Ohtani or Ruth?
 

Gotta do it!

I don't think Ruth was as good a two-way player as Ohtani, particularly since he only had two seasons (WWI seasons, at that) where he did both -- and those were before he peaked as a hitter.

And that's setting aside the strong arguments that favor Ohtani's playing era as being far more competitive and professional.

Ruth, due to longevity. I’m honored to be the lucky first to respond. Ruth won only one MVP because at the beginning of his career there was no MVP award and then, after it was created, because of a rule during his career prohibiting anyone from winning more than once. My 17-year baseball playing son says Ruth had a big advantage over Ohtani because Ruth played against common men. Ruth’s OPS+ was over 200 in eleven seasons. Ohtani zero. And Ruth was a more dominant pitcher than Ohtani is. Of course, I didn’t get to see Ruth play. If Ohtani keeps this up then maybe he’ll be the guy.

I'm going to put this out there, that the comparison between these two is absolutely pointless considering how much the game, and quite frankly, life has changed within the past 100 years.

In Ruth's era players worked second jobs, medicine was basic, there was barely anything resembling modern athletic training, and players traveled on sleeper cars. How the game was played was entirely different, and this is all before we even attempt to open up the can of worms that is the lack of integration of the game back then. We can only compare a player relative to his peers.

What makes Babe most impressive was his sheer domination that literally redefined the game. He hit 600 Homers before anyone hit 300. There were seasons where he literally out homered entire teams. He brought baseball into a completely new era, and single-handedly carried the popularity of the sport on his back.

If you wish to use modern statistics to compare Ruth, to everyone else in the history of the game, his domination still reigns supreme. Ruth is the all-time leader in OPS, OPS+, WAR, and Offensive WAR. He Led the league in OPS in 13 out of 14 seasons from 1918-1931. If we use a stat such as Weighted Runs Created Plus, which is an era adjusted statistic, that neutralizes park values he is the all time leader with a 194 wRC+. The fact that we're still talking about him almost 100 years after his retirement speaks volumes.

Ohtani is the superior athlete. Of course he is, that's common sense. Ohtani lives in 2025 and has access to modern training, facilities, nutrition, and recovery techniques. You cannot compare the two because life itself is so different. This comparison is apples to oranges. We just need to enjoy what we get to watch.

I voted Ruth, people have always tried to Compare someone to him but they’d have to hit like 100 home runs in a season, get 300 hits or do something almost unimaginable to have the impact Ruth had - Got to admit hitting three home runs and striking out 10 batters in a playoff game is truly Ruthian

Comparing players across eras is unfair and logically untenable, but nevertheless a fun exercise.

Here's my counterargument:

Ruth was likely a genetic outlier, which allowed him to dominate as a hitter against "common men", as your son put it, for the entirety of his career.

Ohtani is playing in an era where every player is likely not only a genetic outlier in a global (and not just white American) gene pool, but also has access to modern medicine, diet and training. His stats relative to his era won't be as impressive as Ruth's, but that's because Ohtani's era is so much more competitive. It may well be much harder to have an OPS+ of 160 today than it is to have an OPS+ of 200 in Ruth's era because of the high percentage of common men playing major league baseball in Ruth's era versus the percentage of common men playing major league baseball today.

As for impact on the game, it's hard to tell. In Ruth's era, there were far fewer competing forms of professional sports entertainment, and far less access. Yes, Ruth boosted baseball's popularity in America at the time, but is that as impressive as what Ohtani has done for baseball's global popularity? In terms of number of incremental fans as a percentage of the global population, I wouldn't be surprised if Ohtani's impact on the game is bigger -- much bigger -- than Ruth's.

It's a fun topic to debate, but as someone who is a big fan of the history of the game, and also a big fan and collector of Ohtani, personally I don't care if he's "better than Ruth" or not. We're watching greatness and whether he's the greatest to ever do it, or the 2nd greatest, I'm just going to enjoy it.

I'm a diehard Yankee and Judge fan. But what I can say about Shohei Ohtani is WOW! This guy is amazing! Back to the question, Babe Ruth all the way!!!

I think the distance between Ruth and the next player was far greater than Ohtani and his peers.

It's always fun to chime in on stuff like this, but there's really never going to be someone as good as Babe Ruth again. He's the greatest home run hitter of all time not just because of the numbers, but because he outhomered entire teams on many occasions. People who make these comparisons forget one crucial fact - the fences were typically 450' from home plate in Ruth's day. Enough said.

Hmm, I read the opposite. The Polo Grounds was 258 feet to right field, and the House that Ruth Built was 295 to right field. It seems to be the case that dead center field in certain parks were deeper that it is today, but that's likely more than made up for by ridiculously short fences to right.

Ohtani is amazing but it's still Ruth

Ohtani and it isn't even close. It is like comparing a pro to a novice. To be fair ALL top athletes are better now than 100 years ago.

