Well I must say your research has changed my mind quite a bit. I will admit when I’m wrong.
I remember reading in one of Jerome_Holtzman’s books that the day after Ruth’s supposed “Called Shot”, not one sportswriter in Chicago or New York mentioned the event in either city’s newspaper. (Holtzman checked). It was a myth that grew over time. When someone finally asked Ruth if he did indeed call his shot Ruth replied with something to the effect of, “Well, the newspapers said I did.” It is important to remember that any film you may have seen of Ruth was shot towards the end of his playing days. He was quite slim and athletic throughout much of his career. Whenever I do see film of him hitting home runs it is quite evident that he could bring his bat around quickly.
Obviously MLB pitchers sometimes dramatically change their approach depending on the batter. Baseball writer Bill James once commented that after George Brett hit a 500-foot home run off a 98-mph Goose Gossage fastball in the 1980 playoffs that “it would be an exaggeration to say that was the last fastball Brett ever saw, but not by much.”
Hitters have weaknesses and pitchers will attempt to exploit them. It’s when they make the odd mistake that they get burned.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
So it’s unlikely that Ruth is a fraud as a big league hitter. He also certainly wasn’t given “gimme” pitches by the opposing teams. He did benefit tremendously from the fact that in his home ballpark he didn’t need to hit the ball very far if he pulled it right (which he had a tendency to do) in order to jack it out of the park.
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Babe Ruth hit more home runs on the road (367) than he did at home (347) so in fact it would appear he gained no advantage at all from his home park.
If you think about it, having a short porch in right really isn’t that big a deal to a good power hitter. How many balls would Ruth have specifically hit right down the lines, or within 30 feet of the right field pole, that went just long enough to be home runs but not long enough to have been home runs in a normal park? Probably not that many, really - and probably not as many as long flies he hit to center field, where home runs went to die. In his time it was 520 to dead center, effectively impossible to hit a home run out of more than once every five years.
It is one of their weird circumstances of baseball history that very few big time home run hitters have ever gained much advantage from their home parks. Ruth didn’t. Bonds hit a few more homers on the road as well; Candlestick and Pac Bell were not good home run parks. Hank Aaron his a few more homers at home but not many (385 to 370) - Atlanta’s a good place to hit homers but Milwaukee was not. Willie Mays hit 335 at home, 325 on the road. A-Rod has 334 at home, 320 on the road. Sammy Sosa did get a significant boost at home, probably worth 30-40 homers, but someday we’ll have a player who has a long, elite career in a place like Cincinnati or Colorado and the guy might hit 800 homers.
That’s a good statistic about Ruth, I guess the talk of the short porch really has been overblown. People even talk about how Yankee Stadium (that was torn down recently) was designed specifically for Ruth to pull home runs in, but I’m not so sure now that’s a fair claim.
I’d say that Yankee Stadium made it hard for right-handers to hit home runs more that it made it easy for Ruth. For example, Joe DiMaggio hit 148 home runs at home and 213 on the road, despite the fact that he played more games at home. At home he hit .168 home runs per game, while on the road he hit .249 home runs per game - a difference of about 48%.
I added up the number of games and homers both home and away for Ruth during the Yankee Stadium years - 1923 through 1934. He hit 259 homers in 851 games at home, and 252 homers in 829 games on the road. This comes out to about .304 homers per game both at home and away. Yankee Stadium made no difference in his home run rate.
Mel Ott is one of the most extreme examples of a player who was helped by his home ballpark. He hit 323 home runs at home and 188 on the road. The Polo Grounds had a huge outfield, but the distance to the foul poles was short, and Ott was able to take advantage of this.
Going back to the thread title, I would love to see some kind of “skills test” of an elite MLB pitcher just throwing baseballs at things to see just how accurately he can put the ball where he wants to.
Kind of like this video, except we never quite decided if that was fake or not, did we? But somewhat more controlled and less gimmicky.
A story about Greg Maddux and his control.
With a hefty 5.52 ERA as a Yankee pitcher. He ranks 17th all-time in that category at 2.28.
Ruth had the good sense to pitch almost entirely in the dead ball and era, and become the first true power hitter of the live one.
First, in case anyone wondered, of all the elite sluggers in baseball history, Mel Ott is the only one who hit a HUGE percentage of his career homers at his home stadium He hit 2/3 of the career homers at the Polo Grounds.
As for Babe Ruth, I always ask: if it was easy to hit 50 homers a year in the 1920s, due to lousy pitching and the lack of black opponents, why didn’t EVERYBODY do it?
