Hey americanbros, was he truly the greatest player of all time or just a good player that is overhyped by media and nostalgia like it happens here with Edson Arantes (Pelé)?
>Tfw you'll never get to see the Babe hit a homerun while drunk off his ass
Highest career WAR of all time (value on far right of table)
Funnily enough he was below the average defensive player but his offense was enough to make up for it
He played a long time ago so I don't really know how the statistical normalization is done
>>64286881
He was a weird dude. Like a next door neighbor with retard strength, alcoholism, bad temper, and love of food. That makes him something of a lovable dude that people fondly look back on regardless of the times.
Ruth came about when nobody even gave half a shit about how to pitch. Pitching was all about dirty tricks and no lighting on the field back in those days-- so when stadiums started becoming lit and pitchers couldn't fall back on spit balls and shit they got rocked to kingdom come. Can't knock the dude for the climate of baseball but he definitely came around at the right time.
>>64287005
Even if you normalize his values he was pretty fucking good but yes different eras
I think in his era it was probably easier to play at a level far above even whoever is second than it is today
Imagine if a guy was a goalie and was incredibly good at it. Now imagine if that goalie played winger occasionally and was very good at that too. Imagine that suddenly he started to score 4-5x the amount of goals that had ever been scored in a single season before. That's Babe Ruth.
>>64286991
damn, ted williams a shit defense
>>64287055
Are you trying to imply Babe Ruth was good at defense?
>>64287084
Ruth was an elite pitcher before he started launching bombs.
>>64287088
Ah gotcha
He was not a good outfielder
>>64287055
Now imagine if that goalie didn't have to play against wayne gretzky, and all the best players. Ruth played before latin dudes could? Fuck all that
>>64287112
Since blacks and latins haven't into hockey yet, it's basically still what early 20th century baseball was
>>64287112
Yeah that's the toughest part about normalization, it generally is based on how you did relative to everyone else but hard to do before integration
>>64287023
Not OP, but from this discussion I conclude that he's somewhat like Pelé indeed. At least on the whole different eras thing.
>>64287180
I don't know much about soccer but in terms of strategy and just general style of play baseball has radically changed from the Ruth era
The they try to account for this in statistics is through normalization factors. Let's say a player hit .300 in a year where the league average was around .290, well that's less impressive than someone who hit .300 in a year where the league average was .250 (you can get into much more detailed matchup statistics for normalization too)
In my opinion Ruth is the best offensive player of all time relative to his peers
baseball has to be pretty easy to compare across eras i wouldnt imagine the game or athleticism has changed that much. can yanks provide some insight?
>>64287212
It's changed quite radically in style as racial integration came and we've learned more
One of my coworkers wrote his statistics doctoral thesis on baseball
