As Freddy the Pig notes, the spitball was banned after the 1920 season (which was Ruth’s first season with the Yankees). Then-current spitball throwers were grandfathered in, and allowed to continue to throw it, but its use likely declined year-by-year through the rest of Ruth’s career.
Well, some of them did. I assure you Walter Johnson and Babe Ruth did not. Star players were paid very well - not zillionaire money, but plenty to live on. For most of his career Johnson’s salary ranged between $12000 and $20000. His first $10000 contrat, in 1914, would be the equivalent of $225,000 today.
Manual labor is also of questionable value in training someone as an athlete.
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In my mind, Paige would have struck Ruth out every time.
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Obviously he wouldn’t have, not least because Satchel Paige was a small child when Babe Ruth got to the major leagues and was just coming into his own when Ruth’s career was in its last half.
However, there’s no doubt that the lack of black ballplayers had an overall effect on the stats of white major leaguers. Had black players been allowed to play, Babe Ruth would still be today considered one of the best, if not THE best, ballplayers of all time, but his stats would be a tiny bit less than they are because you just have to assume that he’d have a few more outs if he had to take some at bats against superior pitchers.
This is sort of obvious if you just do a thought exercise; how would it change things today if every black ballplayer quit? One presumes Justin Verlander would still be the best pitcher in the game, but his statistics would improve just a little bit if he didn’t have to face Edwin Encarnacion, Torii Hunter, Robinson Cano, and Adam Jones. Those at bats would, presumably, have to be backfilled by inferior ballplayers. Similarly, I would expect that Mike Trout would remain an awesome hitter, but his batting average would be even higher if he didn’t have to bat against the likes of David Price, C.C. Sabathia, and Mariano Rivera.
Who said anything about training? Plenty of those guys were farmers or millworkers in the off season.
Ruth was an extraordinary talent, no doubt, but his peak could only have happened in the 20’s. A terrible decade for pitching. There was an adjustment period, with pitchers learning the hard way that they couldn’t get away with the same repetoire that worked in the dead-ball era.
We have seen a progression in velocity in recent times, from Mark Wohlers hitting 100 mph in the 90’s to Aroldis Chapman reaching 106 mph today. I find it believable that the only the elite fastball pitchers in the 1920’s topped 90 mph.
I disagree. Using your logic there should have been many more players puttomg up Ruthian numbers. To understand how great he was compare his stats to the other players from his era.
Heading in the 1920’s, the single-season home run record was 19, set by Ruth.
In 1923, Cy Williams hit 41.
In 1925, Rogers Hornsby hit 39, Bob Meusel 33.
In 1927, when Ruth hit 60, Gehrig hit 47.
Ruth was great, and he led the way, but it a lot of feasting started to happen. I maintain Ruth could only have done it in the '20’s.
I’m not clear on what you’re arguing, ultimately. Are you saying that the early- to mid-1920s were the most ripe hitting environment in the history of baseball? I mean, to the extent that you’re saying it’s misleading to look at Ruth’s raw career numbers in comparison to dead-ball-era numbers without pointing out the fact that the dead ball era existed, I think you’ll find that everyone agrees with you.
But there’s still the fact that Ruth hit nearly twice as many home runs in the 20s as anybody else did, and three times as many as anybody who wasn’t named Williams or Hornsby. And the fact that he slugged more than a hundred points higher for the entire decade than anybody else, and that just to nearly be within a hundred points of him, you had to be one of the greatest batting geniuses there’s ever been. Whatever the environment, Ruth was further ahead of his peers in terms of production than anybody’s ever been for that long a period of time. He wouldn’t have hit 59 home runs in 1913, sure, but he might have hit .490 with 85 doubles. I don’t see why his peak wouldn’t have happened about twenty-five years after he was born, whatever era that was in.
Incidentally, the record before 1920 was 29, not 19. Plenty of people had popped as many as 19 before that.
I screwed up the HR totals, but I’m really more interested in the quality of pitching Ruth faced. And in the 1920’s (and 30’s) pitchers were being dominated like never before, or since. League wide batting average was up to .292 in 1925 and .296 in 1930. It was more like softball.
If you put Ruth in a time machine and brought him to the modern game, he’d be closer to Steve Balboni than Albert Pujols.
