Babe Ruth Informative Essay

Greetings loyal sports fans. Today I am here to dethrone a legend: Babe Ruth is not the greatest baseball player in history. If anyone deserves that title, it is New York Giants and Pittsburg Pirates player Barry Bond, but we'll get to that later. For now, I want to talk about Babe. We all know him; he's a myth, a master of his game. The Sultan of Swat, some have called him. And indeed, he could hit a mean homer, but beyond that, he could do nothing else. Babe Ruth was not the "greatest" baseball player in history, because he had very specialized skills and was not a complete player, faced fewer and easier competitors, thus having an easier time beating records and becoming famous, and lead a very unhealthy lifestyle.

A good baseball player,

Barry Bonds was accused of using performance enhancing drugs in early 1998. Some may say that the drugs were what caused Bonds to be such an amazing athlete, but Barry was a great player before the drugs. He joined the Pittsburg pirates in 1986, 12 years before he was accused of using the performance enhancing drugs, and he was good then too. The drugs helped, but for more than half of his career, he was drug free, and he was a talented player. Babe Ruth, on the other hand, lived a life full of drinking, gambling, sex and smoking. As a ESPN writer wrote, "Babe Ruth was... a man with a... prodigious appetite for women, food and drink." He was unhealthy, and his wide girth and heavy weight meant that he couldn't run, even if he had wanted to. We can see that his health had major effects on his game: in Babe's and Bonds' 22 year long careers, Barry stole a total of 655 bases, while Babe stole only 240. Babe was not a fast runner, but rather a walker, out of necessity. Both players were unhealthy, so Barry's drug use doesn't disqualify him from earning the title of "the greatest” . Babe ruth, “The Great Bambino”, ate horribly, had sex all of the time, was so fat that he couldn’t run or steal bases, and, because of his health issues, he hit fewer homers. They both were pretty bad, which levels out the playing field. As they say, it's not over till the fat man