Sorry, Shohei – Babe Ruth is still the GOAT to me

Last week, the Dodgers swept the Cubs in Tokyo, Japan, to open the 2025 MLB season in what doubled as a showcase homecoming for phalanx of Japanese stars. Shohei Ohtani, the headline act, rose to the occasion, homering before a crowd of 42,367 and inspiring fresh claims that he is the greatest player of all-time.

I have always been reticent to wade into such ‘GOAT’ debates, because they are an incendiary minefield of unquenchable subjectivity. Everyone has a different interpretation of ‘greatest,’ leading to a futile exercise in semantic frustration. Paradoxes and trade-off reign supreme – skill versus longevity, talent versus accomplishment, ability versus legacy – and no objective answer will ever be agreed upon. 

Above all else, there is the leviathan matter of context. How, fundamentally, can we ever hope to accurately compare one era with another? There are so many variable factors – league size, competition quality, equipment, technology, physicality, facilities, professionalism, segregation, free agency – that cannot be objectively harmonised, juxtaposed or ranked. Inevitably, therefore, we revert to instincts, opinions and hunches. And I feel compelled to share mine.

In sum, I find the Ohtani-GOAT claims to be hyperbolic. Undoubtedly, Shohei is stupendously skilled, as an elite hitter and pitcher, but to me, Babe Ruth maintains an instinctive, spiritual – and perhaps irrational – hold on the baseball GOAT distinction, and I have a hard time relinquishing that sacred intuition.

If so inclined, I could dig deep into a vast statistical study of both players, splitting hairs over WAR and OPS+ while mining Fangraphs for granular comparative data. And I’m confident Ruth’s metrics hold up against anybody, from any era, ever. But to me, there is more to ‘greatness’ than numbers, and the hunt for objective truth often snakes back to subjective bias, so such an endeavour seems doomed to agitation. 

Yes, analytics should be consulted, but so should cultural transcendence and household penetration – the sense of a player’s outsized influence, often as a trailblazer or folk hero, informing their aura. Broadly, this can be encapsulated as a player’s ‘mythology,’ and contrary to our data-driven zeitgeist, that is a prism through which I enjoy baseball.

Indeed, my GOAT rankings tend to differ from those of the mainstream. Transcendent icons like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Shoeless Joe Jackson feature higher on my lists than most others, as do Jackie Robinson, Mariano Rivera and Sadaharu Oh. I’m a scholar of baseball’s alchemy – the way it is interwoven with culture and community – rather than a scion of its data. 

To that end, there may be no Japanese person alive that is more beloved, revered and watched at every turn than Ohtani. In a Japanese baseball context, only the aforementioned Oh can compete, and he just called Shohei unprecedented. In Japan, 15.9 million people watched Ohtani in Game 2 of the 2024 World Series, while 25 million – or roughly 20% of the country – tuned-in to the Tokyo Series. Both cohorts beat the 2024 NBA Finals’ viewership in the US, contextualising Ohtani’s impact. He is composing his own mythology, which may well rest among the greatest of all-time in eons to come, but declaring him the GOAT right now still feels premature.

Ultimately, Babe Ruth is – well – Babe Ruth. He is a figment of folklore, more than a mere ballplayer. He is the cherubic face of aspiration, a fabled embodiment of the American Dream who rose from an orphanage to become the most recognisable emblem of the most powerful country on earth. He is Paul Bunyan with a baseball bat, a deity drenched in mythos. He is the Sultan of Swat, the Caliph of Clout, the Maharaja of Mash. He is The Great Bambino. George Herman Ruth. The chimera eclipses the actuality.

Ruth rivalled Santa Claus as the ultimate hero of children. Ruth earned more than President Hoover in 1930, and likely contributed more to national pride. Ruth had his own candy bar, and would wave to adoring crowds in the middle of nowhere, in his bathrobe, on moving trains, like a centrepiece of PT Barnum’s travelling circus. When Japanese soldiers charged into battle against their American counterparts during World War II, they yelled, ‘To hell with Babe Ruth,’ such was his eminence. Franklin D Roosevelt, Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway went unmentioned.

Accordingly, it is impossible to overstate the revolutionary impact Babe Ruth had on baseball, professional sports, and their confluence with pop culture and celebrity. The game we see today can be traced to Ruth’s sheer incongruity, and I believe his legendary #3 should be retired across baseball as a token of appreciation. 

Before the Babe, baseball was chess on grass, the preserve of cunning pitchers and slap hitters. After the Babe, America fell in love with the home run, his signature trick, which turbocharged the game as one of crashing excitement. Ruth was the first player to top 30, 40, 50 and 60 homers in a single season. He was also the first to accumulate 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 and 700 homers all-time. In 1920, he out-homered every American League team. And without delving too far into the metric morass, those accomplishments matter. They blazed a trail and birthed an instinctive national allegory that Babe Ruth was, for all time, the greatest ballplayer who ever lived.

Hewn by unprecedented production, and maintained by a mystical miasma, that assertion has morphed into a rote American value, hovering almost as an unspoken amendment to the Constitution. It has been passed down from one generation to the next, a bedtime feature alongside Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood. It is just one of those learned, unquestioned axioms you take for granted, embronzed in the ether, like the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance. Tampering with that legacy – justly or unjustly – feels blasphemous.

Sure, Ruth inspired more sensationalist myth-making than any other sporting figure, but that, too, is part of his sacrosanct allure. Why? Because Babe Ruth can be whatever you want him to be. Whatever you need him to be. In that regard, he is something akin to a god, and though perhaps farfetched, the fervour he engenders among acolytes should be respected like any other religion. 

“Every big leaguer and his wife should teach their children to pray,” Hall of Famer Waite Hoyt once said. “God bless mommy. God bless daddy. And god bless Babe Ruth.”

Amen.

To reiterate, Shohei Ohtani is an amazing player. A unicorn, even. I get it – he is a top-3 hitter in the world right now, in addition to being an elite starting pitcher when healthy. Overall, as a package, he is the best, most well-rounded player on the planet. Shohei may be the second coming of Ruth, or at least a passable modern imitation, but he has not yet surpassed the Babe, statically nor culturally, and probably never will. Not in my estimation, at least. Ohtani may be the most talented player of all-time, but that, alone, does not make him the GOAT.

All things being well, Ohtani may top 500 career home runs. He may top 2,500 hits. He may top 100 WAR. He may even win 75 games as a pitcher while contributing to multiple World Series championships. And all would be phenomenal achievements from a single player. But Babe Ruth topped all those marks, as well – almost a century ago, while totally transforming the sport. We must not let recency bias cloud our perception of history.

In the current climate, those who push back on the Ohtani-GOAT narrative are ostracised as fringe baseball conspiracy theorists. That is absurd. Yet worse, trendy Ohtani acclaim is often couched in a tactic dismissal – if not an outright denigration – of Ruth. Slanderous claims suggest the Babe would not even make contact against a modern reliever pumping 103-mph fastballs, or that his potbellied physique would crumble in the contemporary minors. Some raise valid points about Ruth’s dominance of a smaller league before integration, and I share those concerns, but lambasting him for conditions beyond his control is unfair. 

Besides, would Ohtani have excelled in the 1920s, when one soggy, doctored ball was used for an entire game, indistinguishable against a murky sky in twilight without floodlights, facing headhunting pitchers who mastered the dark arts? Oh, and without all the predictive metrics, trend analysis, video breakdowns and biomechanical data available today? Maybe, but maybe not. And that is my overarching point: everything is relative, and Babe Ruth is still the GOAT to me. You are welcome to disagree.