Babe Ruth was a myth

As you can see by my posts, I love sports history and trying to quantify who were the greatest players in various sports. I have a system for baseball, but thanks to the fact they no longer produce the Baseball Encyclopedia, where I get all of the fielding stats, it's taking a while to finish the tables to produce it.

When I am finished, you'll quickly notice there will be some players missing. You won't see Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Babe Ruth. In fact, none of the players who compiled the bulk of their stats before 1947 will be included.

I'm a huge Negro Leagues fan -- I have about 20 books on the subject ranging from a history of the Puerto Rican leagues to most of John Holway's works -- and I fully support a call Holway made in one of the first books of his I read. All statistics before Jackie Robinson should carry an asterisk or be set aside as non-integrated records.

Really, do you think Cobb would have hit .367 in his career if you took out the weakest outfielders in the American League and replaced them with speedsters such as Oscar Charleston and Spotswood Poles to chase balls in the gap?

Would Cobb even have been the greatest centerfielder considering Charleston was likely just as fast and had much more power?

How high would Stan Musial's lifetime batting average been if you removed Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente from the majors and replaced them with AAA white outfielders?

I pick on Ruth in the headline of the post just because he seems to generate so much passion. I wrote a column on this subject for the newspaper I work for and received phone calls where the four letter words outnumbered the non-four letter words.

I consider Ruth a great player and an overall good guy. He, unlike Cobb, barnstormed often with Negro Leaguers seeing it as a way to make some extra money for himself and his opponents. There are legions of stories of his praising Negro Leaguers.

But what are we really to make of his numbers? He compiled them against all white players from the U.S. except for a handful of white Cubans at a time when scouts rarely headed west of the Great Plains. Indeed, the Pacific Coast League was considered to be very nearly major league and many players chose to stay in the PCL rather than travel east for the major leagues.

Really, all we know about Ruth was that he was the greatest white right fielder of the east coast.

Why even bring it up now? Sports Illustrated just published its all-time team. It included: Lou Gehrig, Lefty Grove, Joe DiMaggio, Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner.

It did not include a single player who played a majority of his years in the Negro Leagues.

That's really a joke. Look at three on the list, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson. They came directly from the Negro Leagues with short stays in the minors.

If you were to pick an all-time team and insisted on including pre-1947 players, then Oscar Charleston should replace either DiMaggio or Cobb, Satchel Paige needs to be on the list ahead of either Mathewson or Young and Gibson should replace Johnny Bench or Yogi Berra. And I say this as a life-long Reds fan who grew up watching Bench play.

In the following posts, I'll add stats to support the arguments.