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Posted By: Jeff Lichtman

Ted, your reading about Ruth -- but not witnessing a single game of his career -- with all respect, has as much value as someone born in the year 2098 who reads the same books. That's the thing about good books: they tend to transport readers to the times that are contained therein.

As for my being a Mets fan, I actually grew up a Dodgers fan, though I'm not sure how either is relevant to my thoughts on Cobb/Ruth. I happen to like the Yankees as well (honestly). As for "winners", how many World Series titles did Jackie Robinson have? One -- and he lost 5 others. That hardly makes him a loser. I don't think that how many rings you have totally defines your value as a player just as I don't believe that Don Zimmer was a better player than Ted Williams.

As for my legal training, again, I'm not sure how that impacts on my ability to clearly see that the groups of baseball writers and greatest players who watched Ruth and Cobb both were wrong in picking Cobb over Ruth. Numbers ain't everything -- though I did get an A in my Consensus class in law school so you may be on to something.

I think in the end it is easy to be impressed by the gargantuan numbers and giant shadow that Ruth cast over the game -- deservedly so. I just think that Cobb's game was filled with more intangibles than Ruth's which don't show up in boxscores. And finally, your belief that Ruth was better than Cobb is based partly, as you admit, on what you read: books written by people that saw Ruth play. Well, the great writers that wrote those books wrote about what they saw and they also talked to Ruth's contemporaries for their opinions -- and both the writers and players (by an unscientifically small margin) agree that Cobb was a better player. Perhaps you misinterpreted what you read? At the very least, I'm sure you can agree that my conclusion that Cobb was a better overall player is at least based on logical, empirical evidence.