…to give you an idea of how good he was look at these pitching stats.
First lets start with the World Series, in 31 innings of World Series play he gave up 3 earned runs. That is an ERA of 0.87 against the National League Champion!
In the regular season he started 148 games and completed 107. That in itself is not so odd given his era, but consider this out of those 107 completed games 17 were shutouts.
Run that through your head, One out of every 8 starts he made was a shutout. That’s a slightly worse rate than Koufax, about the same rate as Bob Gibson but much worse than Walter Johnson, but if you can be mentioned in the same breath as these guys without looking bad, then you are really something.
No offense to Aaron, Bonds, Killebrew, Mays, Dimaggio, Mantle, Williams, Snyder, Ripken, Greenberg, Stan the Man, Yaz, Berra, Manny, Griffy, McGwire, Henderson, Pujols, Banks, Robinson, Josh Gibson and Ichrio et/al. When any of those guys put up pitching numbers half as good as Ruth to go along with their great offensive numbers then we’ll talk about who was greater than the babe and not before.
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