I seem to remember Bill James writing about whether you were better off, scientifically speaking, intentionally walking Babe Ruth every at-bat rather than pitching to him. I think he concluded that managers were better off pitching to him.
But I wonder if Ruth was on a cellar-dwelling team if that would still have been the case.
Very interesting. Something important to consider there is that Babe Ruth batted in front of Lou Gehrig in the Yankee lineup for most of his career. That’s surely a big reason why Gehrig hit 23 grand slams in his career — a record that stood for decades until Alex Rodriguez broke it 2013.