Shohei Ohtani vs. Babe Ruth: Who’s really better?

The impact of the color barrier

It is an unassailable fact that when Ruth was at his peak, between 1915 and 1935, Major League Baseball was a segregated game played only by the 400 (25 per side times 16 teams) best white players, almost all of them from the United States. Playing only against 175 of those players (25 times seven teams), Ruth’s opposition was even more restricted.

It is similarly a fact that a modern player such as Ohtani faces more than 1,000 opponents annually, and that those opponents represent the best baseball players of virtually all races, regions and cultural backgrounds.

On the surface, the “depth of competition” argument plainly goes to Ohtani.

It isn’t quite that simple, of course. Ohtani’s team only plays an opponent as few as three times per season. Ruth’s competition certainly was restricted, but his potential exposure to the best of that restricted base was substantially more concentrated.

Just to cite one example: Between 1915 and 1927, Ruth stood in the box against Walter Johnson 153 times. (For the record, he had 45 hits, 11 of them home runs.) In the structure of the modern game, it would be impossible for Ohtani to face a pitcher anywhere near that often. But to illustrate, since Ohtani came into the league four American League pitchers have won Cy Young Awards: Justin Verlander (2), Blake Snell, Shane Bieber and Robbie Ray. Ohtani has faced those four quality arms a total of 32 times (he has eight hits). That’s about a fifth as often as Ruth faced Johnson.

To an extent then, the argument that Ruth faced a diminished talent pool because non-whites were excluded is certainly true in the  abstract, but probably less so in relative terms, given the far greater dispersion of talent — creating less frequent exposure to it — today.

The value of simultaneous performance

One potential argument in favor of Ohtani (Phillips did not really make it, but he could have) is that while both stars were pitchers and hitters, only Ohtani excelled in both skills over an extended period.

Ruth came up as a pitcher. He was a superb one, compiling a 94-46 career record and 2.28 ERA. But almost all of his wins — and 97.5 percent of his pitching workload — came prior to 1920, when he concentrated on that singular skill.

Ruth really only spent two seasons (1918 and 1919) in a combo role. He was almost strictly a pitcher prior to 1918 and almost strictly an outfielder after 1919.

That fact leaves open an intriguing question. If Ruth had tried over an extended period to be both pitcher and hitter, could he have done so? We can speculate, but we can never know.

In that respect, Ohtani is clearly different. From the moment of his arrival in 2018, Ohtani has largely been a two-way threat. The sole exception was 2019 when arm concerns limited him to duty as a DH/pinch hitter.

In 2018, 2021, and 2022, Ohtani averaged 20 starts on the mound as well as 555 plate appearances. Due in part to the fact that both 1918 and 1919 — his transition seasons — were shortened due to World War I, Ruth never hit both those benchmarks in any single season, much less three. The closest he came was 1918: 19 starts, 382 plate appearances.

Of course Ohtani has one real advantage that was not available to Ruth. That advantage is the creation of the designated hitter rule. Unlike Ruth, Ohtani’s non-pitching contributions are almost entirely limited to the offensive side.

In fact since arriving in the U.S., Ohtani has made only seven appearances in the outfield, those seven coming in 2021. We asked a moment ago whether Ruth could have succeeded over a long term as a true two-way player; in a sense, the same question could be asked of Ohtani today.

Projecting

If we’re honest, what really drives the discussion isn’t what Ohtani has done to date, but what we project that he will do in the future. After all, although he’s been in MLB since 2018, he was limited for three of those five seasons: treated as Delft China in 2018, barred from the mound in 2019, and short-scheduled by Covid in 2020.

If Ohtani’s career ended right now, comparisons with Ruth would seem ludicrous.

• He has a .267/.354/.532 career slash line; Ruth’s was .342/.474/.690
• He has hit 127 home runs; Ruth hit 714.
• Ohtani has a career 139 OPS+; Ruth’s was 206.
• Ohtani has 28 pitching wins in 63 starts covering 349.2 innings. Ruth won 94 times and produced 1,221 innings.
• Ohtani has amassed 8.8 games worth of Win Probability as a hitter plus another 6.4 as a pitcher. That totals 15.2. Ruth accumulated 111.4 on offense and 8.0 more as a pitcher, totaling 119.4.

They didn’t say so, but neither Russo nor Phillips were arguing in the past tense, or even in the present tense. With respect to Ohtani, they were projecting what they assume he will do based on his two recent and very spectacular seasons plus his remarkable WBC showing.

There’s no harm in that; it’s a substantial portion of what sports media does. But it is not necessarily accurate.

Ohtani going forward

There’s no way for anybody — Russo, Phillips, me or you — to speak with certainty about what the future will bring for Ohtani. There are, however, patterns that can be recognized.

The most obvious is the one stipulating that pitching performance will decline with age and use. Obviously there are exceptions, Verlander and Scherzer being the two most obvious. If Ohtani is one of those exceptions — if he amasses six or seven more seasons as a front-rank combo pitcher/slugger — then he may indeed stand at the apex of the game’s greats.

Since Ohtani is now only 28, such an outcome is plausible. But it’s also plausible that, from a pitching standpoint, he’s just experienced his two best seasons.

Let’s assume something that, in the end, may prove to be generous to Ohtani. Let’s assume that between now and 2028 — when he’ll be 34 — Ohtani produces on the mound at the average of his 2022 and 2023 work.

That would give him an extraordinary eight consecutive seasons as a combo player, something no other player in history has done.

In that circumstance, he would conclude 2028 with exactly 100 victories against 47 defeats and a career ERA hovering around 2.68. He would also have matched (and barely surpassed) Ruth’s mound workload, with 1,127 innings under his belt.

Relativity

If that scenario plays out, it would elevate Ohtani to a level unimagined since Ruth.

The problem is that’s an assumption, and a very high one. We’re projecting forward six seasons, which, in baseball terms, is a long time. If we  reach back six seasons  into Ohtani’s past — including two seasons pitching in Japan — these are his cumulative  numbers; a 41-18 record in 515 innings and an ERA around 2.90.

That’s a line any team would be satisfied with. But 41 wins is a far cry from 100, and the workload is halved.

When we say Ohtani is comparable to — or better than — Ruth, we are projecting. It might work out … but it might come up well short. Check back on that one.

Given the prevalence of arm injuries, batting numbers are far more reliable than pitching numbers in the projection game. Indeed, it is assumed (quietly) that when Ohtani reaches free agency at season’s end and signs a mega deal, that deal will be with a team projecting to get two or three seasons of dual use out of him, then transitioning him to offense alone.

Like Ruth, basically.

Can we project Ohtani to match Ruth as a hitter? Well, it’s a far more power-friendly game today than when the Babe played. In 1927, only two Major League teams (the Yankees and New York Giants) hit more than 100 home runs. The average was 46 per team, the same number that Kyle Schwarber hit to lead the National League and of course 16 fewer than Aaron Judge. Ohtani hit 34, a total that would have ranked 13th among MLB teams in 1927.

But those numbers are absolutes; when we compare players across eras, relativity is a legit construct.

That’s why OPS+ and ERA+ (both relativistic) are prized. As noted earlier, Ohtani’s OPS+ and ERA+ are 139 and 142, respectively, while Ruth’s were 206 and 122. That suggests it’s a good thing that Ohtani’s future projects more productively as a hitter than as a pitcher. On the offensive side, he has more work to do.