Quote by Tim Hudson

"If Babe Ruth tried to use a 44 ounce bat today, he wouldn't hit .100."

Any thoughts?

My obvious reaction is that if a player with that kind of talent were faced with baseball today, he'd adapt.

This is why Tim Hudson wasn't a great thinker of his time. Come to think of it--he wasn't a great ballplayer of his time either.

Players have to be compared against their peers. Ruth was so far ahead of his peers, there is no analogue in the modern era unless you look outside baseball...possibly Gretzky...maybe Jordan...but even then not quite the same differentiation

Nobody really thinks Babe Ruth contemporary Johnny Weissmuller is the greatest swimmer ever and nobody really thinks Bill Tilden is the greatest tennis player ever. But, by God, this fat man named Babe Ruth is a freak of freaking nature! Did he play against people of color? I forget.

no other white guys were playing against people of color either. But so what?...and people of color weren't playing against white guys. By extension, there was no black player that far ahead of their peers at that time. Although it seems likely the overall quality of the NeL was probably higher than white MLB. Ruth's peers were not that good comparatively. has nothing to do with an idiotic statement about Ruth swinging his bat in 2012.

and tilden isnt because federer is.
not mto mention tilden may hold that title on wikipedia...but thats why wikipedia is not a source.
he doesn't even have the most slams if you remove federer and sampras. nor the most titles.

again..."if bill tilden swung his wooden racket in 2012, he'd never win"
no people of color on his court either. no one said he was the greatest of all time. That wasn't the assertion in the original statement.

Hudson is not saying Ruth would hit .100 in MLB today, he's saying that Ruth would'nt be using a 44 oz bat.

Atlanta Braves' Chipper Jones recently spoke at a clinic at the ABCA Convention in Atlanta. He was told as a rookie to "swing the heaviest bat you can get around on a 90-mph pitch," so Chipper practiced in the off-season with a 39 oz. bat. In games, though, he uses a 33 oz. bat, unless he's facing Curt Schilling, Kevin Brown, or someone else who brings it in the high 90s. Then he drops an ounce and maybe even an inch.

Using a heavier bat brings more momentum to the collision, so a power hitter would want to follow the advice Chipper was given. Getting around on a 90-mph pitch is a good barometer, because the average fastball of today is 91 mph.
I would feel certain that the AVERAGE fastball of the 1920s and 1930s was not 89 mph. Contemporaries of Ruth, Ty Cobb used a 42 oz bat and Rogers Hornsby used a 50 oz bat. So if Chipper uses a 33oz bat for the "average" 90 mph MLB fastball, logic suggests that Ruth, Rogers, and Ty werent worrying about an "average" 90-mph fastball on a regular basis.

from ESPN.com, 2011 seasons stats

League Average Fastball Velo
By Month Last Season
April-90.8
May-91.3
June-91.4
July-91.7
August-91.5
September-91.4

OF course, if Ruth were around in our time he wouldn't have been sent to the plate in the first place because he'd be a pitcher that the DH is supposed to hit for.

But he would not use a 44 ounce bat today. He knew pitching better than any hitter of his generation, probably because he was a championship-caliber pitcher himself. So he knew what his adversary wanted him to do and expected him to do, and he was able to counter it. He wasn't just bit and strong -- he was a smart hitter too.

Of course, he wasn't that smart in his personal life, but who is?

Bu8t Babe Ruth was very much a product of his day. In his day, nobody had ever done the things he did with a bat in his hand. The game of baseball fundamentally changed to accommodate him. For an athlete in any sport to have that sort of impact today is virtually unimaginable.

Good discussion. My personal view of Ruth is that a big part of his performance as a hitter was that he was doing things that pitchers had not been taught to counter. Note that within 10 years of his first huge year (1920), baseball saw the greatest single offensive season ever, as the guys who saw what Ruth did while they were honing their skills decided to push themselves in his direction rather than Cobb's.

So I think that comparing him to his peers is as big a fallacy as Hudson's expecting him to try to play today with a 44 ounce bat. He was swinging for the fences, and everybody else in 1920 was trying to hit it "where they ain't". Of course he put up staggering offensive numbers. You want a similar situation in another sport? Go check out the career of Sid Luckman of the Bears, who was the first QB to play out of the T formation in the NFL.

Ruth's swing was insanely long, but the pitchers of the day didn't have the weapons to make him pay for that. Even so, he struck out a lot. My guess is that, if he had come up in the 60's he'd have put up Wille Stargell sorts of numbers, or that they'd have left him on the hill. But there's no way to say anybody else's guess wouldn't be accurate (except for those of you who think he'd hit 6 times as many HR as the average cleanup hitter).

Pitchers just weren't throwing that hard back then -- they were taught to "pace" themselves, and that way they racked up some incredible innings in the early 20th century. The slider (nor all the off-speed and more complex pitches of today) wasn't invented yet, and so it was basically a fastball (average probably in the 80s) and curve ball MLB. The pitchers were smaller and not as strong as ones today -- that's clear to the naked eye. If they had been throwing hard back then, common sense would dictate that batting helmets would have been introduced far sooner than in the '40s (finally mandated by MLB in 1971). The slower pitching was one big reason Ruth could use a 44-ounce bat and a long swing. As time went along, the pitchers got bigger, stronger and the pitches more deceptive as the game evolved in these and other areas. Fielding and glove technology improved as well. Today, the game of baseball is a much more highly evolved system of various complexities than in Ruth's day. He can only be measured and understood in the context of his own performance in his own day and age -- to extrapolate otherwise is folly and illogical.

Ruth's genius, if you will, was swinging for the fences and changing the nature of the game. He is the founding father of "power" baseball -- at the plate and on the mound, the game today is so much quicker than ever, and arguably this has its roots in what Ruth brought to the table. As noted above, it took years for the others to catch up. Of course, he would adjust and adapt to today's baseball environment, so it's moot to imagine him now using a 44-ounce bat.

Did you know the Polo Grounds was 258 ft. to right field?