The greatest baseball player of all times

There will not be another Babe Ruth, because no one will be the pitcher and hitter he was.

“100 years ago, in 1915, the Boston Red Sox were establishing themselves as one of baseball’s first dynasties, a thought that, for decades following, must have felt so impossibly far-fetched for New Englanders as to be some joke rotely planted in every official history of the game.

“In that same year, in which the Sox would win the World Series — a feat they would achieve again in 1916 and 1918 — the team featured a 20-year-old Ruth in his breakout season. As a pitcher. The lefty was 18-8, for a winning percentage just under 70%, with a 2.44 earned run average, a number he would lower to a paltry 1.75 the next year, taking the ERA crown in a field that featured no less a hurler than Walter Johnson, a man you could very well argue is the best pitcher in the history of the sport.”

…

What Ruth did with the Yankees “over the course of the 1920s would thrill a mathematician. The numbers, any way you crunch them, are surreal, folkloric, with Ruth out-homering teams, doubling and tripling the outputs of other stars, other all-timers. He wasn’t even as good an overall hitter as previously when he had his epic 1927 season, with a career best of sixty home runs.”

http://thesmartset.com/leaving-the-mound/

Hitting has been much the same since Ruth began launching bombs. Pitching has been trying to adjust ever since.