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Babe Ruth Central Stats Main
"Others may break Babe's stats, but show me one ballplayer that can break them all." - Donna Analovitch, Granddaughter of Babe Ruth
With the passing of each season as team and individual accomplishments are tallied, debates are heard in bars, stadiums and homes across the country, as well as in the media - Who's The Best?!? It's true for all the major U.S. sports - football, basketball, hockey and baseball - as well as worldwide sports - soccer, bicycling, tennis, golf and more. But, it is baseball that holds a particular passion in many fans' minds, with its rich tradition and long history - longer than any other professional team sport in the U.S.
The Best Baseball Player of All-Time
Babe Ruth, The Hitter
Babe Ruth, The Pitcher
Babe Ruth's Stats
The 500+ Homerun Club
So who is the best baseball player of all time? Many names come to mind, as Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues and some of the world leagues, such as the ones in Japan, have produced some amazing ballplayers.
When looking at Major League Baseball, the answer is apparent. At the end of 1999, the most highly-recognized members of the sports media all came together to determine their lists of the best athletes or baseball players of the 20th Century. Without fail, Babe Ruth was at the top of everyone's lists:
- Member Major League Baseball All-Century Team
- Associated Press Athlete of the Century
- ESPN Sports Century - #2 Athlete of the Century (#1 was Michael Jordan)
- The Sporting News Greatest Baseball Player of All-Time
- Sports Illustrated Greatest Baseball Player of the 20th Century
Why was this recognition so unanimous? Likely because, when you consider all of the Babe's abilities, feats, statistics and stats in the proper context, no other ballplayer has matched his same level of pitching and hitting skills, as well as pure baseball ability. A deeper look into all of Babe's statistics demonstrates just how dominating a baseball player he truly was.
Take the 1919 season for example, when Babe Ruth began his transition from a pitcher to a hitter. Because he had a significant amount of play in both roles, his statistics from that year illustrate his well-rounded abilities:
Pitching:
- 12 Complete Games
- .642 Win/Loss Percentage
- 2.97 ERA
Hitting:
- 29 Homeruns (1st in the American League)
- 114 RBIs (1st in the American League)
- .322 Batting Average (8th in the American League)
- .555 Slugging Percentage (1st in the American League)
Looking beyond that one season, Babe amassed 56 major league stats for hitting and pitching, by the time he retired in 1935. Let's take a more in-depth look:
Babe Ruth has always been best known for his homerun-hitting prowess -- some say he figuratively "created" the homerun. During the course of baseball history, many players have sought to break Babe's single-season (60) and career (714) homerun stats.
Ultimately, Roger Maris broke Babe's single season record in 1961, while Hank Aaron broke his career homerun mark in 1974. Even so, it took decades for these great ballplayers to do it and for others to even come close.
Even today, Babe's stats are considered a benchmark of a batter's season and ability. Maybe that's why players can seem a bit intense as they begin to approach Babe's marks. No one can deny that Barry Bonds was focused and driven to surpass the Babe's career homerun total earlier this year!
In the early days of baseball through the first two decades of the 20th Century, very few homeruns were ever hit. So much so, that the concept of a homerun was considered an oddity and was actually not very appreciated by fans or baseball critics. When Babe entered the majors, however, he changed all that. When he became a full-time batter and started slugging the ball out of the park, homeruns became a regular part of the game and fans started paying attention.
For quite a while, Babe was the only one that hit them on any kind of consistent basis. The homerun statistics that Babe amassed over the course of his career put his amazing slugging abilities into perspective:
- Babe Ruth led the American League in homeruns for 12 seasons - 1918-1921, 1923-1924, and 1926-1931.
- In 1927, the year that Babe set his single-season record of 60 homeruns, he individually accounted for 14% of all homeruns hit in the American League that year.
- In order for someone to equal that percentage today, they would need to hit approximately 340 homeruns in a season!
- After the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, the Babe single-handedly out-homered the entire Red Sox team for 10 of the next 12 seasons.
- Babe is the only player to ever hit 3 homeruns in a World Series game on two separate occasions -- Game 4 of the 1926 World Series and Game 4 of the 1928 World Series.
- Babe's single-season homerun mark of 60 lasted for 34 years, until Roger Maris broke it in 1961 by hitting 61 homers that season.
- Babe's career homerun record of 714 lasted for 39 years until Hank Aaron hit 715 in 1974.