In limited action as a hitter during the Dead Ball Era, Ruth hit .308 with a .981 OPS, led the AL in home runs with 11 in just 95 games in 1918 and set the record for most home runs in 1919 with 29 in just 130 games. He then broke the record for homers in a season three more times as teh Live Ball Era began, led the league in homers 11 times in all (most years having as many homers as the league average for a team), won a batting title, and finished with the 10th best batting average of all time.
Albert Pujols wishes he could put up Ruthian numbers. Babe Ruth was flat-out the best offensive weapon in the history of baseball and would have performed at an extremely high level regardless of the era in which he played.
As to the pitching he faced, pitchers of the time were used to challenging hitters and economizing on pitches because the vast majority of hitters, even through the 1920s, were not threats to get out of the yard. You could be effective while throwing at 80% velocity, spotting your fastball and inducing ground balls and you could pitch late into games by notrunning your ptich count up by trying to strike everyone out.
I’d be surprised if pitchers didn’t feel the need to bear down and start bringing their best stuff when a Ruth or Gehrig or Hornsby stepped up, however, because those guys could do some damage with one swing of the bat. Facing Murderers Row must have been a nightmare because it completely changed the way you had to approach your time on the mound. Make a mistake and one of those guys would hit the ball to the moon; any other day against any other team a mistake might find a gap for a double or triple, but you didn’t dare serve one up to Babe.
I have no cites, but have heard the stories over the years of Ruth being struck out by the best pitchers of the era. Sometimes in games, sometimes in exhibition, and no doubt only in the dreams of some. But I’d suspect that the very best hitters of any era always had difficulty with the very best pitchers.
By the standards of the time, Ruth struck out more than most, although he never struck out more than 100 times in a single season. So no doubt many or all of the top pitchers struck him out at least once.
I’d have to go looking for it, but I have a magazine from the 90s somewhere that showed evidence to suggest that the top hitters tend to have less trouble with the top pitchers. At the time, Tony Gwynn, for example, had a career batting average well in excess of .400 against Greg Maddux. Apparently good hitting beats good pitching, not the other way around.
This is interesting. I’ve done no real analysis here, just considering the anecdotes I’ve heard. But Maddux is the perfect example of a great pitcher, one who uses control and intelligence to get through batters.
In the case of Ruth, and other hitters who may face an occasional pitcher only in an exhibition, All-Star game or World Series (and now for reasons no one can comprehend, interleague games) I’d think the pitcher has an advantage over a well known hitter because the hitter is unfamiliar with the details of the pitcher’s style. But the general case is another matter, where pitchers and hitters are familiar with each other. I’m a little surprised that top hitters do better than top pitchers when matched up, but there’s a lot of complexity to this elaborate dance.
I think particularly in a case such as Gwynn v. Maddux you have a case where one guy’s strengths actually play directly into the other guy’s strengths. Maddux like to nibble on the outside corner and get guys to take bad swings at difficult pitches. Gwynn was always looking for an outside pitch to slap to the opposite field, so he was basically just hitting the ball where it was pitched rather than trying to pull an un-pullable pitch so he had great success. But there were several other examples in the article I was referring to.
In Ruth’s case, he was predominantly facing fastball pitchers who weren’t used to facing batters who could consistently change games with one swing of the bat. Sure, Ty Cobb could have a multiple-hit game every game, but he wasn’t a threat to take you over the wall. Most pitchers of that era probably didn’t have the tools to make the adjustments necessary to deal with Ruth, beyond just walking him to get to Gehrig. Yikes.
I think a lot of the unfamiliarity these days can be dealt with through the use of technology. If you’re getting ready to face someone you’ve never dealt with before, there is tons of video of him, charts, hot zones, etc… that you can study to get a feel for what to expect. On the other hand,this articlesuggests that pitchers in recent years have begun to make some significant strides against modern hitters, so the pendulum seems to be shifting.
This goes to my original point, the very best pitchers of the era could probably use ball placement to get past Ruth. But the average pitcher, and the pitchers he faced most often probably got beat up a lot. What a decision to make, walk Ruth and face Gehrig with a man on base, or let the Bambino put one over the wall. Now-a-days they’d walk Ruth every time, with no better results.
(Let us not forget we are talking about the Yankees here and I’ve had to spit multiple times).