MLB Pitcher Ottavino: 'I Would Strike Babe Ruth Out Every Time'
It is an understandable, even common, reaction for today’s athletes to compare themselves favorably with the greats of the past.
A journeyman NBA center often thinks he’d have held Wilt Chamberlain under 20 points on the night Wilt scored 100.
A mediocre NFL running back, if you get a few beers in him, will tell you he could’ve run for 300 yards against the Pittsburgh Steelers defense in the 1970s.
And now free-agent reliever Adam Ottavino is trying to have us believe he could have whiffed Babe Ruth every time he faced him, literally saying, “I would strike him out every time.”
Which, hey, it’s not like ol’ George Herman’s around to contest the assertion, nor was Ruth himself immune to big boasts even in his own time.
After all, it was Ruth who said, “If I’d just tried for them dinky singles I could’ve batted around .600.”
The 33-year-old Ottavino, who spent the last seven seasons with the Colorado Rockies, was on MLB’s Statcast podcast to talk about baseball in 2018, and comparisons to history are as much a part of a sport whose first professional teams played almost a century and a half ago as are hot dogs and the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
“I had an argument with a coach in Triple-A about Babe Ruth’s effectiveness in today’s game,” Ottavino said. “I said, ‘Babe Ruth, with that swing, swinging that bat, I got him hitting .140 with eight homers.’
“He was like, ‘Are you nuts? Babe Ruth would hit .370 with 60 homers,’ and I’m like, ‘I would strike Babe Ruth out every time.’
“I’m not trying to disrespect him, you know, rest in peace, you know, shout out to Babe Ruth. But it was a different game. I mean, the guy ate hot dogs and drank beer and did whatever he did. It was just a different game.”
With all due respect to Ottavino, this is the kind of talk that makes sensible people respond with, “Go home, you’re drunk.”
The core problem with Ottavino’s argument is “but it was a different game.”
If you put Babe Ruth in a time machine, bring him forward to 2018, give him all the benefits of sports nutrition advances from over a century since Ruth came into the league as a rookie with the Red Sox in 1914, and traded the hot dogs and beer for lean chicken breast and organic fruit smoothies, you’d have … well, imagine Shohei Ohtani, but with Clayton Kershaw’s stuff on the mound and Mike Trout’s ability with the bat.
And as good as Adam Ottavino is — and in 2018, he was very good, with a WHIP under 1.00 and an ERA of 2.43 in 77.2 innings pitched with the Rockies — when he faced the Angels, he may not have faced Trout, but Justin Upton homered off him.
And if Justin Upton’s going yard against you, Babe Ruth would hit the ball so far out of Coors Field that it landed in Wichita.
It’s interesting, however, when we see these historical comparisons because baseball indeed was so different in 1918 than it is in 2018 — except for the fact that in both cases, the Red Sox were World Series champions — that it may as well have been a completely different sport back then.
But as long as we’re on the subject, there is one thing undoubtedly true about Ruth, Ottavino and making contact:
Ruth would strike Ottavino out every time.
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