There was some discussion in another thread about Ted Williams generally being considered the greatest hitter ever. However, I've started to read Brushbacks and Knockdowns by Allen Barra and he makes some interesting points.

Barra compares Williams to Ruth. If one states that Williams is the greatest hitter because he was more consistent and reaches base more often then Williams has a slight edge:

Williams: :
Lifetime Batting Avg: .344 (2292 Games)
OBP: .482
Strike Out: 1 per 10.9 AB

Ruth:
Lifetime Batting Avg: .342 (2503 games)
OBP: .474
Strike Out: 1 per 6.3 AB

Ruth obviously has the advantage as a power hitter, but not as great as you might suspect:

Williams:
Total Home Runs: 521
Homerun Ratio: 1 per 14.8 AB
Career Slugging: .634

Ruth:
Total Home Runs: 714
Homerun Ratio: 1 per 11.8 AB
Career Slugging: .690

Berra also includes SLOB (Slugging times OBP) and Ruth ranks first with a career SLOB of .3217 and Williams is second with a Career SLOB of .3060, which translated to 32.7 runs and 30.60 runs per 100 at bats respectively.

There are a host of factors to consider, but I thought this would be an interesting discussion to begin.

As a stat, what does SLOB tell you about a batter? How does it work, I guess is what I'm asking. Other than provide a really great acronym, what does it mean when you multiply slugging with on-base percentage?

maybe this is a question for the dumb question thread, but I've never heard of SLOB before.

Ruth is the better power hitter obviously but Williams was probably the purest hitter. Williams had a better eye which is why he K'd less.

I remember hearing that Ted Williams had better than 20/20 vision. Another to to consider is that Williams missed a lot of time (about 5 seasons from what I remember) due to the wars that he fought in.

Just taking a quick look at their stats and Williams' top 2 OPS+ seasons were 272 and 267 while Ruth's were 239 and 239.

I read something that said that most major leaguers have better than 20/20 vision. Not only did Williams miss time serving in the Marines but he missed his age 24-26 years. Imagine his HR totals had he played those years?

The interesting part of the equation to me:

We always bring up the years, in his prime, that Williams lost to WWII and Korea.

But, of course, Ruth lost a good chunk of his first three full seasons to being a pitcher. The Red Sox started playing him in the OF in 1918, and started giving him considerable time there in 1919. 1915-1917 (plus the 4 games he played in 1914) were spent exclusively as a pitcher. Through the end of the 1917 season, Ruth had 461 major league at bats.

Obviously, that's not quite comparable to the amount of time Williams missed. Considering that he had just 9 HR in those 461 ABs, it's debatable whether or not that time "lost" really made a significant difference.

But it's interesting to me, anyway. Had he been an everyday player from the start, would Ruth have hit 800 HR?

All of this Williams vs. Ruth is crazy talk. The best hitter is CI, the man with calm eyes.

I agree that people don't often mention the time Ruth spent as a SP early in his career. If he did play full time hitting he probably would have hit some more but like you said his HR/AB rate weren't very good then so who knows.

The difference though is that Williams lost 3 years of his prime (24-26 where he hit 36 HR the year before and 38 the year after) and 2 years just after his prime (33-34) when he was still a nasty hitter (30 HR the year before and 29 the year after). So just assuming he stayed the same those years it would be about 37 HRs each year for the first 3 years adding 111 HRs and for the last two years add 60 HR to his total. So add about 171 HR's assuming that Williams was hitting the exact same number of HRs each year. Since he had 521 HRs then add the 171 for lost time (which is still conservative if you ask me) then he would have had about 692 career HRs and probably would have hung on to hit 700.

No. Discarding the fragment of the 1914 season, Ruth hit 20 home runs in the four years from 1915 through 1918 in 775 plate appearances. Using the same HR/PA rates per season, if we give him 600 PAs for each of those four years his home run total would have increased from 20 to 61. 41 additional home runs would put him at 755(!), tied with a certain Mr. Henry Aaron. Nowhere near 800 though.

Ok. Where is SSA for this? I know he insists that there is no God.

But if your math is correct, you may well have irrefutable proof that the Baseball Gods really do exist.

Ignoring the will of those gods for a moment, however, the dueling Ruth questions become:

1. Would his HR/PA in those seasons have increased had he gotten regular ABs as a position player (and/or had he not split time between honing his pitching and his hitting)?

Or,

2. Is there a specific line of demarcation for the "dead ball era" which just happened to coincide with Ruth's emergence as an everyday player?

The Major League home run leaders for the years 1915-1917, when Ruth was a full time Major Leaguer, but exclusively a pitcher:

1915: Gavvy Cravath (Phillies) - 24
1916: 3-way tie between Cy Williams (Cubs), Wally Pipp (MFY), and Dave Robertson (NY Giants) - 12
1917: Tie between Robertson and Cravath - 12

In 1918, Ruth played 72 games as an outfielder or first baseman in addition to his 20 as a pitcher, and tied for the ML home run lead with Tilly Walker (A's), at 11 HR.