If you hit the ball exactly down the foul line and off the foul pole, yes but if you hit the ball just a few sections over you had to hit the ball 344 feet. If you hit the ball to right center on the wrong side of the bullpen it had to go at least 407 feet.

The dimensions of old Yankee Stadium make what DiMaggio did seem incredible. Any ball pulled into the left field bullpen had to go at least 400 feet.

Ohtani.

Ask yourself this question: how many players either today or throughout history can throw the ball at 100 mph, shutout a good team for 6 innings, and then hit a home run out of the stadium?

Answer: 1

Then maybe we should be comparing Aaron Judge to Babe Ruth because he didn't have a problem putting up OPS+ 225, 215 and 210 seasons while Ohtani's best season is 187. Ohtani is not the best hitter in the game. He doesn't play defense. He is an average baseball runner despite his 50 steal season. The last season before the rules change he attempted 20 stolen bases and was thrown out 9 times. His extra bases taken percentage of 42.1% is definitely not like Mays' 63%. Ohtani's best pitching season was worse than either of Ruth's two full seasons of pitching.

Ohtani's argument for the greatest comes down to being really good at many things, but so are the arguments for Babe Ruth and Willie Mays who performed at a high level for ~20 years. When Ohtani has put in a similar amount of time is the only time to compare him to the greatest in the game. I heard these arguments for Albert Pujols and Mike Trout until their careers fell off a cliff. Now their 101 and 87 WAR doesn't seem so impressive and neither should Ohtani's 51.5.

He's a full time DH. Let Ohtani play the field everyday and put mileage on his body and see where his numbers go. Mays and Ruth easily.
Judge is a better hitter than Ohtani. A .282 lifetime average and people want to compare him to Ruth. No one was a better hitter than Ruth when he played.

Well, Aaron Judge and Willie Mays never pitched. The debate assumes that elite pitching and elite hitting are such a rare combination that anyone who can do both for any appreciable period of time is a superior baseball player than a traditional five-tool position player (like Mays) or 3-4 tool player (like Judge), no matter how good those pure position players were. And the only two players to have elite pitching and elite hitting in their resumes are Ohtani and Ruth.

Ruth was basically a two-way player for 2 seasons, and that's probably being generous. Ruth seems to get more credit for being an elite pitcher and then becoming an elite hitter, with some overlap between the two. Ohtani is going to win 3 MVPs as a two-way player and 1 as a two-tool player in only 8 seasons.

Most fundamentally, in order to believe that Ruth is better than Ohtani, you'd have to believe that the level of competition in Ruth's era is even in the same ballpark as that today. And I just don't see that as being the case.

Great point. Also Ohtani has pitched around 40% of the innings that Ruth pitched.

I wonder how I voted?

"Maybe the best individual performance ever in a Postseason game. I don't think anyone can argue with that."

- Pat Murphy on Shohei Ohtani


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This is how I see it. Since 2000 I would easily say based on their 1st half careers Pujols,Cabrera and Judge were better hitters than Ohtani. Based on analytics you can throw Trout in there too.
Can't think of one player I would rival Ruth from his era even though a few had some Ruthian years.
The difference is Ohtani pitches and that should not be the reason he beats all others as a player. The fact that he has 1 complete game in 100 starts just shows what pitching has become where not long ago 5 to 10 complete games a season was common.
Huge Ohtani fan but the hype in modern baseball is insane.

I assume that the people who voted Ohtani took the question literal, as in who is better right now. :)

Soto started the same year and is up about 7 points in batting WAR.

-
I chose Ruth due to his sheer impact on the game, but…

Only 12 hitters have ever recorded 3 home runs in a postseason game.

Only 26 pitchers have ever recorded 10+ strikeouts with 2 or less hits and no runs in a postseason start.

Ohtani did both in one game.

Too soon to say. Last night was the greatest single game performance in history but you can’t sum up a career midstream. Ohtani is not the hitter Ruth was. 22nd in OPS, 13th in SLG. Ruth leads both.

Why on earth would you bat Ohtani lead off? Surely he would generate more runs batting 3rd or 4th. It seems willfully stupid. As far as Adam's too soon comment, at 50 combined WAR, Ohtani has a long way to go to catch Ruth at 180 and obviously is never going to get remotely close to that. Just one measure of course, but by the numbers Ruth was a better pitcher and a much better hitter, in relative terms. That takes nothing at all away from Ohtani.

And add that only seven players have hit a baseball out of Dodgers stadium (in 63 years!), and Ohtani did that yesterday!

You want your best hitter getting the most PAs. There's no shortage of things to criticize Roberts for, but this isn't one of them.

One game is great and all, but probably not the basis for comparing greatness.