Touché 
That used to be much more true than it is now. These days virtually every non-hit pitch is tracked by the very accurate Zone Evaluation system which replaced the original QuesTec system. The umpires receive a report after each game on how they did calling balls and strikes against a standard strike zone. In general umpires are over 95% accurate and about a dozen times a year an umpire will call a game perfectly.
Even more to the point, in 1921, Ruth hit 59 home runs, one less than the American League team average (which was skewed because of his HRs) and one more than the National League team average. He hit more home runs himself than half the teams in the majors.
Umpires aren’t 95% accurate in calling balls and strikes. They’re about 85% accurate in calling strikes (e.g. they will call a pitch a ball when it should have been a strike about 15% of the time) and 92% accurate in calling a ball.
While that number has been improving, umps unfortunately are more likely to screw up when the call is especially important. Their strike accuracy falls with two strikes on the batter, and falls precipitously late in the game with two strikes on the batter. The reverse is also true; umps will err with amazingly frequency in calling a ball a strike when the count of 3-0.
They were within a few years.
From 1920 to 1961, when Maris broke the record, there were only fifteen 50 homer seasons, four by Ruth himself.
McGwire and Sosa are the only batters to match Ruth’s 4 seasons.
Only 27 have managed the feat.
In addition, it was ten years before anyone other than Ruth hit 50. It’s significant that the first time it happened was in 1930; the ball that year was notoriously “juiced”: the entire National League, including pitchers, had a .303 BA that year.
Ruth has always been a weird statistical anomaly, not the weirdest (even in baseball) but definitely strange in that he had tremendous HR hitting power that has rarely been equaled even as ballparks have definitely been designed to facilitate the long ball.
Just his confirmed number of 500’ home runs is impressive, because aside from all the claims about pitching in the 1920s versus 2014 and etc, 500’ home runs are genuinely difficult for any player to hit even in the 1990s during the height of the steroid era. If you go to a major league game and watch batting practice you rarely see them jack them that far and those are with pitches designed to be jacked out of the park.
Incidentally the longest I’ve ever seen a baseball hit was a game I attended at PNC Park between the Reds and the Pirates, in pre-game batting practice Ken Griffey Jr. was taking swings with an aluminum bat (which I wouldn’t think Major Leaguers would even practice with), and hit one probably 500’ or more, but that’s with an aluminum bat. At PNC you can get one out of the park at around 450’, but this one cleared the stands with probably 20’ space between it and the wall whereas most of the ones that get knocked out just barely do. I’m almost positive it ended up in the river.
Ruth excelled in a time before baseball was a fully developed sport. In the dead ball era, most players didn’t even try to hit the ball over the fence. Once Ruth showed the way, bigger and stronger players became valued over small, speedy ones.
Ruth feasted on “cans of corn” and a lesser variety in pitching techniques. Most pitchers could only manage a low 80’s fastball and that truth is borne out by the weight of Ruth’s bat. Ruth might be a decent player in the modern game, but he wouldn’t be The Babe.
I think statistically Ty Cobb is the most out of the norm player in baseball history, given some of his records and their deviation from the average. Cobb likely would have been quite a power hitter if his prime had fallen in the live ball era. He wasn’t an Ichiro style singles hitter but actually was usually in the top ten of the league for slugging, home runs, and triples in the dead ball era.
Donald Bradman (cricketer) is probably the most statistically out of the norm athlete in any sport: his test match batting average was just under 100, the next closest is like 60 or something.
Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux are both dramatically more dominant than anyone below them. If not for Lemieux Gretzky would be almost like Bradman in how far he is above his closest rival in terms of points per game.
The ability to hit the ball far was pretty valued in the dead ball era as well. While the best guys might hit 9-10 homers a year, they often hit a huge number of triples. Many ballparks in the dead ball era essentially had an “endless” centerfield wall, so far out that realistically you’d almost never see a ball hit beyond the wall there. Even aside from the “dead” ball this also made it quite difficult to hit home runs (and Ruth played in some of these parks and was able to hit home runs FWIW, with the live ball.) But the flip side of those deep center field walls making home runs difficult is it also meant a huge outfield to cover. If you could hit a ball deep into center there was a good chance it would drop, the smaller outfields combined with faster players today make just about any ball with any kind of air time catchable limit this sort of thing but in Cobb/Wagnus era they scored tons of triples because of being able to hit the ball way out into yonder (and of course they were fast–as being a fast base runner was indeed important in the dead ball era.)
This is all true, but it’s still notable no one in Ruth’s era came close to him in performance. If it was so easy to do what he did, someone else would have as well. His 714 career home runs stood above everyone else like a colossus until many years later.