Babe Ruth: The Pitcher Who Changed the Sport by Hitting
Babe Ruth's career in numbers and phases, from a 94-46 pitcher in Boston to the 714-home-run slugger in New York, with the context that explains what those figures meant in his time.
Babe Ruth won 94 games and lost 46 as a pitcher, with an earned run average of 2.28, and then hit 714 home runs. Either career alone would have earned a place in the record books. The pair of them, packed into 22 seasons between 1914 and 1935, is why he is still the answer to the question of who changed baseball most. He was a very good left-handed starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, a conversion to everyday outfielder driven by his bat, and then the most dangerous hitter anyone had seen, at the moment the sport was ready for one.
This article follows the career in phases: the origin and the pitching years, the move to the outfield, the sale to the Yankees, the peak, the decline and what came after. Every figure comes from the historical record through the 2025 season, and the places where the historical record cannot answer are said plainly. The aim is to show what the numbers meant to the people who watched them, not just to list them.
The career line itself is a good place to start: 2,503 games, 2,873 hits, 506 doubles, 136 triples, 714 home runs, 2,217 runs batted in, 2,174 runs, 2,062 walks and 1,330 strikeouts, with a batting average of .342, an on-base percentage of .474 and a slugging percentage of .690. His OPS of 1.164 is the highest of any player with at least 3,000 at-bats in the historical record, ahead of Ted Williams (1.116), Lou Gehrig (1.080) and Barry Bonds (1.051).
From Baltimore to the Red Sox rotation
George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore on February 6, 1895, and grew up in large part at a Baltimore boys' school, where he learned the game. He signed with the minor-league Baltimore Orioles and was sold to the Boston Red Sox, for whom he made his major-league debut on July 11, 1914. He appeared in five games that season, went 2-1 with a 3.91 earned run average, and had two hits in ten at-bats.
The next four seasons made him one of the best left-handed pitchers in the American League. In 1915 he was 18-8 with a 2.44 earned run average, in 1916 he was 23-12 with a 1.75 earned run average in about 324 innings, and in 1917 he was 24-13 with a 2.01 earned run average in about 326 innings. Those innings totals are the part of the record that modern readers tend to miss. A starter who throws more than 320 innings in a season is doing a job that no one does today, and Ruth did it in two successive years while still a very young man.
His complete game total tells the same story. In his career he started 148 games and finished 107 of them, 72 percent. Greg Maddux, who is among the most durable modern pitchers, finished 109 of 740, about 15 percent. Ruth was not an unusual pitcher in the 1910s for finishing his games, but he was an unusual pitcher in having an earned run average of 2.28 while doing it, and the World Series record backs him up. In three postseason starts he was 3-0 with a 0.87 earned run average in 31 innings. His scoreless streak in World Series play, which stretched across the 1916 and 1918 Series, stood for decades.
The hitting starts to take over
By 1918 the Red Sox could not ignore the other thing Ruth did. He played 95 games that year, with 317 at-bats, 95 hits and 11 home runs, which tied for the American League lead, and he pitched about 166 innings with a 2.22 earned run average and a 13-7 record. In 1919 the balance tipped: he played 130 games, had 432 at-bats, hit 29 home runs, drove in 114 runs, batted .322, and pitched only about 133 innings, going 9-5.
The 29 home runs broke the major-league single-season record of 27, set in 1884, and the number is not a rounding detail. In 1919 the two leagues averaged about 0.20 home runs per team game, fewer than one every five games, which over a schedule of about 140 games comes to roughly 28 for a whole team. One man had hit about as many as an average club. The decision to put him in the outfield, which cost the Red Sox an effective starting pitcher, was a bet that the bat was worth more than the arm, and that bet turned out to be right to a degree no one in 1919 could have predicted.
His final year in Boston also set a pattern that would hold for the rest of his career: league leader in home runs. He led or tied for the American League lead in home runs 12 times in his career, in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930 and 1931 (the last tied with Lou Gehrig, the first with Tilly Walker). He also led the league in runs batted in six times and in walks 11 times.
