Hypothetical Question, could Ruth hit modern pitching
 

Interesting question regarding Ruth. With many pitchers hitting 100 MPH on the radar guns and Sliders, curves, split finger fastballs, could Ruth do what he did against modern pitchers?

Ruth back then transported to now. LOL, not a chance. Ruth in his prime given a year to get used to modern pitching would be a decent hitter.

Fun question to ponder. Take it a step further - could Ty Cobb hit modern pitching, or Hornsby, or Dimaggio, or Ted Williams ? You can't discredit all these top tier hitters throughout the years. So tough to compare era's.

What about Mays and Aaron? They're MUCH closer to Ruth (Mays started just 16 years after Ruth retired) than to today's players. Yet I think not many would ask the same question about them.

I think guys with compact swings would fare better than guys with the big swings. So, I'd say Cobb and Williams would be fine, while Ruth and DiMaggio (and Musial) might have a tougher time with the fast, late-breaking stuff.

ruth
 

Ruth in todays game - Daniel Vogelbach ? NO !

but the body shapes would be very similar

From Bill James.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/comp...tside_his_era/

Ruth, time traveled in his prime directly today couldn't make a AA roster

and the modern AA player would have a batting average of 612 and hit 97 home runs off the same pitching Ruth faced.

Ruth was the best hitter back then. Of course he could hit today’s pitching. Assuming otherwise seems ridiculous. Many of today’s pitchers are fast but stink. Mets staff has been full of those guys.

Pitchers throw much harder today and are aided by aided by advances in science that pitchers 100 years ago didn't have.

But, imagine how much better past great hitters would be if they were transported to the present and had access to everything that hitters today have, like strength and conditioning coaching, dieticians and improved health/lifestyle information, data on swing mechanics and other hitting analytics, opposition research, and of course, the new shift limitations.

In sports you have essentially three components that make a player good: talent, skill and intelligence (in all its forms). When you play sports as a kid it's easy to identify guys who have an abundance of talent. Hand eye coordination, balance, speed, strength. Later you see which of them hone their skills (and intelligence) with practice, observation, coaching, facing top competition, etc. And of course some guys with less natural talent succeed by becoming so skillful and savvy that they can outplay guys who are more naturally gifted.

I suspect most of the truly gifted athletes of the past would, over the course of their playing lives, adjust to their competition and improve their skills much the same way today's young players do. No one is born hitting 105 mph sliders or Zach Wheeler slurves. I bet a young Ty Cobb or Oscar Charleston would look at those pitches in awe - - for about three minutes. Then they would say "give me a week to figure this out."

It always an interesting debate and of course there is no answer.

Oscar Charleston prob could not hit a home run off Zach Wheeler. Sure.

And highly doubtful that Pete Alonso could play two games, get on a bus, drive through the night, have the bus break down in the middle of the night, sleep on the floor of a hotel for 3 hours, and then play 3 more gamers at a high level the next day.

Would Abraham Lincoln be a good lawyer today? I have no freaking idea.

What about Roy Hobbs? :p

Re-interpreting the question a bit :

If, after first being born on Feb 6, 1895, Babe had been reincarnated in his next life on Feb 6, 1995, could he hit modern pitching?

Absolutely, and with 7 month older Shoheo Ohtani as his competition, I see him staying with the Red Sox in his second trip to the majors, to completely reverse his own curse. The Pesky Pole being renamed Ruth's Rod, or Babe's Beam (thank you Thesaurus.com).

Doug "with modern medicine Koufax might still be pitching" Goodman

Bullshit!

You guys honestly think just nobody alive in the 1920-30’s were in any way athletic? WTF?

There are young players today with some very minor training as youths that can compete at the highest levels of today’s game yet nobody from the past would have been able to compete.

Clown stuff!

Nailed it!

I honestly don’t know who would struggle more…

1. The best from the past being transported today with all the modern advances and salary and computer/video help to adjust their game.

-or-

2. The best from today transported to 1920 and having to play in those conditions with only the technology available at the time with no IR and pitchers having to pitch complete games and little to no use of relief pitching.

Oh, now that some perspective is added... Could Roy Hobbs have hit modern day pitching? :p

Good call RY.

