Greatest hitters ever

Babe Ruth has the edge in a two-man race with Ted Williams

Jun 07, 2023

Several players probably deserve to be mentioned in any conversation about the greatest hitters in major-league history.

Let me drop a handful of obvious names (in alphabetical order):

Henry Aaron (755 home runs and 3,771 hits)
Barry Bonds (762 homers)
Ty Cobb (12 batting titles and a lifetime average of .366)
Rogers Hornsby (two Triple Crowns and a career mark of .358)
Stan Musial (seven batting titles and a .331 career average)
Pete Rose (4,256 hits)
Honus Wagner (eight batting titles)

It’s a solid list, and I’m sure you can think of a few other stars who should be added to the mix.

But here’s the thing: If our aim is to identify the single greatest hitter of all time, there are only two serious contenders:

Babe Ruth
Ted Williams

You know all about both of them, of course. How Ruth singlehandedly converted the home run into an offensive weapon, setting single-season (60) and career (714) totals that remained benchmarks for decades. How Williams batted higher than .340 in 11 different seasons, drawing almost three times as many walks over his career (2,021) than strikeouts (709).

Observers find it difficult to choose sides. A savvy ESPN analyst once wrote: “Babe Ruth is the greatest player of all time. Period. He is the greatest hitter ever.” But another knowledgeable ESPN writer made this claim: “No one was ever better at hitting a baseball than Ted Williams. If he were playing today, he would be the best hitter today.”

Those two authors, interestingly enough, went by the same name, Tim Kurkjian. If an expert as solidly grounded as Kurkjian can’t make up his mind about baseball’s greatest batter, how can we?

I’ve got two possible solutions — bases per out (BPO) and statistical adjustment.

I often cite BPO in this newsletter. It tallies the bases a hitter attains through singles, doubles, triples, homers, walks, hit batters, stolen bases, and sacrifices, then divides that total by the outs he makes. (Click here to learn more about the formula.)

Statistical adjustment is a tool that I used in Cooperstown at the Crossroads, my recent book about the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (If you want to know the specifics, I advise you to consult pages 53 to 63.) It converts the stats from any point of baseball history to their 2011-2020 equivalents, allowing direct comparisons of players from different eras.

My research for the book determined that only 24 batters in major-league history piled up an adjusted total of at least 6,000 bases and posted an adjusted BPO of 1.000 or higher. These truly were the best hitters of all time. (All but Barry Bonds are in the Hall of Fame.)

At the very top of the list is Babe Ruth, whose actual and adjusted BPOs were an identical 1.413, indicating that he reached roughly 1.4 bases for every out that he made throughout his career. Ted Williams is second with an adjusted BPO of 1.301. (The average BPO for all big-league batters in 2022, just for comparison, was .660.)

Nobody else has ever exceeded 1.250 on the adjusted BPO scale, allowing us to say that Ruth and Williams (in that order) were the greatest hitters ever, and that nobody else really came close.

Look below to see the 24 elite hitters who topped 1.000 in adjusted BPO. You’ll see their actual totals of games, bases, and outs, followed by their adjusted totals.