Babe Ruth was so much larger than life that it' s often difficult to separate fact from fantasy -- especially in the wake of a couple of popular film biographies that didn' t even try -- but his on-field performance requires no artificial enhancement.
Who needs an artist when it' s so easy to paint the man by the numbers?
The 714 home runs. The .342 career batting average. The 2.28 ERA during his brief career as one of the best left-handed pitchers in the game.
He was not just a swing and a myth.
" His stats indicate that he was the greatest player who ever lived," said statistics guru Bill James, the author of several books that analyze baseball players and the numbers they accumulate. " He dominated the players of his time for 15 years in a way that nobody else ever has."
Sure, there was the Ty Cobb debate. The Georgia Peach was the greatest pure hitter of his time. Perhaps of any time. But an apples-to-oranges comparison of their respective offensive capabilities misses the point. Cobb adapted to the game and dominated it. Ruth was so dominant that the game adapted to him, but not before he had mastered it on two different levels.
Ruth' s emergence as a premier pitcher and his evolution into the most-feared power hitter in baseball history withstand comparison with any other American sportsman. He was Willie Mays and Bob Gibson rolled into the same player.
Try to imagine his transition from premier pitcher to all-time slugger in a 1990s context. Try to imagine, say, Orioles pitcher Mike Mussina (with his 52-21 record and 3.20 career ERA) splitting time between the rotation and the outfield and winning a piece of the American League home run crown the first year.
" It would be like [Roger] Clemens suddenly getting tired of pitching and becoming a better hitter than [Jose] Canseco," said author Robert Creamer, whose 1974 biography of Ruth is considered the most accurate and comprehensive. " Babe Ruth was the best left-handed pitcher of his time, and he clearly had better [all-around offensive] skills than Canseco does."
Ruth had a combined record of 67-34 and a career 2.07 ERA when he began the gradual conversion to full-time position player in 1918. That first year, he tied for the home run lead and won 13 games in 19 starts.
In 1919, he led the American League in home runs, RBIs, runs, total bases, on-base average and slugging average -- and still pitched effectively (9-5, 2.97 ERA) on a part-time basis.
It was in 1920 that Ruth changed the face of baseball forever, hitting 54 home runs and out-homering every other team in the American League. He was so dominant at the plate that he failed to win the home run title only twice in the 1920s. The game came out of the dead-ball era with a bang, and Ruth emerged as the sporting world' s most pervasive symbol of the upbeat, go-for-broke Roaring ' 20s.
Big? He was huge, both literally and figuratively. Ruth, at 6 feet 2 and 215 pounds, would not be unusually large by the pumped-up standards of 1990s professional ball, but he was an imposing physical presence in an era when the average major-leaguer stood about 5-10 and weighed between 165 and 175 pounds. Players over 6 feet tall were relatively rare in the 1920s. By comparison, 36 of the 37 players on the Chicago Cubs' 40-man roster last spring were at least 6 feet tall.
" He was a big man. . . . He was strong in his hands and wrists and arms," said Bill Werber, a former Yankees infielder who played with Ruth in 1930 and ' 33. " And he had tremendous leverage, which enabled him to propel the ball a long distance. He hit the ball with an upsweep, got a good loft to it. . . . There always seemed to be something heroic about his home runs."
Talented? Ruth was so physically gifted that he overwhelmed the sport, and did so without the obsessive commitment to physical fitness that is taken for granted in the 1990s.
" I think he had extraordinary skills," said Mike Gibbons, director of the Babe Ruth Museum. " He was not a devoted athlete as far as keeping himself in shape, so his skills must have been so extraordinary that he could excel with an out-of-shape body . . . just tremendous God-given talent."
That was confirmed in 1921, when Ruth agreed to undergo a battery of physical and psychological tests at Columbia University for an article in Popular Science Monthly. The testing, conducted by two research psychologists, might seem primitive today' s level of technology, but it proved what baseball fans -- and opposing pitchers -- knew. Ruth' s eyesight, reflexes and coordination were far superior to the average male his age.
" The secret of Babe Ruth' s ability to hit is clearly revealed in these tests," wrote sportswriter Hugh S. Fullerton in the October 1921 issue of the magazine. " His eye, his ear, his brain, his nerves all function more rapidly than do those of the average person. Further, the coordination between eye, ear, brain, and muscle is much nearer perfection than that of the normal healthy man."