Today's AVERAGE player would melt under the strain of past conditions.

The AVERAGE player of the past could only do better today.

Let's see today's boys go back in time with no roids or HGH, no world class supplements, play doubleheaders in St.Louis in July and August, no batting helmets or body armor with headhunting pitchers allowed, no air conditioning or penthouse hotel rooms for one, bounce around and suck down coal smoke for 24 hours on a train in an upper birth, stadiums with 440 plus in cf and 407 in the power alleys and on off days play exhibition games along the way before the next series. And you will play because the owner makes money off that. Oh and in the off season work in a coal or zinc mine.
Sorry I don't see Trout of lover boy Harper quite liking that.

I agree that they wouldn't "like" it, but they could still play and would still be stars.

Have news for you Lou Gehrig or Ted Kluszewski were naturally strong and would destroy these pretty boys that lift the weights and use the special wheaties. A cock strong guy as we used to call them always destroyed the pretty boy weight trainers.
I've spent 40 plus years working out and I've seen it time and time again. Debate it all you want but it's a fact.

Wonder if they would also like to go fight in a war for 4 years also?

I think todays hitters would be able to hit for sure. The game was different back then so the hitters that were terrible fielders may not have been kept around. There were quite a few hitters that were terrible fielders that were never given the time of day in the majors (Buzz Arlett, etc) as their hitting prowess didn’t overcome their shortcomings in the field (which was infinitely more difficult in the past with glove size, field conditions, field size,etc)

Today’s pitchers…I have no idea how they would fare in the past. They would initially (I imagine) be insanely overpowering but they would have essentially zero shelf-life as Tommy John surgery would not exist and I imagine they would end up sacrificing power for longevity.

Wonder if they would like fighting in a war for 4 years or working on the farm when they were a teenager and bucking hay. If you have ever bucked hay you know what hell is. Sorry fella's no traveling all-star teams to join as you have to help make ends meet at home.

The only weights I like are family sized packages of oreos, and my main exercise is running to the fridge for another ice cream...

And I agree with you

It's interesting how people's personalities and biases feed into how they answer the question or others like it.

Personally, I think baseball has probably evolved in terms of athleticism the same way as other sports. Jesse Owens and Paavo Nurmi probably would be average high school runners now based solely on their times. Can you imagine Bill Tilden against Roger Federer? Why would baseball be different?

What do you see as the personality traits that correlate with different answers?

In the past, the best most elite athletes played baseball, whereas today football/basketball/even soccer take most of the best.

Ruth was elite at putting bat to ball with power. Those skills would translate just fine to today’s game.

Note that I didn't pickup 1920s Babe Ruth and drop him in the 2020s, I move his birthday 100 years...

Roger Federer is only Roger Federer because of the bedrock of Bill Tilden, there is no reason to think that "new" Bill Tilden given the same bedrock of "old" Bill Tilden wouldn't be able to complete with Roger Federer.

Right but you've changed the hypothetical. The hypothetical is you just beam the player into the present time.

I think a large number of collectors, especially older ones, have a big nostalgia bias that comes through in the "in those days men were men" type of comments. I think people more attuned to tech, data, etc. more easily recognize the huge gap in athleticism 100 years brings about. For example.

Babe Ruth swung a 50 oz bat in his early years, and later transitioned to 44 and 42 oz bats during his prime. The only reason that was possible is because he was facing slow pitching. Extremely slow pitching. You can watch old footage and clearly see him waiting on pitches as he sets his weight back in his stance and turns on balls with his large frame and as he swings a lamp post at a ball of leather.

But he was still the best hitter of that era. Could he hit fast pitching? I don't think we have any way of knowing. Some hitters can learn to hit faster pitching, but others can't. It's why some top prospects eventually fail at the big leagues. Some guys are absolute monsters at the plate when facing 88 to 92 mph pitching, but they reach the end of their limits after that and can't turn on 96+ mph pitches. If Ruth were alive today, he'd have to drop down to a 35 oz bat just to get it around in time. His entire swing would have to change. Could he do it? Possibly. But we'll never know. He prepared and trained for the world he lived in, and that was a very different world of baseball.

