Quote:
Originally Posted by rats60
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.
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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.