Unfortunately, that study did not compare Ruth with other athletes of his time, so his performance remains the most accurate and compelling evidence of his unusual athletic
prowess.
Ruth wasn' t just a power hitter, of course. He finished his 22-year major-league career with a .342 career batting average, more evidence of his amazing physical tools. But it is difficult to put that number into perspective, because it is impossible to compare the quality and complexity of the pitching he faced with what today' s hitters must compete against.
The spitball was legal, but the sharp-breaking, split-fingered pitches that revolutionized modern relief pitching were not common in Ruth' s day. Hitters faced half as many different pitchers and saw them much more often in an eight-team American League. Every game was played in daylight. It was a different world, which leaves room to wonder whether Ruth would have been such a dominant player in a different era.
" I think he would have," Creamer said. " He was an absolute athletic genius. He was so far ahead of everybody in his own time, I' ve got to think he would have been great no matter when VTC he played."
There is no comparable figure in the game today. Barry Bonds may be the most exciting player in baseball, but in his best season (.336, 46 homers, 123 RBIs in 1993) he barely challenged Ruth' s average offensive performance from 1920 to 1933.
Ruth was The Natural. He defied the efforts of opposing pitchers to discover some weakness in his swing. He was considered a dead pull hitter, which prompted some pitchers to work him exclusively down and away. If that had worked, no one would be taking notice of the 100th anniversary of his birth.
He actually liked the ball knee level on the outside part of the plate -- the Columbia University study showed that to be where he made his best contact -- and he had no trouble going to the opposite field.
He also had decent speed on the bases, a fact that is belied by ubi-quitous mid-1930s newsreel footage that shows an overweight Ruth prancing gingerly around the diamond.
Still, no one disputes that Ruth was a man of weak discipline and self-destructive appetites. That aspect of his personality leaves open for question whether he would have been able to adapt to baseball in the modern age.
Today' s players train year-round, shaping their bodies with high-tech workout machines and futuristic dietary regimens. Ruth was what would be described today as a party animal, and his behavior would have made him as prominent in the National Enquirer as in the Sporting News.
In his day, he was talented enough to get away with it. In the 1990s, it might be a different story, though most experts on Ruth say he would not have been any less of a baseball prodigy if he had been born 70 years later.
" Babe was a product of his times," Gibbons said. " Had he been removed from that carefree Roaring ' 20s era that he so aptly personified . . . if he was transported to the present time, he would have adapted. I think his love of the sport and desire to play the game would have driven him to sculpt his body like everyone else."
Maybe not. Ruth knew in the 1920s that he was not taking care of himself, and made several attempts to change his ways. But even as he seesawed between his playing weight (listed at 215 in " The Baseball Encyclopedia" ) and an off-season peak that often reached 250, he continued to put up astounding numbers in the later years of his career.
It wasn' t all that surprising that Ruth out-homered the rest of the teams in the American League when he hit 54 homers in 1920. The game was just coming into the long-ball era. But a 32-year-old Ruth did it again in 1927, when the home run was well-established as the game' s most exciting offensive weapon. At the age of 37, he failed to lead the league for the first time in seven years, but he still had more home runs (41) than the entire Chicago White Sox roster (36).
Ruth' s career home run record fell to Henry Aaron in 1974, but it still stands as the most impressive display of power in baseball history. Aaron finished with 755 homers, but he had nearly 4,000 more at-bats in the course of his career. If Ruth' s home run ratio were stretched over Aaron' s at-bats, he would have finished with 1,051.
How' s that for perspective?
Far less has been said or written about Ruth' s defensive skill, though he was a strong-armed outfielder who had decent range in the years before he started to look like John Goodman. He apparently was not an exceptional fielder, because he was shuttled between left field and right to accommodate Yankees teammate Bob Meusel.
" Ruth' s defense isn' t what put him on top," said James, who ranked Ruth as history' s greatest player in his Historical Baseball Abstract a few years ago. " He was a pitcher, and from that we know he had a strong arm, but Bob Meusel had the strongest throwing arm of that era. Meusel played right field on the road but moved to left at home because Yankee Stadium had such a deep left field. That kind of thing isn' t done very often, so they obviously were thinking about it."
If Ruth had any significant defensive shortcomings, they were not serious enough to diminish his legend. He was so productive at the plate that he played regularly until he was a paunchy 38 years old.
" I think you have to look at the whole package," James said. " Babe Ruth did more to help the other team lose than any other player in history."