I was with you until the last sentence.

I don't get it, David. You agree, obviously, that the Babe didn't have to face the Pedro Martinez of his day, or the Santana or the Rivera, whoever they were. Nor the Dontrelle Willis, and so on. No doubt there would have been fewer top non-white pitchers than there were white pitchers, for the reasons you suggest, but that doesn't mean those pitchers wouldn't have made a big difference.
No sliders, I'd forgotten about that. Wow. And no closers, either -- even when he faced the best pitchers, Ruth usually got to see them for an at-bat after their pitch counts had rendered them much less effective.

It's not necessary that the best ineligible American blacks and dark-skinned Hispanic be as good or better than the best white pitchers of the time.'

It's that (were they allowed to play) they would've at least crowded out the dregs of the pitching pool, leaving them unavailable for Ruth and Wagner and everyone else to club to death game after game.

Also, Ruth would've looked less impressive compared to his peers were great ineligible hitters like Oscar Charleston there. He wouldn't've towered so high over his contemporaries in a desegregated league.

I think Dave is wrong when he says that the best Negro League pitchers wouldn't have made a big difference, but I guess I'd never given much thought to the difference in talent pool sizes. There were certainly many talented players (both hitters and pitchers) in the Negro Leagues, but the ones who were very good would definitely have inflated stats (if they had reliable stats to begin with) because of their weaker competition.

This may be an un-pc sentiment, but why do most people assume that being a black player means you are talented? With the exception of Adam above, most peole (like Caple, who is an idiot) "Ruth didnt have to face black pitching, so he couldn't be the best". Sure, Ruth didn't face a Pedro Martinez, but he didn't have the pleasure of hitting against any number of mediocre non-white pitching we have today (see: Igawa, Kei or Heredia, Felix)

David, you also make a good point about the talent pool, but don't forget that there were also far fewer teams in Ruth's days, meaning there were fewer big league spots that would keep the talent level higher. In this age of expansion, can people really say that on average the 5th starter on a last placed team is better than the pitchers in Ruth's day? Answering that question would lead to far more credible conclusions than simply assuming.

After all, Barry just hit his 755th home run off of a pitcher who wasn't even in the league when he hit his 754th!

it's true about the malnutrition. just look at the original seats in fenway- and seats back then were built for males. my mama went to a game there about 15 years ago and she said they were too small for her and she's about 5'11" and not fat.

but i don't know how to deal with the question of how things would have been if they were different.

thre weren't basketball, football, soccer, hockey leagues back then. there was basically baseball and boxing, so i would guess that most all of the top male athletes, black and white, played baseball.

there were fewer teams, but there were fewer players too.

sigh

who knows.

and babe ruth would be an ordinary size guy these days in the ML instead of being extra large...

it would be REAL interesting to see how the media would treat him in modern times...

Nobody is assuming that a player's being black means he's talented. What on earth gave you that idea?
If a guy really can't pitch, like Igawa, then he doesn't play long, so the fact that Ruth never had to face his equivalent is just about irrelevant. If a player pitches like Santana, he'll be around a long time, so the fact that Ruth never had to face the Santana of his day is extremely relevant.

Sure, there were fewer pitchers (fewer teams and fewer pitchers per team) in Ruth's day, so the bottom of the talent pool got removed then. But the population of the US today is triple what it was in Ruth's time, so in fact the talent ought to be greater today (although Lisa does make a good point about the absence of other sports to drain away talent in the twenties). That together with the internationalization of MLB convinces me that Ruth's competition was very watered down compared to the competition today.

Just out of curiosity, how many times has Bonds faced Santana?

David's point is valid, though he also loses me on the last sentence. "The best black pitchers of the Negro Leagues were likely not as good as most elite white pitchers, so I don't see where they would have made a big difference." It seems more accurate to say there were likely not as many elite Negro League players as white players, but the ones who were elite were probably approximately as good as the best white players.

It all becomes a bit irrelevant when you consider how Babe reinvented the game. Does anyone know who held the career HR mark before Babe Ruth broke it? Of course... it was Roger Connor, who amassed 138 HRs over his 18-year career ending 17 years before Babe took his first swing. Once Babe converted from pitcher to masher, it took him all of three seasons (1919-1921) to dismantle the record.

Roger Connor had a career OPS+ of 154, so he was no slouch in his day. Babe Ruth had the career OPS+ of two normal baseball players (207). (For comparison, Barry sits at a very respectable 182 OPS+.)

Of the top 20 OPS's of all time, Ruth's career overlapped with that of Gherig, Hornsby, and Foxx. Bonds has played alongsinde Pujols, Helton, Manny, the Big Hurt, McGwire, Thome, Vladdy, Berkman, Larry Walker, and A-Rod.

We can't even agree on who the best player in a given year, as evidenced by all the bicker-blogging about MVP snubs. How can we compare players separated by multiple World Wars? At least we should be able to agree that Babe Ruth redefined how the game is played more than probably anyone else has since, including Bucket-Head Bonds.