We must never forget
Bonds efforts are minor league next to Ruth
He batted .342 lifetime, is second all time in homeruns and
RBIs, and his career .690 slugging percentage is the highest in the
history of the game.
We must never forget
Bonds efforts are minor league next to Ruth
He batted .342 lifetime, is second all time in homeruns and RBIs, and his career .690 slugging percentage is the highest in the history of the game.
If George Herman Ruth were alive today, he would be 111 years old.
If he were still playing baseball, his homerun blasts would be worth a lot more than anything posted on eBay.
Next month, Babe Ruth’s accomplishments in the sport will come to the forefront again when Giants slugger Barry Bonds passes The Bambino on the All-Time homerun list.
Buttocks injections or not, Bonds is just seven more taters away from passing the Sultan of Swat. It will happen and, as I mentioned in last week’s column, Bonds could pass Hank Aaron this season too.
But Bonds will never surpass the Babe when it comes to all-around greatness, nor will anyone else for that matter.
Other than the homerun totals, Ruth had a higher career slugging percentage, batting average, number of hits, triples and RBIs than Bonds has at this point.
Babe Ruth is baseball’s version of Paul Bunyan. And he didn’t need steroids to become a larger-than-life figure. What he did for the sport has evolved into folklore over the years.
Like his pointing to the bleachers before hitting a homerun one year. Bonds needed extensive hours in the weight room and, allegedly, steroids to excel. Ruth did what he did with couch-potato-like gut and hangovers half the time. I’ve never heard of a Barry Bonds bar but we’ve all had a Baby Ruth.
But all kidding aside, Ruth has the numbers to prove he was the best of all time.
For starters, Ruth won 94 games as a pitcher and had a career ERA of 2.28 to boot. In 1916, he had 170 strikeouts, a 23-12 record and an ERA of 1.75 in this third season with the Red Sox.
In fact, he was well on his way to a Hall-of-Fame pitching career when he was switched to primary status as an outfielder in 1919.
Yet no one even thinks of him as a pitcher; they think of him as the fat guy in sketchy black-and-white films with chicken legs running around the bases in pinstripes and a number three on the back of his jersey.
But he had to be an accomplished athlete to do what he did. Just as everyone thinks of Elvis Presley as the fat guy in a gaudy jumpsuit, they forget that he was slender for the majority of his career, and so was Ruth, or at least more in shape.
From his rookie season of 1914 through 1919 – his last season as a fulltime pitcher – Ruth’s ERA was under 3.00 five times.
What if Ruth had been an outfielder from the beginning of his career? Can you say 800-plus homeruns?
In his first five seasons, he had less than 400 plate appearances each year.
Ted Williams studied hitting like it was astrophysics. Ruth just picked up the bat, gripped it and swung for the moon.
He once was credited with saying, “I’ve never heard a crowd boo a homer, but I’ve heard plenty of boos after a strikeout,” and, “If I’d tried for them dinky singles, I could’ve batted around .600.”
In his final season in Beantown, Ruth began stepping into the batter’s box on a regular basis. That year he hit 29 homeruns. In the five seasons prior to that he hit 20.
In 1920, he was traded to the New York Yankees and the rest of the story is history. That year, he hit 54 homeruns and had a .847 slugging percentage.
The following year, he slugged .846, had 59 homeruns and drove in 171 runs.
If he was able to do this the first two years that he had a chance to step into the batter’s box on a regular basis, what could he have done those first five seasons in Boston?
Remember too that Ruth’s accomplishments came with less lively or “dead” balls that were out-of-round – and used until they were lost.
The balls that Bonds gets to hit everyday jump off the bat like they’re on steroids as they blast out of the park.
Although the balls weren’t as lively in Ruth’s day, surprisingly, many of the parks were bigger back than – and spitballs were allowed too. Both added facts that elevate Ruth’s accomplishments.
Clearly pitchers had more of an advantage back then.
Even the fans that would sit in centerfield with white shirts and ties affected the batter’s ability to see pitches coming at them. Today, most of those centerfield areas are blanketed with green tarps to assist the batter.
Ruth also had a career fielding percentage of .968, which shows that he was more than just an offensive sideshow.
If he hadn’t started out as a pitcher, he surely would have had more home runs and more runs batted in than anyone else.
Yet even with his pitching years slowing him down, Ruth still went on to lead the league in home runs 12 times and slugging percentage 13 times.
In addition to the numbers that most everyone who ever picked up a bat and ball knows, many of his obscure statistics are just as amazing.
Babe Ruth is the only player ever to hit three home runs in a World Series game on two separate occasions – Game 4 of the 1926 Series and Game 4 of the 1928 Series.
Babe Ruth led the American League in home runs 12 times (1918-1921, 1923, 1924, 1926-1931.)
In 1927, Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs accounted for 14 percent of all home runs in the American League that year. To put that figure in modern perspective, a player would need to hit more than 340 home runs in a season to account for 14 percent of the American League’s total homerun output.
After the Red Sox sold him to the Yankees, Ruth single-handedly out-homered the entire Boston team in 10 of the next 12 seasons.
Truly this man was a legend of folklorish proportions. Hopefully, he is never forgotten for what he meant to America’s Pastime.
