At this point, the Red Sox had not won the World Series in 83 years, since 1918. Many people attributed this to selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season. This was known as "the Curse of the Bambino."
Martinez to the media, after the game: "The questions are so stupid. They're wasting my time. It's getting kind of old. I don't believe in damn curses. Wake up the damn Bambino, and have me face him. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass, pardon me the word."
June 4, 2001, 5 days later: The Yankees beat the Red Sox 7-6 at Yankee Stadium. (The old one.) Pedro goes 6 innings, and does not figure in the decision. He makes his next start, but misses his next one due to injury, makes his next 2, then is out with an injury for the next 2 months. He makes 3 more appearances that season, the Red Sox lose all 3, the last 2 to the Yankees, and Pedro is the losing pitcher in the last one, on September 7 at Fenway.
After that May 30 shutout, Pedro made 7 appearances, pitched 35 2/3rds innings, and went 0-2. In fact, after that shutout, he didn't win another game until April 7, 2002 -- a span of 311 days. Oh yeah: In 2001, the Red Sox fell 13 1/2 games short of the American League Wild Card berth. Had the current setup been in place then, they still would have finished 2 1/2 games short of the 2nd berth.
In other words, had Pedro kept his fat mouth shut, and not mentioned the Babe, he probably wouldn't have made a difference; but, under today's format, he could have.
Instead, he fucked with the Babe, and he and his team paid the price.
I cleaned up the language for the title of this page. I refuse to do so in the actual text of the post.
Pedro Martinez fucked with the Babe.
Never, ever fuck with the Babe.
In 2015, Pedro was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. On his first visit to the building in Cooperstown, New York thereafter, he went to the Babe's statue, and apologized.
*
December 11, 2018: Adam Ottavino, a 33-year-old pitcher with a career record of 17-20, 17 saves, an ERA of 3.68 and a WHIP of 1.300 (in the National League), and currently a free agent (meaning he doesn't have a job right now), said this today, on MLB's Statcast podcast:
I had an argument with a coach in Triple-A about Babe Ruth's effectiveness in today's game. 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, shoutout 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."
Adam Ottavino, a guy who is, at best, a marginal major league pitcher, said that about Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player who has ever lived.Cue the Match Game studio audience: "How dumb is he?"
It is clear that the average player now is better than the average player in the Babe's time (1914 to 1935). However, the best players in one era would be the among best players in any era.
Given his ability, and the fact that there were only 16 teams at the time, I feel safe in saying that Ottavino would not be in the majors in Ruth's time. He's barely there in his own era.
The Babe's stats are mind-boggling. Everyone knows that. But let's look at the perspective:
The Babe never faced most of today's "trick pitches." He never saw a split-fingered fastball, or even its predecessor, the forkball. He never saw a knuckle curve or a slurve, rarely saw a screwball, and saw very few sliders or knuckleballs.
But he did see a few sliders and knuckleballs. And, unlike today's hitters, he faced the array of "doctored" pitches that fell under the category of "spitballs" - on a regular basis until they were banned in 1920, and then from a few pitchers who were allowed to continue using them until they retired.
And if such a pitch had gotten away accidentally, the Babe would have been hit in the head with no batting helmet. (I can think of only one incident where the Babe was knocked out by such a pitch, but he apparently didn't miss much time on that occasion.) The Babe didn't have all that padding used by Barry Bonds and David Ortiz, either. (Hmmmm, how come two of the worst steroid offenders seemed to use the most padding?)
The Babe never got on a plane, at least not during his playing days, and flew 6 hours from New York to the West Coast. But can you imagine the modern era's pampered players - Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Rickey Henderson come to mind - riding on a train from New York to St. Louis for 24 hours? Have you ever tried to get a good night's sleep on a train? I have, taking an Amtrak from Trenton, New Jersey to Chicago, and it's not easy - but that's a story for another time.
The Babe never played at night, when the ball is harder to see. But the ball is still easier to see at night, with modern stadium lighting, than it was at dusk when there were no lights to turn on. (In fact, the Babe's last game was on May 30, 1935 -- just 6 days after the Cincinnati Reds' Crosley Field hosted the 1st major league night game.) And, as I said, if he didn't see a pitch that was headed for his body rather than the plate, he took an awful chance.
Also, while the Babe wasn't always the fat man he's usually portrayed as, on those occasions when he was out of shape (much of the 1922 and 1925 seasons, and pretty much continuously from 1932 onward), he still had to play the outfield. He wasn't going to be moved to 1st base, thus forcing first Wally Pipp and then Gehrig out of the lineup. And there was no designated hitter in those days: Regardless of where he was put, he was going to have to think about his fielding as well as his hitting.
In fact, after his disastrous 1925 season -- disastrous both personally and, in comparison to his usual performance, in his hitting -- the Babe became the 1st major athlete, outside of boxers, to hire what we would now call a personal trainer, Artie McGovern, a former flyweight boxer who'd been recommended to him by Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey.
He was one of the few who could afford it: In addition to Ruth and Dempsey, McGovern's clients included golfer Gene Sarazen, bandleader John Philip Sousa (who conducted the band at the opening of the original Yankee Stadium in 1923), and bandleader Paul Whiteman. (Ironically, McGovern died before the Babe, in 1942 -- but at age 54, which is slightly older than the Babe lived to be.)