The 1920 sale and the arrival of a new game
In January 1920 the Red Sox sold Ruth to the New York Yankees. The reported price was $100,000, a figure that has been repeated for a century, and the owner who sold him, Harry Frazee, has been blamed for it ever since. The story that the sale caused a decades-long drought in Boston, which ended with the 2004 championship, is folklore rather than cause and effect, but the sale did change the balance of the American League for twenty years.
The timing mattered as much as the transaction. In 1920 the rules and the ball were changing. The spitball and other doctored pitches were banned, with a handful of existing pitchers allowed to continue, and baseballs were replaced more often once they were scuffed or dirty, which made the ball easier to see and to hit. The league as a whole scored more: runs per team game rose from 3.87 in 1919 to 4.36 in 1920, and home runs per team game rose from 0.20 to 0.26. Historians still argue about how much the ball itself changed, and this article does not settle that. What the numbers show is that the league changed, and that Ruth changed more.
His first year as a Yankee was an eruption. In 1920 he hit 54 home runs, drove in 137 runs and batted .376 in 142 games. The league average of 0.26 home runs per team game over a 154-game schedule works out to about 40 home runs for a typical team, so one man had out-homered a typical club. A year later he hit 59 home runs, drove in 171 runs and batted .378.
The peak years in numbers
| Year | G | AB | H | HR | RBI | AVG | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1920 | 142 | 457 | 172 | 54 | 137 | .376 | First year as a Yankee |
| 1921 | 152 | 540 | 204 | 59 | 171 | .378 | Most RBI of his career |
| 1923 | 152 | 522 | 205 | 41 | 131 | .393 | MVP; highest average |
| 1927 | 151 | 540 | 192 | 60 | 164 | .356 | 60 home runs |
| 1928 | 154 | 536 | 173 | 54 | 142 | .323 | World Series title |
| 1930 | 145 | 518 | 186 | 49 | 153 | .359 | Also pitched a complete game |
| 1931 | 145 | 534 | 199 | 46 | 163 | .373 | Shared the home run title with Gehrig |
The table picks seven seasons from a stretch of 15 as a Yankee in which he hit 659 of his 714 home runs. Three features stand out. First, the batting averages: Ruth was not only a power hitter, but a .340 hitter over his career, with a high of .393 in 1923, the season he won the Most Valuable Player award. Second, the walks: he drew 2,062 in his career, more than he struck out (1,330), which is the signature of a hitter pitchers would not challenge. Third, the consistency: he hit 46 or more home runs in nine different seasons.
The 60-home-run season of 1927 deserves its own paragraph. The record stood until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961, in a schedule that had grown from 154 games to 162. The 1927 Yankees, with Ruth and Gehrig hitting in the middle of the order, are often ranked among the best teams in baseball history, and they won the World Series. Ruth did not win the Most Valuable Player award that year, despite hitting 60 home runs, because the award's rules at the time, as generally described, did not let a previous winner win again, and he had won in 1923. Gehrig took the award.
What 714 meant, and what it did not
Ruth's final home run total of 714 remained the career record from his retirement in 1935 until Hank Aaron passed it in 1974 and finished with 755. It remained a number that every baseball fan knew, which is a measure of how thoroughly he reshaped the sport. Home runs had been a rare outcome before him. After him they were the point.
The raw total understates what the record means. He hit 714 home runs in 8,398 at-bats, which is one every 11.8 at-bats. He did it when the schedule was 154 games and, in 1920, a typical club hit about 40 home runs for the whole year. A modern player who hits 40 in a season is doing something that a whole team did in Ruth's early years. The context does not make later sluggers lesser. It makes Ruth's relative dominance clear, and relative dominance is the right way to compare eras.