Hypothetical answer, yes. You can come up with all the stats and metrics and analytics and computer simulations and yada yada yada you want to. I don't care. The answer is yes, he could. So could Gehrig, Foxx, and all the others.

I'm sure my answer isn't in favor on this forum, and will no doubt be ignored. Oh well, sucks to be me, I guess.

And before you guys chime in with "Walter Johnson threw 100 mph and Ruth could hit against him", I'll just say bullshit ahead of time lol. Walter Johnson want throwing anywhere near 100 mph. Most of the pitching in that era was in the 70 to 80 mph range. Guys throwing 80+ were throwing heat. WaJo might have touched 90. And I'd wager my right nut that he never once threw a ball above 92 mph.

I think more people here, with the forum's heavy nostalgia bias, probably agree with you than disagree. Now go to Blowout, different world.

This forum leans romantic. I can appreciate that, but as a scientist making retrodictions about the likelihood of X or Y having occurred in the past, I have to disregard the romanticism.

No question in my mind that he could. A better question is could today's prima donnas, lacking in the fundamentals of the game, have played in Ruth's era.

Makes sense. Thanks for elaborating

Travis, I'd have to believe that he threw at least one pitch over 92 mph. What happens if you won? What do you get in return? I'd settle for a T206 Joss "lstoi" card....

A well-aged Ruth, in 1935, hit a fastball off of Satchel Paige still in his prime. Satch almost got whiplash turning his head around in amazement when that pitch went screaming well over a 450-foot centerfield wall.

How can we be so sure the old pitchers had no gas in the tank? MLB baseball was deprived of the international pool it has today, but a lot of those guys back then grew up as farm hands or ranchers of some kind. The point is that they were strong and durable back then, probably more so back then than today, especially Walter Johnson.

So young kids that can hit 85-90+ in high school just didn’t exist back then? I went to high school in Maine and we faced Matt Kinney (eventually made the majors with the Twins) and he was routinely hitting 90+ then. Was there some training that a small town kid in Maine had in the 1990’s that was impossible in the 1910-30’s?

Did Something happen at some nebulous point in history that made humans able to throw faster?

I will never understand this logic.

In 1930 the world record for the mile was 4:10. It's now 3:43. Over the same time the shot put record has gone from 16+ meters to 23+ meters.

In all honesty the competition was possibly higher back then due to the immense popularity of baseball. More kids played and discovered their natural gifts. The odds of a kid in 1920 discovering their natural ability to throw a baseball 90 mph is far higher than today.

You're talking most small towns in America were fielding full teams easily. And on top of that company and factory teams lined the streets.

If you were a Male in the 20th century between the ages of 15-40 you had a very high chance of being on a serious ball club.

The only thing separating today's players from back then is the time taken to train and practice etc. Sure they are more advanced today. But if we gave the slew of guys 100 years ago the bare bones of what we do today for training we would get slaughtered, their periods best vs ours. It would simply be a numbers game, and we would lose. We have the science today to win but it doesn't mean we are better at baseball.


This isn't even mentioning the sharp decrease in male testosterone in the last few decades.

I would posit that I haven't "changed" it but, as I said in my original post, I am "re-interpreting the question a bit"

Just because we didn't have radar guns back then doesn't mean we can't make fairly accurate retrodictions about how fast pitchers were throwing during that era. Anecdotally, we know that guys were pitching complete games with regularity, and were even on the mound in back to back games sometimes. Yet they rarely got injured. But it's not because they had magic ligaments, it's because they weren't creating enough torque to damage their arms. We also know that players like Ruth and Hornsby were swinging 50 oz bats! That's truly bonkers. If you tried to swing a bat that heavy against today's pitching, you'd never get a hit. You simply wouldn't have time to get the bat around. We also have video footage of what can only be described now as suboptimal, if not outright silly, pitching forms from numerous players. Guys practically playing catch.

But we don't even need those sorts of observations to know that guys weren't throwing nearly as hard back then. We can look at the peak of human performance in other sports which we do have measurements for like discuss, shot put, and javelin events at the Olympics. We can sit and hypothesize about how and why humans have evolved to become stronger and faster over the last 100 years, but the fact is we have for one reason or another. And that's absolutely irrefutable.

