far. Jenkinson also charted the balls Ruth hit that didn’t make it that far, (as he could because of all the vivid newspaper descriptions). This gave him a good idea of how many of Babe’s drives that resulted in outs or extra base hits would have gone over today’s fences.
There have been three rule changes that also impact what Babe Ruth’s home run totals would be today. (1) What would now be called a ground-rule double- a ball that hits on the playing field or the top of the wall and hops over it- was considered a home run in Ruth’s time. Jenkinson found no account of Ruth being credited for a home run on such a play in his entire career. (2) A walk off home run only counted as a home run if that run was needed to win the game. Otherwise, the batter was credited with however many bases he’d taken when the winning run scored, (which terminated the game). Jenkinson thinks Ruth lost 4 home runs in his career because of this rule. (3) The foul poles were used as a guide to the umpires as to what is foul and what is fair, not a terminus point, after which it no longer mattered. If a ball was fair when it went over the fence but curved foul after that, it was judged a foul ball. If it left the stadium, as Ruth’s shots sometimes did, the umpire had to guess where it landed. Jenkinson thinks Ruth lost at least 50 career home runs that would have counted now because of that rule. In other words, without even accounting for distance, Babe Ruth actually hit 768 home runs that would have counted how. That alone puts him back in first place for career home runs.
Jenkinson focused on Babe’s greatest season, when he was at the height of his powers. No, not 1927. 1921, a year when he hit .378 and slugged .846, (compared to .356 and .737 in 1927). In 1921, Babe hit 59 actual home runs. Jenskinson said that Babe didn’t lose any to the rule that the game ended when the winning run was scored that year but he did lose at least 4 of them to the “fair/foul” rule. That gets him up to 63 home runs. The Babe also hit drives off the distant fences that would be home runs now, so now he’s up to Barry Bonds plateau with 73. Then there are the drives that fell into the spacious outfields of the time that produced doubles and triple or even long singles but would have been over any modern day fence. Jenkinson believes there were at least 26 of them. Now we are at 99 home runs. By multiplying that by 162/154, (although the Babe played in 152 games that year), he arrives at the 104 home runs in the title of his book. He regards that as a conservative estimate.
He did the same sort of study for the other season of Babe’s career. He thinks Babe Ruth, playing in modern ballparks under modern rules for 162 games, would have hit at least 91 home runs in 1927, 86 in 1920, over 70 in 1924, 1926, and 1928-1930 and over 60 in 1919, 1922, 1923 and 1931. He estimates Babe would have a career total of 1,158 home runs playing in this era. Those totals I came up with in my ill-fated “normalization” study of decades ago may not have been too far off, but for a different set of reasons.
Jenkinson reversed the process for Bonds, but, unfortunately, he didn’t choose 2001, the year Bonds hit 73 home runs. Instead, he chose Bond’s last good year, (2004). Jenkinson decided that Barry, hitting in the old ballparks under the old rules of Ruth’s time for 154 games, would have hit 27 home runs, rather than the 45 he actually did hit If 2001 has a similar differential, then Barry, in his greatest year, would have hit 44 home runs in Ruth’s time.
As I’ve said, I don’t think much of adjusted stats since games are won and lost based on what actually happened but Jenkinson’s research is impressive. The one big counter-argument is that the quality of opposition Ruth would have had in the 1920’s must surely be less than it is now. Players are bigger, stronger and faster. The talent pool is much greater now. Pitchers have developed more pitches, (although they can’t use spitballs, which any pitcher who was using them in the major leagues in 1919 was allowed to continue to use for the remainder of their careers). In how many sports is the greatest player considered to be someone who played in the 1920’s? Of course, in the 1920’s, baseball was by far the major team sport and the best athletes were playing it if they could, because that’s where the money was. How many great baseball talents are playing other sports today? Maybe the talent pool isn’t all that much bigger after all..
I think that when you consider everything, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter and greatest baseball player of all time. Looking at other sports for an example of a player who had a similar impact on his sport as Ruth did on baseball, I really couldn’t find one. You could argue that Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Wayne Gretzky were as statistically prolific but I don’t know that they changed the way their games were played, at least not nearly as much as Ruth. Bill Russell in basketball may have changed his game as much, turning it from a half-court game where you fed the ball to your star into a full court game that started on defense and was all about hitting the open man. But Bill himself wasn’t statistically prolific, except as a rebounder. You could combine Chamberlian with Russell and get some idea of the impact Ruth had on baseball. But Wilt and Bill were opposites: Wilt started winning championships when he started playing more like Bill. But then he wasn’t “Wilt” any more. And Bill could never have put up Wilt’s number even if he’d wanted to. And neither had the impact on his age Ruth did. With his extraverted showmansship and his appetite for life, Babe Ruth came to symbolize the 1920’s. The best comparison in that regard would be Muhammed Ali, also arguably “The Greatest” in his sport and an extraverted showman who, being a rebel, became the image of the 1960’s. Both Ruth and Ali, as times changed and their eras became a memory, became beloved figures. Both were impacted by serious illnesses and became figures of great sympathy. Both had rough edges that got polished off by these circumstances. So to find an equivalent of Babe Ruth, you’d have to somehow combine Wilt Chamberlain with Bill Russell and blend in Muhammed Ali. That was the Babe.
A sport doesn’t reach its full maturity until it becomes international. Then you find out who the greatest players and teams are. Soccer did that decades ago. Basketball has begun to reach a similar level. Hockey is probably limited to the northern hemisphere but is pretty internationalized. I think American football will probably remain a regional passion. But I think baseball, which has shown it can prosper in poor areas, can go global in this century. It has flourished in certain places in the Caribbean, Latin American and around the Pacific rim but I see no reason it can’t go beyond that. When it does, we’ll be in a better position to judge who the greatest baseball player will be. But I still think it will be the Sultan of Swat.
erhaps the most overrated player in baseball history”, sighting a low on-base percentage considering those high batting averages and saying that under James “Win Shares” system, Sisler’s reputation for defensive excellence is not borne out. In his first HBA, James had said “George Sisler is the probably the only player other than Lou Gehrig who can reasonably be considered the greatest first baseman ever in terms of peak value… He was, at that moment, (1922), the best player in baseball other than Babe Ruth.” In that volume, James makes a statistical comparison of Sisler’s output from the beginning of their careers until 1922 and says “The point is not that he was a as good as Ruth, of course, but that, if you can stand next to Ruth and not look ridiculous, you’re pretty good. “
