The Best Baseball Player of all time

It was, is and likely always will be George Herman "Babe" Ruth.

Despite the egotistical pretensions of Barry Bonds, he will never be the "best that ever was" because until he wins 94 games as a Major League pitcher, with an earned run average of at least 2.28, Bonds will be just another overweight guy swinging a bat.

Babe Ruth not only carried a .342 batting average to go with his 714 home runs, for the first six years he was in the American League, with Boston, he was a pitcher. That meant not batting most of the time, although in 1919 he led the league with 29 home runs. Even after he was no longer considered a pitcher he managed to pitch in 5 more games for the Yankees - and won all 5.

Credit the Yankees with the good sense to put the Babe in the batters box everyday by switching him to a player position.

In 22 seasons he carried a .968 fielding percentage with only 179 errors.

Bonds has played all of parts of 21 seasons, is a .300 hitter and has appeared in 169 more games than the Babe. As of this moment, at least, he is still one home run shy of Babe's record. If the Bambino could've played in 170 additional games, his number would be considerably greater than 714.

Also, while Bonds has 1,865 RBIs, Babe had 2,211. Difference, 346 in Ruth's favor. That is not an insignificant number.

Babe Ruth had 2,873 hits and a .690 slugging percentage. Bonds has 2,759 and a .611. We would argue that Babe was more of a team player in that he was willing to put the ball into play to score baserunners more often than we have seen Barry try.

Also, Bonds-boosters frequently boast of how many times he has been walked: 2,341. But Babe Ruth was walked 2,062 times. The edge - 279 - goes to Bonds, but it is not nearly as telling a statistic as RBIs. Walks are potential runs; RBIs are tallies on the board.

Finally, lest we forget, while the Babe was accused of ingesting certain liquid substances, they were hardly performance enhancing.

But Bonds ...