In 1919, Ruth played 116 games in the field for the Sox, in addition to 17 as a pitcher, and hit a record 29 HR.

In 1920, he played for the bad guys, and began building their house with 54 HR.

It was still another two years, though, before a single other player hit as many as 30 HR. Closest to Ruth in 1920 was George Sisler with 19 HR. When Ruth hit 59 HR in 1921, the next best total was 24, shared by Ken Williams (St. Louis Browns) and Ruth's teammate Bob Meusel.

Did Ruth singlehandedly end the deadball era by pioneering a new approach to the game? Or did his slugging approach in a station-to-station era merely coincide with the end of an era of what was literally a dead ball (because of the spitball still being legal; because the ball was kept in play longer; because the ball itself may or may not have actually been different; etc.)?

And all that is just trying to figure out how to take Ruth for what he was in his own time. Not an easy task (at least not for an amateur like me) when a player's career so closely coincides with a paradigm shift in the sport itself. Add that always fun element of comparing players from different eras...and...well...

...let me just throw in one more variable, among the many that always get tossed into the historical comparison mix:

Consider these graphs of historical fielding percentage and errors.

Pretty Ty Wigginton-esque fielding in Ruth's era, no? Unless those errors were of the Wily Mo variety, maybe that doesn't significantly impact power numbers. But I'll hazard a guess that in an era with a lot more outs turned into errors, there were also a lot more outs turned into hits. What does that do to comparing Ruth's BA to Ted's?

Hornsby and Cobb should make into this discussion as well.

As long as we play 'what if' consider if Mantle had stayed healthy or retired in '65.

IMHO, I think Williams is never given enough credit for missing those key years. I think he probably would have passed at least 750HR.

The thing is though, that's ~750 v. 714 in a vacuum. Im not concerned about the time where Ruth was a starting pitcher - Heck, he's usually given credit for being a pretty good starting pitcher and it adds to his resume... What stands out to me is how far Ruth stood over his contemporaries. He demolished Gavvy Cravath's record and then blew away his own records... No one came close to the guy. Williams was incredible as well, but in no way did Williams deviate as greatly from the league average as Ruth did. Ruth was so far ahead of the other players of his time (even after the deadball era ended and especially if we also exlcude the greatest 1B of all time...)that it would have to be like someone hitting 80 HRs today when the best power hitters hit 50+(nothing scientific... just questimating). Horsby and Cobb certainly belong in the discussion(I think perhaps Hornsby moreso). The problem with those two is that their early careers stretch too far into mirkier times where the game starts to look different from today's game... Ruth somewhat begins in that era but he arrives on the national scene along with the lively ball. The argument becomes more interesting when we ask who is the greatest "player". When we talk simply hitting the answer can only be Ruth IMHO. In fact, when we consider Ruth's pitching the question of player normally arives at the same answer.

Williams has comparable contemporaries (Musial, etc...). Who approaches the young Ruth? In 1950 the Career HR list was led by Ruth(714) and second was Jimmie Foxx(534). That's a difference of 180 HRs... a decent career...

The fact that no one has ever surpassed the other players in their league like Ruth did can still marvel us today. Many, many season have been played since then and no one has really matched his raw numbers(Aaron was over a longer time... not to take anything away from him) nevermind if we correct for era, etc...

I've never heard of SLOB either, but seeing it here makes me remember another great stat that we don't talk about: BARF (Batting Average times Range Factor).
SLOB and BARF tell you nothing, but:

1) They sound really cool.
2) Throw them into conversation, and you look more knowledgeable than your baseball-discussing friends.

"In 2004, Barry Bonds was the highest SLOB in the majors, but he couldn't touch Bill Mueller's BARF."

On topic, I don't know a way to determine across eras who was the "best" hitter ever, but Ruth and Williams seem to be a tie, in my eyes. Ruth far outclassed his league averages, but Williams missed five years and still hit 521 homers.

I vote for the former.

There's a famous story about Cobb, who despised Ruth and the changes he brought to the game. In some meaningless game, Cobb decided to demonstrate to his teammates how easy it was to play baseball Ruth's way:


Link

This suggests to me that the "paradigm shift" resulted from a fundamental change in the way one approached hitting. I don't think a powerful athlete like George Sisler was unable to hit home runs before 1919; I think he just (like Cobb) chose not to, because it wasn't the "proper" way to play the game.

I think that certainly has something to do with it and there are many apocryphal stories about Cobb, etc... boasting about how they could have hit HRs.

I think the most important factor was far and away the quality of the balls. Once fresh balls were being put in play all the time and shine/spit/emery balls were outlawed the offensive numbers exploded(Following the Chapman tragedy). Before then guys would swing for the fences b/c it didnt make any sense to - it was far harder to hit the ball there. Old Timers would constantly complain about how easy it was to hit the nice new balls and how they had lumpy, misshapen, dirty, blackened balls in their day...

There is also the issue of the size of ballparks and the weight of bats...

I think Sisler, etc... would have been more than happy to swing for the fences back then...

In terms of Ruth's dominance as compared to the rest of the league: Impressive, needless to say. But I'm not so sure that such dominance would even be possible in this day and age, any more than it's possible for a basketball player to be as dominant as Wilt Chamberlain was.