What the number does not say is as important. Ruth played in a league that did not admit Black players, and the best Black players of his time played in the Negro Leagues. The historical record includes Negro Leagues statistics for 1920 to 1948, but the records are incomplete, and the comparison between Ruth and, for example, Josh Gibson cannot be made rigorously from this data. Anyone who tells you with certainty who hit more or better is going beyond the evidence. The honest statement is that Ruth was the best hitter in the major leagues as they were then constituted, and that segregation kept the sport from knowing how he compared with the players it excluded. Major League Baseball did not break the color line until Jackie Robinson debuted in 1947.
Decline, the Braves and the end of the career
The decline came gradually. By 1933 he hit .301 with 34 home runs and 103 runs batted in, still a very good season by any standard, and pitched a complete game, going 1-0. In 1934 he hit .288 with 22 home runs in 125 games. He was selected for the All-Star Game in both 1933 and 1934, the first two years it was played, and he hit the first home run in All-Star Game history in 1933.
After the 1934 season the Yankees let him go, and he signed with the Boston Braves, who played in the same city as his old Red Sox. His 1935 season was brief. He played 28 games with 72 at-bats, 13 hits, 6 home runs and 12 runs batted in, a .181 average. On May 25, 1935, in Pittsburgh, he hit three home runs in a game, the last of which was the 714th of his career. His final game was on May 30. He did not manage in the major leagues, a job he wanted and did not get.
After baseball and what the record shows
Ruth was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936, the first year of voting, in a class that also included Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. He received 215 votes from 226 ballots, with 170 needed. He died in New York on August 16, 1948, at the age of 53.
The postseason record is part of the legacy: 41 games, 129 at-bats, 42 hits, 15 home runs and 33 runs batted in over 10 postseasons, a .326 average. He appeared on the roster of ten World Series teams, and seven of them won: 1915, 1916, 1918, 1923, 1927, 1928 and 1932. The 1932 Series is the one tied to the most famous disputed story in baseball, the called shot in Chicago. Whether he pointed to the stands before hitting a home run is argued to this day and cannot be settled from a database or from the surviving accounts, so it is left as an open question here.
What the historical record cannot answer
The historical record gives the box-score line of a career, and Ruth's is among the best ever recorded. It cannot give wins above replacement (WAR), which tries to put hitting, fielding, baserunning and pitching on one scale, and a calculation of Ruth's value would need to combine his 94 pitching wins with his hitting. It cannot give Statcast data, which began long after his death, so the exit velocity and distance of his home runs are unknown. Park effects, the differing dimensions of ballparks and the weather are not adjusted for, though Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was famously friendly to a left-handed pull hitter.
It also cannot show how much better the competition has become. The pool of players in the 1920s was smaller, drawn from a narrower population and without the full international and Black talent that has since entered the major leagues. That is a reason to compare Ruth to his peers rather than to modern players, and by that measure his lead over his peers is among the largest any hitter has had.
Common questions
Was Babe Ruth really a good pitcher? Yes. He won 94 and lost 46, a .671 winning percentage, with a 2.28 earned run average, and his 1.75 earned run average in 1916 was among the best in the American League. He also went 3-0 in World Series play.
How many home runs did he hit as a Yankee? He hit 659 as a Yankee, 49 as a member of the Red Sox and 6 as a Brave, totalling 714.
What was his best season? The numbers support several answers. His 1921 season (59 home runs, 171 runs batted in, .378) and his 1923 season (.393, 41 home runs, MVP) are the strongest cases, and 1927 (60 home runs) is the best known.
Did he ever win an MVP award? Once, in 1923. Under the voting rules of the 1920s he could not win a second.
Why did the Red Sox sell him? The reported price was $100,000 and the owner was Harry Frazee. The wider reasons are debated, and this article does not attempt to settle them.
Where to go next
Two of Ruth's teammates and rivals have their own profiles on this site: Lou Gehrig, who batted behind him on the great Yankee teams, and Ty Cobb, the other giant of the era. For a pitcher from the same decades, read about Walter Johnson and his 110 shutouts, and for the October context, see how the postseason works. The leaders pages let you sort every historical career and season, and the history and Hall of Fame topic page collects more reading.