Babe Ruth Reigns Supreme As Baseball's Greatest Hitter
Travis
at bat) have
Ruth at .690, Ted Williams at .634 and Lou Gehrig at .632. The slugging
percentage is much
fairer than total bases or home run records in that it is qualified by times
at bat. Some players like Williams, DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg suffered by
losing prime years during
WW II and with Ted Williams also the Korean war.
On base plus slugging (OPS) is also a very good statistic in that it
includes walks. Some great
sluggers were often deprived of hitting opportunities by intentional walks
or walks resulting from a pitcher not giving the batter a pitch to hit in
the strike zone. Ruth, Williams and Gehrig also also place one, two three in
the OPS category.
Hank Aaron, Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds who broke Ruth's home run records
placed
well down the slugging and OPS lists. It is interesting to note that Ruth,
Gehrig, Williams
and Aaron also preceded the steroid era and their records are not tarnished
like some others.
One record for a very important category baffles me. It is the annual RBI
record set by Hank Wilson in 1930. Wilson batted in 190 runs for the Chicago
Cubs. Only Lou Gehrig has come close. It looks as if this record along with
Ruth's slugging in OPS records, and Pete Roses'
5000 annual career hits are untouchable.
--
By the test of serious intellectual
persuasiveness, Marx was hardly a
a 'great thinker", though he often appears
as such in low-level academic curricula.
---Robert Conquest "Reflections on a
Ravaged Century".