Babe Ruth Hit More Home Runs in 1920 Than Every Other American League Team

Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920. Every other team in the American League hit fewer than that, individually. He finished with 714 home runs and a .342 average, and before any of it he went 94-46 as a pitcher with a 2.28 ERA.

Ruth led his league in home runs twelve times. His 1920 season produced an OPS+ of 255, the highest single-season figure ever recorded, meaning he was two and a half times as productive as the average hitter of his day. His career slugging percentage of .690 is still the record, more than a century later, through every offensive era since.

The out-homering-teams fact is not a quirk of a dead-ball year. It is the entire point. Baseball before Ruth was a game of singles, bunts and stolen bases, and the strategy made sense because nobody could drive the ball out of the park reliably. He demonstrated that the whole sport had been playing the wrong way, and within a decade every team was trying to find its own version of him.

The pitching half is what makes the resume unique. He was a genuinely excellent left-handed starter, good enough to throw 29 consecutive scoreless World Series innings, a record that stood for 43 years. Then he stopped, moved to the outfield, and became the greatest hitter in history. No other athlete has been elite at two entirely different jobs within the same sport.

The objection is the competition. Ruth never faced a Black pitcher in the major leagues, never faced the Latin American talent that arrived later, and played in a league of sixteen teams drawing from a fraction of the population the sport now draws from. Willie Mays is the more complete player by a distance, an all-time center fielder who could also hit. Barry Bonds has the best peak of the modern era and seven MVPs, with the steroid question attached.

The segregation point is real and permanently unresolvable. What survives it is the size of the gap: Ruth was not slightly better than his peers, he was doing something none of them could do at all.

The verdict: Ruth for the dominance. Mays for the complete player.