How the Babe Broke Baseball

New York Yankee Aaron Judge now holds the American League record for home runs hit in a single season with 62. (Some might also say that he is the only legitimate holder of the MLB record, given the other records’ holders being tainted by steroids, but we’ll leave that for another time.) Without dispute he is a terrific hitter, but such milestone accomplishments as this that drive others to effulgent accolades drives me to the history books, where I often find some interesting contrasts. I find it a more edifying approach than simply crowning this new guy the “Greatest of All Time.”

To be sure, Judge had an excellent 2022 season. In addition to home runs, he led the AL in runs batted in and finished only a couple points behind Luis Arráez’s .316 batting average with .311, which made him a serious contender to be only the second Triple Crown winner in the last half century. But he also happens to have struck out more than all but two others in the American League. Yet, he can still reasonably be called the greatest that season, given that everyone is striking out more. When it comes to hitting, things are far different than in Ruth’s time.

In 1927 when Ruth hit 60 home runs, batters hit only 439 home runs in the entire American League, giving Ruth 14% of the home runs hit in his league that year. Judge would have had to hit 355 home runs to equal that percentage in the AL in 2022. Though it is true that there are more teams now than in Ruth’s time, that can hardly make up for the difference in total home runs.

There are 15 teams in the AL now, and they combined to get 19839 hits in 2022, of which 13% (2557) went over the outfield fence. Ruth’s AL had eight teams that combined for 12025 hits, of which only 4% (439) scored the batter. In fact, in 1927 Ruth broke his own record of 59 dingers in a season, set in 1921 when he hit twice as many as the second-place finisher, Bob Meusel, who hit 24. 1921 also happened to be the first year there were more than 400 hit in the AL season. Players just didn’t hit home runs then.

These days players may be bigger, stronger, and faster. They have time in the off-season to work out and prepare for the next season, a luxury Ruth’s contemporaries did not always have. However, increases in athleticism apply across the league, which maintains the competitive balance. Pitchers now routinely throw pitches that move faster and in more crazy directions than Ruth could ever have seen, yet hitters also routinely knock them out of the park.

So, the difference must be in approach. In Ruth’s 60 home run season, the AL averaged only 0.35 home runs per game. You could go a week of games without seeing more than one or two. This year the average is 1.05 per game, and rare is the game that doesn’t include at least one. But so what? Maybe the faster pitches just go farther off the bat.

That may be so, but the biggest difference in hitting between the two years isn’t home runs, or even in hits. In Ruth’s record-breaking year, the AL averaged only 2.74 strikeouts per game, Judge’s AL averaged 8.4. This clearly reflects a change in approach that exemplifies what Bob Uecker told a bunch of rookies once in a radio commercial, “If you want to hit a dinger, you gotta be a swinger.” When one of the players asked him, “but won’t that mean we’ll strike out?” His reply was, “Oh Yeah! LOTS!” He was right, of course, and when Ruth led the AL with 60 home runs, he also led the league in strike outs. But he still only struck out 89 times, roughly half of Judge’s 175, because even his approach was different. Judge’s second-best average in the 2022 AL (.311) was good enough for 5^th in MLB. Ruth’s significantly better 1927 batting average, .356, was only 6^th in the AL and 8^th overall. For those who favor the “new” stats, both Judge’s (1.1108) and Ruth’s (1.2582) OPS ranks them first in MLB in their respective years, but this only supports my point that home runs have become the predominant indicator of a batter’s value.

Babe Ruth joined the major leagues in 1914 as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. In his first three full seasons he started 28, 40, and 30 games, winning more than 20 games in both 1916 and 1917 seasons. He pitched one game in the 1916 World Series, and two in the 1918 World Series, surrendering only three earned runs over 31 innings pitched. In fact, he pitched 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series – a record he held for 43 years, nearly a decade longer than he held the Single Season Home Run record. He was probably on his way to being a Hall of Fame pitcher, but he wanted to play every day and so Red Sox manager Ed Barrow allowed him to switch to playing the outfield.

In the 1918 season the Babe only started 19 games on the mound, but 95 altogether, and for the first time ended the season with the most home runs hit, 11. He went on to out-homer every other batter in the American League in all but two of the next 13 seasons, and only twice in the 12 seasons that he led his own league in home runs did he hit fewer than his National League counterpart.

Not until Babe Ruth became an everyday player did major league batters swing for the fences. After he started hitting home runs, the game would never be the same.

Babe Ruth, one of the best baseball players of all time and the greatest hitter ever, broke baseball.