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Pete Crow-Armstrong angered a major baseball purist when he brought up a wild conspiracy theory that Babe Ruth did not exist.
“I was like dude, that’s awesome,” the Chicago Cubs star and MVP favorite said recently about hearing the theory. “We always talk about how the game is evolving, and people may as well have been under handing the ball to that guy, and he’s still regarded as one of the best players ever. You might as well dive further into it and be like, well maybe he just never existed.”
That quote got the attention of longtime talking head and former MLB Network host Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, who said his “derogatory” comments on Ruth “drove me nuts.”
“Hey Pete, you’re talking to me now about Ruth! Nobody hit home runs like Babe Ruth. Say what you want about [Shohei] Ohtani, we understand that he’s a unicorn. Babe Ruth is so good it’s mind boggling,” Russo began on “First Take” this week. “Did you know, Peter Crow-Armstrong, that Babe Ruth hit 27 home runs over 500 feet? [Barry] Bonds? Never. Not one… Ruth owned baseball, nobody hit home runs like Ruth! He out-homered leagues!
“To sit there and say they were pitching underhand, well why didn’t anybody else hit the home runs hitting underhand? Outside of Gehrig, nobody hit home runs! It drives me crazy, especially in baseball, it drives me crazy when I hear today’s athletes and media guys who are 30 years old, who disparage the old-time guys.”
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“It drives me crazy when people think the baseball player in 1927 is not nearly as good as the baseball player today. Are you crazy?” Russo continued. “He would have been a Hall of Famer as a pitcher, forget as a hitter. There’s only one Babe Ruth. He hit anywhere, any place, any time. He’s that good. And when you start to knock Ruth…pay attention, do your homework. That was a disgrace what he said this week.”
Ruth, assuming he existed, became Major League Baseball’s all-time leader in home runs on July 18, 1921, with his 139th home run – he hit 575 more to retire with 714, a record that stood until Hank Aaron surpassed him in 1974.
In 1920, Babe Ruth’s 54 home runs were more than the totals of seven of the eight MLB teams in existence at the time. He did the same in his 60-homer season in 1927.
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Ruth is the all-time leader in slugging percentage (.690) and OPS (1.164), becoming one of the game’s greatest hitters after posting Hall of Fame numbers on the mound. He posted a 2.19 ERA when he was a full-time pitcher with the Boston Red Sox but pitched only 31 innings with the New York Yankees.
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