Your hypothesis isn't even true though. Today, baseball is a global sport. Back then, it wasn't. Also, there were only about 2 billion people alive in 1920. Today, there are over 8 billion. Athletes are drawn from MUCH larger pools today. Also, the financial incentives today for the best athletes to pursue a career as an athlete is remarkably higher than it was back then. Many of the best athletes in the 1920s simply weren't playing pro ball. They were providing for their families by other means. And then there's the fact that integration hadn't even happened yet.

100% comically false statement. You really think with the rudimentary understanding of medicine they had then (compared to now) that more players didn’t get seriously injured or throw out their arms?

There were tons of players that got “dead arms” as they used to call it.

There many players would have a few good seasons in the majors or minors and then disappear. Smokey Joe Wood being a very prominent example.

Weight training is far more advanced today than it was then and that is obviously true. Most workouts were calisthenics at the time and that combined with the unnatural things also done by those in strength sports has aided in a lot of the increase in the shotput record.those same things don’t help in all sports but there are obvious sports where the sports themselves hardly resemble the sport played 100 years ago or even 50 years ago…baseball is not that sport.

The mile time difference has a lot more to do with equipment and track conditions than you are giving it credit for but i think you know that

I absolutely agree

I don't buy into that stuff for a second. The theory that is bandied about that pitchers weren't really giving it their all just doesn't make any sense to me. Somehow, they weren't as competitive back then? Come on! Where is the evidence for that? And to compare progressive track and field records to pitching performances to infer that they have progressed as well doesn't make much sense either.

It feels to me like the notion that baseball is somehow unique and exempt from the patterns we see in other sports is a romantic one. Just my opinion. Athletes get better over time and I don't see baseball as an exception.

These were The tracks that Jesse Owens and all those before the 1960’s ran on…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinder_track

These were his shoes, the track and the [lack of] starting blocks(see attached images)

I get that you hold the eternal contrarian POV Peter but you are being silly comparing Jesse Owens times directly to a modern High Schooler.

Baseball was a global sport from the beginning, South American baseball roots go back nearly as far as american. Same with Japan.
So you're wrong there.

I would almost bet everything I own in saying 100 years ago there were more people playing baseball than today. Photos and postcards from literally every corner of north and south america and Japan prove this. Cards as well. You're talking company baseball teams across the country are the norm. When is the last time you've seen a company baseball team? Never in this lifetime. Navy ships had teams, Army bases had teams, hell they had a field on Alcatraz (granted they used a softball). You could travel across the United States on a train and get off anywhere inhabited and have a very high chance of catching a game, if not that day the next.

Baseball essentially isn't played in India, China (The majority of the population rise being these two countries.) Africa or Much of Europe. So, well over half of the world doesn't even have a field, aside from maybe some big cities. Certainly nothing local.

Not sure what integration has to do with my statement, just because they were on all black teams doesn't mean they weren't equally as capable of beating players today.

The monetary point is your best, it's kind of true but on a very small scale. Most people even kids know this will never make them money.

Interesting hypothetical question that always gets heated.

Nobody will ever know the answer but that doesn’t stop all of us from making our opinions I suppose, some more right than others! 🤣

I hate these debates. It completely devalues intelligence of human beings. It devalues pure talent. It devalues competitive drive. We are talking about the .00001 of humans who have the triple combo of talent, intelligence, and drive to rise to the top to play MLB. Of course Babe Ruth could play today. He would have coaches and trainers who would optimize his swing. He could be Miguel Cabrera. He could be Adam Dunn. Or he could have been Barry Bonds - the most feared hitter of my lifetime. And Mike Trout could certainly play in 1920. Would some of the other role players die out in the transitions? Yes, sure, because their skills would not be valued under different conditions. But others would thrive under different conditions and different opportunities as they see their skills become more valued. That's just the way it is. We can't foresee how every player transitions. But the stars are most likely to remain stars because they have that special something that separates them as a generational talent.

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I think this same argument could be made for any hitter who has not played in the last 30+ years. I doubt hitters like Mantle, Aaron or Mays would have the same level of success in the modern era either.