As time has passed, the homerun became a baseball standard and most of the Babe's homerun stats have been broken, but his abilities as a hitter went far beyond this one stat. Unlike the Babe, most homerun hitters tend to lack the entire package of hitting strength (for homeruns) and hitting consistency (Hits, Batting Average and Runs):
- Batting Average (.342 career):
- In the Top 3 in the AL for 6 seasons.
- Tenth highest career Batting Average.
- Runs (2,174 career):
- #1 in the AL for 8 seasons.
- Third on the career Runs leader board behind Rickey Henderson and Ty Cobb.
- RBIs - Runs Batted In (2,213 career):
- # 1 for 6 seasons; in the Top 3 for 11 seasons.
- Second only to Hank Aaron in career RBIs.
- On-Base % - Percent of times a player reaches base when at bat (.474 career):
- #1 in on-base % in the AL for 10 seasons.
- Second only to Ted Williams in career On-Base %.
- Slugging % - Total bases reached per at bat (.690 career):
- #1 in the AL for 13 seasons.
- Remains #1 today in career Slugging %.
- OPS - On-Base Plus Slugging (1.164 career):
- #1 in the AL for 13 seasons.
- Remains #1 today in career OPS.
- Total Bases (5,793 career):
- #1 in the AL for 6 seasons; in the Top 3 for 11 seasons.
- Fifth on the career Total Bases list.
- Bases on Balls (2,062 career):
- #1 in the AL for 11 seasons.
- Third on the career Bases on Balls list.
- Runs Created* (2,756 career):
- #1 in the AL for 9 seasons.
- Remains #1 today in the career total Runs Created.
* Not an official baseball statistic, but this number is considered by some baseball analysts to be an accurate measure of a ball player's overall offensive effectiveness, which is calculated by determining the total number of Runs a hitter contributed to his team.
Clearly, Babe Ruth was not only a dominant homerun hitter, but he remains in the Top 10 for every major career hitting statistic.
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Babe's slugging was so overwhelming for the era and is still so impressive today that a good portion of people are unaware he started his career as a pitcher. Even fewer people realize just how skilled a pitcher he truly was. It is these feats that make Babe the unique ballplayer that he was. There is no other player in baseball history with such well-rounded abilities that were actually game-proven in Major League play.
Initially, when Babe Ruth was signed first by the Minor League Baltimore Orioles and then by the Major League Boston Red Sox, his primary role was as a pitcher.
Babe's Major League pitching career began mid-season in 1914 when he moved from the Minor League Baltimore Orioles to the Boston Red Sox, although he only pitched in 4 games that year for the Sox. In the following four full seasons (1915-1918), Babe's main role on the Red Sox team was pitching.
In the 1916 World Series between the Red Sox and Brooklyn Robins (eventually Dodgers), Ruth took on Sherry Smith in what would become one of the biggest pitching match-ups in history. The game was tied 1-1 through 14 innings until the Red Sox finally scored and won the game. Both Ruth and Sherry Smith pitched the entire game, which is still the longest World Series game ever played. In the 1918 World Series, Babe Ruth pitched 29 1/3 scoreless innings, a mark that stood until 1961 when Whitey Ford finally broke it.
It wasn't until 1919 that Babe began his transition into a hitter, with 17 games pitching and 130 games hitting that year. In the four and a half seasons that Babe devoted to pitching, he amassed the following statistics:
- ERA - Earned Run Average (2.28 career):
- #1 in ERA in the American League (AL) in 1916.
- 15th overall for career ERA.
- Wins (65 career):
- Top 3 in the AL in 2 of his 5 full seasons as a pitcher.
- Won the most games of any left-handed pitcher in the Majors from 1915-17.
- Win/Loss% (.671 career):
- 12th on the list for best career win/loss percentage.
- Strikeouts:
- Top 5 in the AL in 2 of his 5 full seasons as a pitcher.
- Shutouts:
In Babe Ruth's 1916 season as a pitcher, his record was 23 Wins and 170 Strikeouts, with a 1.75 ERA, 9 Shutouts and 23 Complete Games - a very impressive mark for even the best pitchers in baseball. To give some perspective, Roger Clemens, who is considered to be one of the best pitchers today and throughout baseball history, has earned himself a record 7 Cy Young Awards. In what has been considered the best season of his career to date, Clemens had the following record: 24 Wins, 238 Strikeouts, a 2.48 ERA, 1 Shutout and 10 Complete Games.
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Congratulations to Rich "Goose" Gossage, the most recent inductee to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Goose will be inducted as a New York Yankee.
Trivia: How many kids did Babe Ruth have?
