Barry Bonds Vs. Babe Ruth

Who's the better hitter? Now baseball fans can slug it out with better stats.

BY Allen St. John

Photography by Bettman/Corbis (Ruth) and Brad Mangin/Sports Illustrated (Bonds)

Published in the April, 2005 issue.

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When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's career home run record 31 years ago, baseball fans could watch the instant replay and then look up both players' home run totals in Macmillan's 1000-page Baseball Encyclopedia. Any further analysis of the two home run kings involved a pencil, a scratchpad and a slide rule. But when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants bats for Babe Ruth's record a few weeks from now, it'll be a whole new ballgame for stat-obsessed fans.

This is the best time in history to be a baseball geek. Not only are the game's most hallowed records up for grabs, but technology has made it a cinch to crunch stats. A prime tool for the job is www.baseball-reference.com--the brainchild of Sean Forman, a 33-year-old assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. While avoiding work on his thesis five years ago, Forman grew frustrated with the lack of historical baseball data on the Web.

"I thought there should be a place on the Internet where you could find Ty Cobb's stats fairly easily," Forman recalls. There wasn't, so he designed a site that covers all the bases, so to speak. It holds the records of more than 16,000 players--everyone who played in a major league game; year-by-year team and league pages; and rankings that range from the simple (career home runs) to the arcane (single-season intentional walks).

Want to debunk the conventional wisdom dished out by pundits on bar stools and network TV? This is the place to arm yourself. Just a couple of clicks of the mouse, for instance, reveals that since 1900 there have been only 14 seasons in which a player posted an on-base percentage of over .500--and Ruth and Bonds account for nine of them. When it comes to this kind of maneuverability, comparing the power of the Internet to the now out-of-print "Big Mac" encyclopedia is like comparing Bonds's sleek 32-ounce sugar maple Sam Bat to Ruth's bludgeon-like 45-ounce Louisville Slugger.

THE GREAT DEBATE
Who had it easier, Ruth or Bonds? There's no simple answer. Here are four ways baseball has evolved since the 1920s.
1	Bigger Guns Weight training and "flaxseed oil" have helped out at the plate. According to www.baseball-reference.com, there were 1.12 homers per game in the 2001 season--three times more than in 1927.
2	Better Balls You can't hit what you can't see. Until 1920, baseballs were often covered in tobacco juice. Then Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch, the spitball was replaced by clean, white balls, and home runs took off.
3	Slicker Pitches These days, cut fastballs, split-fingers and sliders factor in with situational pitching to keep hitters off their heels. The year 2001 saw 6.67 strikeouts per game--almost 2.5 times more than in 1927.
4	Smaller Zones With a 17-in.-wide plate, a 6-ft.-2-in. player in 1927, like Babe Ruth, had a strike zone of roughly 545 sq. in. By 2001, rule changes shrank the zone of a 6-ft.-2-in. player, like Barry Bonds, to about 410 sq. in.--Davin Coburn

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