I would see Ruth similar to an upgraded Kyle Schwarber. I would think he could still adjust to the pitching, but he would dominate like he did in his era. He would probably be something like a .260 hitter averaging around 40 home runs a year.

Travis, I like you from afar. You almost always nail it. Not this time, sir. There is no chance that average major league pitching in the 1920s/30s was 70/80 mph. 70/80 is what I faced in high school and American Legion ball. I could hit that stuff, and I wasn't even close to major league, talent wise. Sorry. Not nostalgia. Reality. If Ruth was facing 70/80, he most likely would have finished with 2,000+ home runs, and a .500 batting average. I simply don't understand why people think this watered down talent pool, injury prone era of today is so much better, and they cling desperately to that as if it's some sort of insult, or stupidity, to think that pitchers in "the good ole days" threw pretty darned fast. Yes, pitchers throw fast today. They threw fast back in the day too. Baseball is baseball, then and now.

It sounds as if you're underestimating today's players - don't do that. Baseball today is a different game than it was in the say the 20's - 50's.

I've posted this in another thread but the pitchers of today would annihilate all but the very, very best in the old generations. The pitch shaping, velocity, and pinpoint precision of sliders, curves and changeups would blow yesteryear hitters out of the water - for a time. If they kept their mouths shut, the ramp-up for older players would take even longer!

I can only take what I hear from the Ryne Sandbergs, Mike Schmidt and John Kruks of the world during their broadcasts and see with my eyes. They all have stated during broadcasts or interviews that the evolution of MLB pitching since around 2010 has been astonishing. Schmidt himself said he'd struggle to perform like the superstar hitters of today.

I'll take their words for it and extrapolate that back to the 20's-50's. It's tough debate since we'll never know - but we can all see the game is different in so many ways - some would survive, I have no doubt but to what degree?

I love these type of posts. It amazes me how people romanticize about their heroes. Todays players are JACKED and super athletic. Even the little guys are JACKED to the max. You ever see little bitty Jose Altuve without a shirt. He looks like the incredible hulk in miniature form.

The most jacked player from Ruths time would be WAY more out of shape than todays MLB benchwarmer. People are bigger, faster, and holly $hit insanely stronger now than 100 years ago.

What I see is a bunch of people that love their favorite player and are mad people do not think he would still be the greatest if playing now. Babe Ruth was the greatest of his era without question. If in his absolute prime he was magically transported to now. He would b e considered so out of shape he wouldn't even be in the best shape on a lot of beer league softball teams.:)

This is just simply not true. Ruth was hitting in old stadiums and he was outhitting the entire league. No one had ever done that before and it wasn't just because Ruth was "jacked". He had supreme technique and supreme coordination.

You can't shake those skills. They are immediately transferrable in any time. He would be killing pitching today and probably hitting over a thousand home runs in tiny parks.

LOL, Ruth outhitting the league is hilarious. He changed the game for sure by being the FIRST big homerun hitter. As soon as the game changed because of him there was several others hitting big homerun totals. He was just the first and not some super human outhitting the league.

The elite athletes born in any generation could compete in every generation with all things being equal. If you plucked Ruth or Cobb from their eras and dropped them in a game today they would be average at best. If they were born in 1995 and provided with the same training, nutrition, technology, and opportunity they would absolutely be stars. I think you can say that in virtually every sport. Baseball is an international game now. The pool of talent from which to draw from is much larger. Due to that I believe many of the role players and other average players from that era would not make major league rosters. Foxx “The Beast” was 6’ 195lbs. Todays average player is 6’2” 207.

I always thought it was a more entertaining question to pick a player like Griffey Jr., Aaron Judge, Rickey Henderson, Randy Johnson, or Ohtani and drop them via Time Machine in 1927 and watch them compete.

From Joe Posnanski's Baseball 100 on The Athletic https://theathletic.com/1708673/2020...lter-johnson/:

"How fast did Johnson actually throw? Let’s go down that rabbit hole for a minute, even though we can’t know for sure. Johnson always said that his ability to throw hard was just natural. “From the time I held a ball, it settled in the palm of my right hand as though it belonged there,” he said.