Ruth, Chamberlain, Jim Brown in football - those are all physical specimens who were also ahead of their time in their respective sports. Football wasn't ready for Jim Brown's combination of size and speed in the '50s and '60s. These days, football is filled with 300 lb. guys who could outsprint me. Shaq was never able to dominate the way Wilt did. And no hitter is going to be so far ahead of the curve as Ruth was - not necessarily because no hitter is as good as Ruth was, but because the rest of baseball has caught up.

So it's hard to know what to make of Ruth's dominance relative to the rest of the league. I don't think, at any rate, that it alone demonstrates that he was markedly better than Ted Williams.

Damn you! I just spit soda all over my desk. I can't even remember laughing out loud that hard at something posted here before!

One factor that should be considered in this discussion is the beginning of pitchers throwing sliders, in the 1950's. Williams said how difficult a time he had adjusting to the slider in his autobiography. That was a pitch that Ruth never had to try to hit.

Whatever I can add to the discussion.

I agree that this kind of dominance does not, in itself, prove Ruth's preeminence over Ted. In order to add to the discussion of whether this type of dominance can be achieved one needn't look further than the 2001, 2002, and 2004 seasons from Barry Bonds, when he posted Adjusted OPS+ of 262, 275, and 260 respectively, the three greatest marks of all time. Though Ruth hit an insane amount of home runs when compared with his contemporaries, Bonds achieved an even greater level of dominance as a complete player, aided in large part by his record-setting walk totals.

You also have to consider the hitters surrounding them in their respective lineups.
We all know most of the numbers, most people will choose based the laundry they root for

Does the distance to the home RF fence matter re: home runs for Ruth and Williams?

It absolutely should, and is something that is overlooked in this discussion.

Many people like to point to Fenway being a hitter's park for a reason to bring down Williams, but the fact of the matter is the Yankee Stadium was a better park to hit in for lefties. Sure, Ruth did hit the opposite way from time to time, but the dimensions of Yankee stadium's right fiels are just too staggering to ignore. Taking into consideration that Ruth hit in a park that was favorable to his batting side and Williams was actual favorable to righties -- I support Williams for being the best hitter ever. Not by much at all, but yes, over Ruth.

Anyone that takes a general stat like OPS+ and concludes from it that Ruth is a better hitter is completely ignoring that it does not include handedness, which is pretty damn important.

There are a host of factors to consider, but I thought this would be an interesting discussion to begin.

The biggest factor, IMO, is the era and the style of play.

Some have quoted the next-highest HR total; to give you a perspective on the difference; the first year Ruth hit 50 HR, he had more than all but one other TEAM - by himself - never mind that 1st baseman!

Williams also hit against the shift, and (Being a stubborn a**), refused to go to left. and STILL hit over 400!

Best hitter? Williams - by quite a lot . (I'm talking ability - not stats)

Best player ? Ruth - by so much, you'd have to combine Pedro and Bonds to come close.

Tell me again, who holds the Red Sox club record for WS strikeouts? Some lefty?

If you combine Pedro and Bonds, you get someone who was much better than Ruth.

Ruth was an alright pitcher, but don't let myths fool you. Take about one-fourth of Tom Glavine's career and that's basically what you had, in terms of raw innings pitched totals + ERA relative to league.

Ruth really pitched about 4 seasons worth of ball, at basically the same rate Schilling has been pitching the last few seasons. Pedro was far and above anything Ruth ever did on the mound.

And if you take Bonds' stats at face value, you could make an argument for him over Ruth straight up -- though I wouldn't.

I think Williams is considered the best hitter ever because he dominated in a non-hitters era. When Ruth was playing, hitting .400 was not a huge thing, see Cobb, Hornsby, Sisler, Heilmann, Terry. When Ted hit .406 in 1941, nobody had done it since 1930, and nobody has since. The second highest BA in the 40s was Stan Musial's .376 in 1948. And of course, if you want to talk OBP, Williams was even more impressive. Maybe someone could do an OBP+ comparison of Williams and Ruth, if it's available. And, FWIW, Ruth struck out quite a lot more than Williams.

I'm going to go ahead and vote for roided-up Bonds. He basically did a very convincing Teddy ballgame impression against modern competition.

I know a few statheads have crunched the numbers and determined that the level of competition in MLB has increased a good deal over the years. Ted Williams played against a national talent pool, though he wasn't playing against the best black ballplayers in the early years of his career. The talent pool for baseball when Ruth came up consisted mostly of white, ethnic types in large east coast cities. And they didn't work out or train very much.

Bonds has had to hit against the best talent that international scouting and modern training can provide.

I was reading some sabermetrician a while back (Rob Neyer? 6 or so years ago?) who said SLOB (he didn't use the acronym, just called it On Base Times Slugging) is a slightly better indicator of overall hitting than OPS. I think he said something like on a scale of 1-10, OPS would be an 8, SLOB a 9, and BA like a 4.

But OPS is way easier to calculate quickly from looking at the raw numbers, so that's the better number to use.