But, in those days, athletes didn't lift weights. "You're gonna get musclebound!" was the cry, especially to football players. Granted, nobody else was in the kind of shape today's players are in, but in the Babe's time, nobody would let them get into that kind of shape if they were already close to it. Ever see how skinny Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were early in their careers? Very few were big guys like Hank Greenberg.
The shocking thing is not that Babe Ruth put up Babe Ruth numbers, it's that he put up Babe Ruth numbers in the Roaring Twenties.
And the Babe's longest season, 1921, was 154 games, plus 8 in the World Series (it was best-5-out-of-9 from 1919 to '21, best-4-out-of-7 ever since), for a total of 162. Today, if a player goes through the entire regular season, and then takes all 3 postseason rounds to the distance, we're looking at a maximum of 181 games. That's 3 more weeks worth of games than the Babe could possibly have played. Or, to put it another way: A typical season for Ruth would start around April 15, and end (if he reached the Series) around October 7, not quite 6 full months; a typical season today starts as March turns to April and ends as October turns to November, about 7 full months.
But, as I said, today's players have a better chance of getting into and staying in shape than did players in the Babe's time, so, under today's conditions, he probably wouldn't have gotten tired after 170 games.
And let's not forget, most of today's ballparks don't have 450-foot expanses in center field and the power alleys. Today, the longest distances in any big-league park are Fenway Park in Boston, the only surviving AL park from that era, and Comerica Park in Detroit, which both have a 420-foot marker. In the Babe's day, while there were several parks with very short right-field fences, including the then-new original Yankee Stadium, there were also a lot whose fences went way out, including said Yankee Stadium, whose center field was 490 feet when the Babe arrived and 461 feet when he retired. "The House That Ruth Built" wasn't entirely built for Ruth.
Imagine Babe Ruth coming off the 1927 season in which he was 6-foot-2 and 215 solid pounds, batted .356, had an OPS+ of 225, hit 60 home runs and had 165 RBIs -- with dimensions in his home park favoring him not nearly as much as you think they did.
Now, imagine the DeLorean showing up outside Yankee Stadium, and Marty McFly and Doc Brown making him a deal. They take the Babe to November 2017, 90 years later. They spend the time between the end of the World Series and Thanksgiving acclimating him to modern life. Then, after the biggest Thanksgiving feast ever, they take him to a gym. By day, Jillian Michaels spends December, January and February getting him into shape. By night, Marty and Doc show him videos of today's baseball, the tactics and tendencies.
March 2018: The Babe signs with the Yankees, a one-year contract worth $50 million. He becomes the most expensive designated hitter ever. He's 33 years old -- 32 in 1927, and has now passed a February 6. He's now 225 pounds of U.S. Steel and sex appeal. The endorsements have piled up, so he doesn't have to worry about spending cash.
And now he's going into the bandboxes of the 2018 American League.
For all the hype about him, the Yankees are not favored to win the AL Eastern Division. The Red Sox are. Having learned early 21st Century American slang, he tells manager Aaron Boone, "Calm the fuck down, kid, I got this."
April 10: 1st Yanks-Sox game of the year, at the new Yankee Stadium. Chris Sale starts for the Sox. Ruth remembers from the videos he's watched that this is the guy whose sidearm delivery usually sends a slider when there's 2 strikes, and that he also throws a sinker and a tough changeup, which gets mixed in with a high-90s fastball.
The Babe steps in. Sale's 1st pitch is a sinker, and the Babe lays off. Ball 1. The 2nd pitch is a changeup, over the plate but low. The Babe, using a 36-ounce bat instead of his usual 42-ounce "Black Betsy" of yore, swings. The ball lands in Monument Park. Sale goes on the Disabled List with a severe case of whiplash.
Instead of losing 14-1, as happened in the history that we know, the Yankees win this game 5-4.
Two nights later, after the Babe's had 5 hits including 2 home runs against Boston pitching, the Babe steps in against Rick Porcello, a known headhunter. Porcello's 1st pitch is a brushback. The Babe gets out of the way. He gets up, and -- remember, he hasn't gone through the 1932 World Series yet -- he points and Porcello, and says, "I'm gonna hit the next pitch right down your goddamned throat!"
He doesn't. He does, however, hit it halfway to Connecticut.
The Sox never recover, and the Yankees win the 2018 World Series, in which Ruth hits 5 home runs -- including 1 off Sandy Koufax and 1 off Don Drysdale, as Magic Johnson has sunk his billions into building his own time machine.
*
Adam Ottavino said the Babe couldn't adjust to today's baseball.
This would have been a monumentally stupid thing for a pitcher who had earned some dap to say.
Adam Ottavino should have kept his fat mouth shut. Who the hell is he?
He is someone who has fucked with the Babe.
He will not have a good 2019 season. Mark that down.
UPDATE: After I wrote this, the Yankees acquired Ottavino. That worried me. But he's done all right for them, and hasn't brought up the subject of what he would have done against the Babe.
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