My man Pablo Sandoval hit 3 home runs in a WORLD SERIES game, and no one is arguing that he should be considered great.

And these days where strikeouts are a dime a dozen, 10 strikeouts for a pitcher in a game seems to happen about half of the time.

Ohtani is certainly an elite player, but let’s not get carried away.

In the history of baseball, power hitters have batted third or fourth and there is a reason for that. The extra number of at bats Ohtani gets from batting first which turns out to be not THAT many is far outweighed by the increased number of opportunities to drive in runs that comes from dropping down a couple of places in the order. Ohtani's RBI totals would be dramatically higher if he batted behind, say, Betts and Freeman. Research it if you don't believe me. Did Babe Ruth lead off? Ted Williams? DiMaggio? Mays? Mantle? Aaron? Musial? Bonds? A Rod? Pujols? Look at the top 50 HR hitters in history and tell me how many of them batted lead off.

:p

.
.
.
.

Of course you are right about the history. I'm not a "the analytics are always right" person, but there's a reason most teams now bat their big boppers higher in the order. (More teams tend to put them 2nd now)

That said, Roberts had Ohtani 2nd behind Betts for a long time, but then moved Ohtani up when Betts was out. It seemed to work, so he left him there. I think L vs R has a lot to do with it too—against Righties, Ohtani leading off lets you go Betts/Freeman/Smith after that (or put even more lefties higher in the order, if desired).

I think it's more a case of the team is so good they get away with not maximizing than it "works." 55 HR only 102 RBI to me spells waste, and that includes as you say a long stretch where he batted 2nd not 1st.

I've said before (not exaggerating) that they have so much talent on that team that the average Dodger fan could probably manage them into a championship.

Watching the Dodger dugout as they were tracking that ball was hilarious.

The average fan would be better than Roberts. He or she would never have brought Kershaw back out the other night, or made most of the countless other inexplicable decisions he's made over the years. :)

Ohtani has not stood the test of time.

King Kong or Godzilla?

Always interesting to see the comments.

.
.
.

Godzilla had more adventures, King Kong was just remaking the same movie over and over

Remember though, that WAR compares you to your contemporaries, so that brings you back to the level of competition being much flatter (at a higher level) than in Ruth's day.

Cy Young quality arm. MVP quality bat. Ohtani.

Not close, not approximate, but literal.

His only knocks are health for pitching and not playing the field.

There is no comparison for anyone this great on 2 of the 3 most important aspects of the game (hitting, pitching, defense)...arguably the 2 most important aspects even when weighing defense...

The game as we expect it to be played is 100-120+ years old depending on where you want to draw a line and he has no peer. If he was doing this in the 1950s we wouldn't care as much about Mantle and we'd appreciate Mays for his defense, but wow, that Ohtani guy.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that if you just beamed Babe Ruth forward 100 years with his then-level of conditioning, training, nutrition, etc. and put him on the mound or in the batter's box, he would not be nearly as good as he was against his contemporaries. I know people will disagree with that. But to me it's not really the point.

People always getting carried away with modern players. For example, when Messi won the World Cup, then everybody started calling him the GOAT (what about Pele? He won it three times!) Comparing Ohtani to Ruth is just insane. Please stop. If you just wanna' study the numbers, then Mike Trout is still ahead of Ohtani. What Trout did in his twenties was insane. But If Ohtani keeps playing like this throughout his thirties, then yes, he will eventually overtake him.

Recency bias. Every kid who comes up and gets 8 hits on their first weekend, people immediately want to start talking about whether or not he’s the GOAT.

Yeah but nostalgia bias is just as significant and prevalent, at least on this Board which collectively would not name one player with a RC in the last 50 years to the all time team even though that's a third of baseball history.

I would love to see players of today deal with the issues of the players of yesterday. Imagine if they had to work jobs in the off season. Buses and trains to games instead of planes. Players having to look for hotel accommodations on the black part of town and not being able to room with their white teammates. Oh, death threats too. 1 or 2 trainers to a team.
This is why i look at yesterday's greats the way I do. They were tough as nails where today a hangnail sidelines someone. Mantles' teammates wouldn't dare take an off day for a small injury after seeing what he went through just getting ready for a game.

I can't find it, but Ken Burns' book had a quote about how the players of yesteryear were so much better and tougher, and lamenting the current crop of players -- and it was from 1915 lol. Nostalgia bias at its finest. Every generation thinks the newer generation is inferior.

Trout’s fastest throw from the outfield is 98.6pm. If he had done that on the mound, then Trout would be the superior player in my mind. But he did not.

“ [I]t is estimated that [Ruth’s] fastball was likely between 80 and 85 mph. While he was a great pitcher, his career strikeout rate was lower than other "fireballers" of his era, suggesting he was not an extreme velocity pitcher compared to peers like Walter Johnson, who was rumored to throw even faster.”