Home Run King: Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Oh?

Barry Bonds

Hank Aaron

Babe Ruth

Sadaharu Oh

These would seem to be the only four who could reasonably be considered the all time professional baseball home run (HR) king, especially if we are primarily using totals rather than averages as we do with hits.

Babe Ruth Wikimedia Commons

Pros and Cons:

Bonds:
Pros:
- Most U.S. major league HR both career (762) and season (73).
- 73 HR in only 476 at bats (AB); that's one HR every 6.5 AB, by far the best ratio.

Cons:
Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED)

Aaron:
Pros:
Most U.S. major league HR career (755) before Bonds.

Cons:
- Most HR in a season: 47.
- Not even the HR king of his era;  Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were considered better and possibly Harmon Killebrew.
- Got late career boost playing home games in Atlanta.
- Those 1973 Atlanta Braves: was there something in the water?  Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The great Hank Aaron hit 40 homers in 1973 in only 392 at bats at age 39. 1973 was Aaron's personal best in AB/HR: 9.8. Second best: age 37, 10.5 AB per HR. Aaron entered the 1973 season with 713 career home runs, one short of Babe Ruth's record. Aaron hit his career high for a single season at age 37, the same as Barry Bonds, in 1971 with 47 in only 495 at bats.
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Ruth:
Pros:
- Most U.S. major league HR both career (714) (before Aaron) and season (60) (before Roger Maris).
- Out homered every other team in 1920 and 1927.
- Set the single season HR record four times (1919, 1920, 1921, 1927) playing in three home parks (Fenway Park, Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium).
- First to hit 30, 40, 50, 60 in a season.
- When he retired had almost twice as many career HR as Lou Gehrig who was second.
- Led league most times: 12.
- Hit many very long HR.

Cons:
Babe Ruth never batted against Satchel Paige. Neither did Jackie Robinson.  Friday, May 29, 2009

That is often mentioned by people who want to emphasize that blacks had been excluded from wide participation in MLB before April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the modern color line by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League...

what top notch pitchers did Robinson face who would have been banned during MLB racial segregation? The best during Robinson's years (1947-1956) was Jackie's Dodger teammate Don Newcombe, winner of the first Cy Young award in 1956.

Even if Paige had been allowed to pitch in MLB the chances were less than 50% that he would have pitched to Ruth. Paige could have pitched in the other league. Had Paige pitched in the same league as Ruth chances were one in eight that he and Ruth would have been teammates. That's less than 50%, not even dealing with the eleven year age difference. Paige would have been 20 in 1926 about the middle of Ruth's career. In 1920 when Ruth hit 50 homers for the first time, Paige was 14 years old.

There is no reason to think that Satchel Paige would have changed Babe Ruth's stats to a significant degree, even assuming that Ruth would have had difficulty hitting Paige.

Paige was probably a great pitcher but what other banned pitchers would have impacted Ruth?

Evidence is anecdotal. It may be uncomfortable for some to address this but great black players were and still are mostly non-pitchers. Why? I don't know...

The National League integrated earlier and more thoroughly than the American League. However, especially during the first half of Jackie's career (1947-1951), he played against no star players (Mays was not yet a star in 1951) who would have been banned because of their color, none of whom were pitchers who could have directly impacted Jackie's batting.
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Oh:
Pros:
- Most Japanese leagues HR both career (868) and season (55) (before Wladimir Balentien, who yesterday hit two HR to break a tie at 55 with Oh, Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera).

Cons:
- Never played in the best leagues: U.S. American or National Leagues.
- Juiced: players, bats, balls, parks.  Saturday, September 7, 2013

comment:
Robert Whiting said...

(Sadaharu) Oh hit his home runs with a compressed bat . Compressed bats generate much more distance than conventional bats. It was forbidden to use compressed bats in MLB. And they were banned in Japan after Oh's retirement.

