Among the latest in "Ask Bill" ...
I recently read a biography of Babe Ruth. When he was a pitcher, he'd hit the occasional home run, and he and the fans clearly got a charge from it. Basically, he wanted to play every day so he'd have even more opportunities to hit taters, and the team obliged. You know the rest -- he hit more homers than many teams, yadda yadda. Did it not occur to anyone else in baseball at the time that Babe's approach was a much more desired way to score runs and put fans in the seats? Was baseball so hamstrung with traditions from the deadball era that the home-run approach was overlooked? If the Babe had stuck with pitching, would another Babe-like hitter have emerged? Or was he such an outlier, a similar scenario would have been unlikely?
Asked by: rwarn17588
Answered: 6/27/2015
Well ... you've asked such a complex question, embodying so many false assumptions, that you've made your question almost impossible to answer. But to answer just one little portion of it ... people remember that Ruth hit more home runs than entire teams, but what people often miss is that the period when this was true was very brief, just two or three years. It was a universal belief of baseball men that hitting long fly balls was a fool's effort, because for every long fly ball that became a home run, there would be 100 that would be caught. Because of that belief, young hitters were taught not to do that, not to uppercut the ball, but to chop down on the ball. Ruth was able to break through that shibboleth because a) he was exceptionally stubborn, and b) he was a pitcher, and thus no one cared what he did as a hitter, so he wasn't "trained" or instructed to hit RIGHT as he would have been had he been an outfielder. The larger point is -- like me -- Ruth Ruth was very stubborn, and, like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, Babe Ruth thought that the rules did not apply to Babe Ruth. But once Ruth had proven that the prevailing wisdom was wrong (ie, that one COULD, in fact, hit enough long fly balls to make it pay off) then other people switched and began doing so very quickly, so that within a few years there were power hitters on almost every team.
Well ... I hate to say that Bill James is wrong about something.
But he's wrong about this. Factually wrong. It wasn't just two or three or three years that Ruth hit more home runs that entire teams; I mean, considerable numbers of entire teams. It was more like five or six years that Ruth out-homered at least half the teams in the American League, all by himself.
1920: 7 (54 HR)
1921: 5 (59)
1922: 1 (35)
1923: 2 (41)
1924: 5 (46)
1925: 0 (25)
1926: 5 (47)
1927: 7 (60)
1928: 4 (54)
1929: 2 (46)
1930: 1 (49)
I think Bill is remembering 1920 and '21, then Ruth's (relative) lack of dominance in 1922 and '23. But then look at 1924, and '25 through '28! The reason those numbers fluctuate isn't so much as the league catching up with Ruth, as it's Ruth having some (relatively) down power years. As late as 1928, Ruth hit twice as many homers as the league's No. 2 man ... his teammate, Lou Gehrig. It really wasn't until 1929, with the emergence of Athletics Jimmie Foxx and Al Simmons, and a few other strong fellows, that you could find real home-run hitters on most of the American League rosters.
Okay, so what. Bill and I have a small disagreement about the numbers. But I do think there's still a tremendously interesting question that's not yet been answered: Why did it take everybody so long?
Yes, Ruth was a freak. He did things then that nobody's done since, or at least not until Barry Bonds. And even Bonds didn't space his huge home-run season as far apart as Ruth. But you've got Ruth hitting 54 homers in 1920, and nine years later he's got 46 while Jack Rothrock's leading the Red Sox with six home runs.
Yes, park effects. A few of the ballparks in those days were essentially impossible. But park effects explain just a very small of the league's general inability to hit the ball over the fence. And while we know that nobody could match Ruth's strength, we also know that some of these guys were big and strong, could hit the ball a long way, if they wanted.
I think they just didn't want. They were still playing by the old rules. There's this great story about Ty Cobb in 1925. By then he was nearly 40, but could still hit. He'd never gone in much for home runs, but he was sick of hearing about them and wanted to prove something. So on the 5th of May, Cobb went out and hit three home runs. On the 6th, he hit two more.
Point made, Cobb hit only seven more home runs all season (and just one after June). In the 1920s, the culture of baseball just didn't encourage a big, uppercut swing. And it took a long time for the culture to change, maybe because everybody thought Ruth was just a freak and it wouldn't work for anyone else. But mostly because it's hard to change a culture.
