[Vigilanteman]

A lot of people don't know that Babe Ruth would have made it into the Hall of Fame as a pitcher. He was just too good of a hitter to not play every day.

Walter Johnson, of the Babe's Hall of Fame class wasn't too bad of a hitter either. His lifetime batting average was .235 and he was occasionally used as a pinch hitter.

Players were expected to be multidimensional in those days. You look at the equipment they used, especially the gloves, and it was remarkable they were even able to do what they did.

When I hear these blowhard announcers bleat about how much better the players are today, I feel like puking.

Even Hank Aaron, as great as he was, wouldn't have come close to breaking Ruth's home run record if he had spent the first 30% of his career as a pitcher in the deadball era. As for jackasses like Barry Bonds who followed Aaron, they aren't fit to shine Hammerin' Hank's shoes.

[Bullish]

Look up the word Cheater in the Websters dictionary and it should have a picture of Barry Bonds.

[boop]

I wish I could remember the guy’s name but he said right after Ruth went to the Yankees: “Too bad he didn’t keep pitching, he might have become famous!”

[boop]

And I also read that Ruth enjoyed pitching, but he LOVED hitting, to the point where he refused to pitch any more unless he was put in the lineup every day as a fielder.

NY Yankee teammate: "Bam, what was that pitch that you hit?" Babe: "I don't know, it just looked good so I socked it!"

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

When I hear these blowhard announcers bleat about how much better the players are today, I feel like puking.

Athletic conditioning has definitely improved over the decades. If you look at a tape of an old basketball game, you would really want to throw up - nowhere near the skill level and coordination on display back then as is standard now. Nowadays the players are too big for the court. And football? Just the size of the linemen tells the tale, and the fact that they are so much faster than in the past.

I don’t believe that you can compare baseball players from different eras, either - IMHO the strike zone is much smaller than in the past, so it takes much better control and stuff to be a mediocre pitcher than in the past. And the batters are facing different pitching - and especially are not facing tired starting pitchers in the late innings unless the guy is pitching a shutout. So batters have to solve more different pitchers in a given game.

I hope that soon the calling of balls and strikes will be mechanized, so that a strike will be a strike and a ball will be a ball. As it is, each umpire has his own strike zone - at best. At worst, he is unable to be consistent. And at some level inconsistency is inevitable when the judgement is made by a person. Remember that the pitcher’s objective is not to groove a pitch but to make every pitch a difficult call for the batter, and thus for the umpire.