The Babe Ruth Trade Made Sense (Bot9 #359)
As I mentioned last week, I’m on the East Coast for a baseball trip working up from Washington, D.C. moving to Baltimore, and finishing in Philadelphia. On this particular day I started in D.C. reading more of Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, saw Babe’s Dream (photo above), and visited Babe Ruth’s Birthplace and Museum before hitting a game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Needless to say, The Babe’s been on the mind. If you know anything about Ruth’s early life and pre-Yankee career, you already know his childhood was rocky and Ruth needed a disciplined hand. He hated school and didn’t follow rules. To simplify and summarize Ruth’s teenage years and early 20s in professional baseball, I’ll say this:
The Babe Ruth trade from Boston to New York made sense.
Let’s hold off on Ruth as a person and start with how the Red Sox were assessing him as a player. While no one was looking at WHIP or Hits Surrendered per 9 innings, those numbers are felt by anyone experiencing or observing a game. They’re numbers observable to the naked eye and felt by those experiencing the game. Ruth’s WHIP went like this from 1915-1918: 1.153, 1.075, 1.079, and 1.046. 1919? 1.545. That’s a massive jump where another runner was reaching base every other inning. His H9 (Hits Surrendered per 9 innings) went like this from 1915-1918: 6.9, 6.4, 6.7, and 6.8. This 1919 number? 10.0. That’s three more hits surrendered for every nine innings pitched. If you’re just watching the games in 1919, you saw a lot more traffic on the base paths while Ruth was pitching. If you’re looking at him as a pitcher using the data, you might be inclined to move on and let someone else take the risk.
Now move to the idea that Ruth never loved pitching. It isn’t something he was passionate about or really wanted to do. It paved the way for him to make the big leagues, but the big man always loved to hit. His best position as a young man? Catcher. Even back in the 1910s there was a bias against Southpaw catchers so there wasn’t much of a chance for him to make an impact there. Put the big man out in the outfield? It certainly seemed that the Red Sox were amicable to the change after an impressive 1918 primarily off the bench for Ruth, and a stellar 1919 in the outfield when he led the AL in home runs with 29.
Allan Wood, author of a pair of books on Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox, best sums up the sentiment around Ruth, “(He) was just a big headache.” Ruth didn’t want to follow the rules and quit on the team in 1918 because he didn’t want to pitch anymore. He only wanted to play outfield. There were car accidents, injuries, and holdouts over his contract. Ruth also threatened to go back to his farm and become a boxer or actor. At the end of the day, the Red Sox were fed up and didn’t want to continue to put up with someone causing the team so many problems. Put all of those factors together and one could easily draw the conclusion that the Babe Ruth trade from Boston to New York made sense.
To look at events like trading Babe Ruth in 1919 and look at it as a massive error means you’re succumbing to something called “Hindsight bias.” A quick Google search of Hindsight bias is “our tendency to look back at an event that we could not predict at the time and think the outcome was easily predictable.” To look at the trade after Ruth rewrote the record books is an error. Not a single person in the game of baseball had a vision for how the game would change through the prominence of the home run. Ruth becomes the most transcendent player in history because he changed how the game was played forever at every level. In the context of the Babe Ruth experience as it appeared in 1919, the trade to New York made sense. To say otherwise is an error of hindsight bias.
This happens in many other areas of life as well and we often don’t understand the power of hindsight in our current experience. This includes our faith walk as well. On this side of the Resurrection of Christ, it seems to me that we fail to empathize with the religious leaders who sought to stamp Jesus out. They didn’t have the luxury of seeing looking back in hindsight as we do. We look at Pilate and wonder why he didn’t stand up and stop the killing of an innocent man. We look at Judas or Peter with judgment and ignore the pressure they must have felt for their lives in the moment. To fail to recognize that we may have, likely would have, reacted in the same way in those given situations is ignoring the hindsight bias we have in the moment.
And this is the key recognition for our lives. If we were in the front office in Boston in 1919, we would have traded Ruth as well. If we were in first century Jerusalem, we would have been in the crowd calling for the crucifixion of an innocent man. No one recognizes transcendence in the moment. We experience it as a fleeting moment and doubt it seconds later. When we do this, we walk with more humility for those who have made what history has deemed as massive mistakes and live a life willing to take more calculated risks in what we do every day. It frees us up to get out of our comfort zones and judge ourselves less in the process.