I like the Babe and Ted as the two greatest hitters who ever lived, and that they both played in Red Sox uniforms at Fenway, with Chicago, the last great American Cathedral now that the Steinbrenners have replaced the House that Babe Built. I also like that instead of steroids they smoked and drank in the dugout. These two stand alone.

Interesting. And not bad as far as speculation goes. Ted missed some serious years in the military. But why not try your simulation on the years that the Babe “missed” as a pitcher? You will come to the same conclusion that all serious students of the game must.

Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter of all time.

Mike

His homer total for the five missed years certainly would be at least 150 and perhaps as many as 200. There’s a good chance that he would have finished with nore than 714.

Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t assign arbitrary home run numbers to Williams, nor did I project them, I ran a computer simulation that split them out. Granted I had to enter his statistics into the computer that were used during the 1943-1945 seasons and I had to make a guess as to what they would have been. I ran this simulation about eight years ago and I no longer have the program that I used, but I’m pretty sure I assigned about 35 homers to him in 1943 and went from there. I based his numbers on his averages from the seasons that sandwiched 1943-1945. Secondly, and I should have explained this better, Williams was the only player I “brought back” from WWII, so he was facing depleted pitching staffs, which surely helped his numbers. I could have pretended there was no war and entered stats for all the players, but frankly, I didn’t want to go to that length. Lastly, authors and historians Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout projected his stats filling in the numbers from the 727 games he missed and the numbers my computer simulation spit out are very similar to their projections. Runs differed by only 55, hits by only 20, and doubles, triples, walks, and strikeouts were almost identical. Homers differed by 49 (Johnson and Stout projected those to 686) and RBIs by 214, so your point about his 50-homer seasons is well taken. I may try running the simulation again with Out Of The Park Baseball, which has a career feature that will adjust Williams’ ratings based on his career to the point he went into the service. That may be more accurate and less optimistic, but I’m pretty happy with Micro League Baseball’s results.