There were plenty of juiced balls in Oh's era too. Teams were allowed to manufacture their own balls and many of them had jackrabbit in them. it wasn't until 2011 that the ball was standardized. The new ball proved dead which led to the new livelier this year.
So, yes, batters had an advantage this year but then so did they in Oh's time 
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I'm going with the Babe.  Both Bonds and Oh have juicing issues and Aaron took many more AB to achieve his total than the two other major leaguers:

Aaron: 12,364
Bonds: 9,847
Ruth: 8,399

There are so many variables that comparisons become silly but still fun.

- Parks in Japan have generally shorter HR distances.
- Parks in the U.S. have generally shorter HR distances in more modern times.
- The mix of pitchers and pitches has evolved.  Ruth didn't face black pitchers but Aaron didn't face many Asian pitchers as Bonds did.
- Baseballs are inevitably made differently over time even if that is not the intent.

Single season HR records evolved.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Home Run hitting on steroids: 1920s?

For purposes of this topic, I'll consider the modern HR record to have been set at 24 in 1915 by Gavvy Cravath who had led the National League (NL) the previous two seasons with 19...

the 1915 record of 24 HR was broken 43 times in the 1920s...

Ruth's record of 60 has been broken seven times...

Six of those are during the modern steroid era, no pun or literary licence.  But that record would probably have been broken by now even without steroids and/or smaller parks.  If you penalize McGwire ten percent, he still breaks the record with 63 homers.  Is that so hard to accept for a guy who hit 49 as a rookie in 1987?  There are five percent more games than when Ruth played: 162 to 154.

The numbers in recent seasons are bloated but probably not that much more than other historic spikes...  Also consider that there are 87% more teams and players than before 1961: 30 teams to 16.  So we could reasonably expect milestones to be reached about twice as often.
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And what about the season record in Japan?  None of the four players with at least 55 HR is Japanese:

Sadaharu Oh - ethnic Chinese, born in Japan
Tuffy Rhodes - American
Alex Cabrera - Venezuelan
Wladimir Balentien - Curacaon

Maybe it's simply that the style of play is geared more towards singles king Ichiro Suzuki than (Godzilla) Hideki Matsui.  Matsui hit 31 HR for the Yankees in 2004, his only U.S. 30 HR season.  In 2002 in his final season in Japan Matsui hit a career high of 50 HR in 500 AB; he also hit 42 HR twice.

Balentien hit juiced baseballs for part of this season and his HR rate is almost 70% better than in 2012.  Plus, he did not bat against Yu Darvish, who started 29 games for the second consecutive year for Texas nor against Boston relievers closer Koji Uehara or Junichi Tazawa.  And he certainly did not hit against Satchel Paige.

So the record in Japan now stands at 57 HR with more games to be played this season.  Tony Lazzeri finished third in AL HR in 1927 with 18, behind Yankee teammates Ruth (60) and Gehrig (47).  Gehrig's 47 were the most by a player other than Ruth to that point in major league history.  In 1925 in Salt Lake City in the Pacific Coast League (AA level) Lazzeri hit 60 HR in 710 AB and 197 games.  Salt Lake City is known as a good place for HR hitting but I don't know how many Lazzeri hit at home.  Of his 60, Ruth hit 32 on the road.  Maris hit 31 of his 61 HR on the road.

Here are the only U.S. minor league players with at least 60 HR playing at least AA level:

source: http://www.baseballamerica.com/blog/prospects/2011/09/for-the-record-minor-league-home-run-leaders/

LEAGUE	LVL	HR	PLAYER	TEAM	YEAR	AGE	AB	AB/HR
American Assoc	AA	69	Joe Hauser	Minneapolis	1933	34	570	8.3
International	AA	63	Joe Hauser	Baltimore	1930	31	617	9.8
Pacific Coast	AA	60	Tony Lazzeri	Salt Lake City	1925	21	710	11.8
Texas	AA	62	Ken Guettler	Shreveport	1956	29	481	7.8