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