And while we can’t tell you exactly how fast the ball went, we do have a clue. Johnson was the first pitcher to have his fastball’s speed measured. True, it was measured by an archaic (and ingenious) apparatus developed by the Remington Arms Company. But it’s something. Remington had developed the machine to time the speed of bullets. Johnson’s fastball seemed the obvious next thing.

Johnson and another pitcher, Nap Rucker, showed up in a large room at the Remington lab in Connecticut. The scientists had him stand 60 feet, 6 inches away and throw his fastball through a mesh square. The ball would brush through the mesh, triggering the clock. Then, 15 feet later, the ball would slam into a metal plate, stopping the clock. Johnson’s fastball covered that distance in .1229 seconds, which means that it traveled 122 feet per second.*

*Rucker topped out at 113 feet per second.

This became a pretty famous measurement of the time: 122 feet per second! That’s fast! As newspapers reported in the day, “The Twentieth Century Limited, flying at a mile a minute gait over the rails, makes only 88 feet per second!” He threw it faster than a train!

This was not the reason Johnson was called Big Train, by the way. We’ll get to that.

What is 122 feet per second as we would understand it now?

It is 83.2 miles per hour.

It’s OK to feel let down. But the story isn’t over yet.

First, there’s the measurement point. As mentioned above when talking about how fast Feller and Ryan really threw, the speed of today’s pitchers is measured out of the hand. Feller’s pitch was measured as it crossed the plate. But Johnson’s pitch was measured seven and a half feet after it crossed the plate.

So, that requires a major adjustment. The “Fastball” physicists did the calculations and found that today Walter Johnson’s pitch would actually be measured at 94 mph or so.

That’s obviously very fast, though it certainly would not make anyone in today’s game back away. But there’s more: Johnson threw the ball with a shirt and tie on. He did not throw off of a mound. And most of all, he did not throw as hard as he could because he was trying to guide his pitches through the target. It was an awkward thing, and it took him numerous tries to get it right.

“He didn’t throw full speed or anything close,” Rucker said after the experiment. “If he had, he would have thrown over 150 feet per second.”

For the record, 150 feet per second is more than 102 mph. In church clothes. On flat ground."

Only when he's not wearing a buzzer ;)

When Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920 only one other American League team had 50 home runs total. Actually, only one other team in the entire league hit more collective home runs than Ruth hit by himself, and that was 64 home runs for the Phillies in their tiny park.

So LOL I guess?

Training plans and how weight training is used has also changed drastically over that same time. As has technique.

Here's a video showing shot put over about a century. You can see the gradual transition from everyone using a slide step, to nearly everyone using the current rotary approach. Plus differences in both techniques.
The guys winning modern competitions with the slide step are amazing, but obviously have weight trained for explosiveness compared to the earlier competitors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDslPFs3Irw&t=281s

The old idea was that in many althletic areas weight training just added mass and hurt speed and flexibility. Done right, that hasn't been a thing for a long time.

Here are a few things that are worth considering.

What makes a great hitter great?

One hard data item and one anecdote. between the two they cross generations.

Albert Pujols did some tests for someone in a lab setting. They first tested his reaction time, expecting his to be much faster than an average person. It was not, in fact his reaction time was very much in the average range.
So why is he an excellent hitter?
The next test was flashing pictures of a pitcher throwing a variety of pitches.
I don't recall exactly, but the image was shown either very briefly, or until he pressed a button. (All this is in a SI article from a few years ago)
He was not only far faster than average at identifying pitches, but could also tell location from a very briefly seen still picture. Far faster than even decent college hitters, and far far faster than fairly random people including ones who had better reaction times.

The second is more anecdotal, but I believe it says a lot.

The club I was in had a speaker who had played as a player when Ted Williams was managing.
The first year he said was wonderful, Ted focused on fundamentals like waiting for a good pitch. Team batting improved.

Year two he started losing them.
They asked one time for advice on hitting Nolan Ryan.
Teds advice was - early in the game I'd try to hit the top of the ball and drive it somewhere. Later I'd try to hit the bottom of the ball to try and get more distance.
which the speaker said was not helpful as most of the guys were asking how to hit pitches they couldn't really see.

From those things, I'd say the most important part of hitting is having that ability to see and interpret what is being seen quickly enough and well enough. And I have to think that all the top hitters since the beginning have had that ability. So a Ruth or a Williams or anyone else at that sort of level would still be a top hitter today.
That might be different for the typical player.
The other part of the Williams thing was that one of the players just neve rreally got it. To the point that one game Williams stood at the top of the dugout steps yelling out what pitch was coming and the guy still couldn't hit.
Yes, that must have also been a major distraction...

You have to at least give the old dudes credit for not having the modern medical and technological advantages. To simply just teleport Ruth to today as he was in his prime playing days - and then figure if he could play or not is almost not worthy of discussion. Now if we are going to teleport Ruth as a child, give him all the medical and technological advancements of today from his youth to playing days adult, now we might have a legit conversation.

Why isn’t there one already? Is there anything you can point to that isn’t a natural ability of Ruth’s? I don’t see any reason to suggest he couldn’t hit a baseball thrown faster. Being that he played in the era of spitballs I’m not really seeing any evidence for him not being able to hit breaking balls. He hit 342 over his career without striking out more than 93 times in a season.

He could hit the ball. And he broke the mold without any intervention from anyone else. He did everything he did with only natural instincts and no analytics or coaching. He was born Babe Ruth and I still fail to see any reason why his skills wouldn’t translate to any time he lived. To me he represents the pinnacle of ability. The most elite player among the elite.

Being the greatest of all time does not really speak to how he would fare after 100 years of gains in human performance though, if the hypothetical involves taking him just as he was and beaming him into the present.

Sure but that's what I'm asking. What couldn't he do? And why not? This is a guy who rolled out of bed as Babe Ruth. If the hypothetical is placing him in today's game where he'd probably be playing at an elite prep school during his adolescence and surrounded by elite coaching with modern analytics, why wouldn't you think he'd be even better? If that was even possible.

Yes Ruth could hit modern pitching
 

If you transported Ruth in the shape he kept himself he might have trouble. If Ruth landed in 2023 and adopted modern diet and training he would probably do fine. If the 1927 Yankees played a modern team they probably would have issues dealing with all the hard throwers today. So hard to take the best players 100 years ago and compare with modern players. Athletes today are just in better shape and grew up with modern medicine and training. Look at it the other way. Transport the 2023 Braves back 100 years ago with lousy gloves, balls, and minimal training and maybe they would not be very good.

+1 on that. He was so far ahead of anyone with a bat in his day that, with only a couple of exceptions, he rendered everyone else to insignificance. And that after being a superb pitcher. And, except for "the big bellyache", he did it for years without breaking down. And he did it without even trying.

But he did have one other thing, in the absence of "metrics" and data. According to Waite Hoyt who knew him as well as anyone, he had a computer for a mind. You fool him with one at bat, you would likely pay the price next time, even months later or next year.

Oh yeah, he was able to do so because pitchers in major league threw at the high school speed back then.

Modern pitching isn't even that good. You guys are harping on relief pitchers throwing 100 MPH but if you watch baseball it's pretty clear that it isn't hard for a major league player to hit 100 MPH. Relief pitchers are consistently not very good when you look at them as a whole. It's not uncommon to see ERA's in the 4 and 5 range for bullpen arms. Starting pitching isn't much better on the whole either. If you have a 4.15 ERA that's considered pretty decent now.

The same reason I don't think you could take anyone from the 1920s in any sport ss they were and expect them to be anywhere near the same level as today's athletes: humans are stronger, faster, and quicker by a substantial factor. How would Jim Thorpe, exactly as he was, do in a decathlon today? Same concept.

But we're talking about baseball. There are limitations of the human body that mean the basics of baseball can only change so much. For Babe Ruth not to be Babe Ruth in any era, he'd have to have some kind of weakness in his game. I don't see any. And baseball isn't like football or basketball. You can take a player from the 20s and show him baseball in 2023 and he'd recognize it.

And you could take Jesse Owens and he would recognize a track and long jump pit. And therefore what?

My point was that all sports aren't the same. Baseball as a sport has changed very little in the past 100 years. It's managed differently in game, but the game is the same and the same skills that made you an elite player like Ruth translate the same way today.

It's like saying Willie Mosconi wouldn't be as good at billiards now. Why not?