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Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth started his career as a genuinely dominant left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox — a 94-46 record with a 2.28 ERA — before the Red Sox sold him to the New York Yankees in 1920 and his career pivoted almost entirely to hitting. That pivot changed the sport itself: Ruth broke the single-season home run record repeatedly through the 1920s, capping it with 60 home runs in 1927 as the anchor of the legendary "Murderers' Row" Yankees lineup. He finished his career with 714 home runs, a .342 batting average, and a .690 slugging percentage, numbers that look enormous even by modern standards and were simply unprecedented in a dead-ball era most of his contemporaries were still playing in. Ruth won seven World Series titles across his Red Sox and Yankees years and picked up the 1923 American League MVP award along the way. Ruth was one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, receiving 95.1% of the vote — early, overwhelming recognition for a player who'd fundamentally changed what the sport's offense could look like. The shift from a pitching-and-contact game to a power-hitting one is directly traceable to his Yankees years. Ruth's move from ace pitcher to full-time power hitter remains one of the most unusual career arcs in professional sports — most Hall of Famers built a reputation doing one thing exceptionally well, while Ruth built two separate, individually Hall-of-Fame-caliber careers inside a single one, then chose to walk away from the mound almost entirely once his bat made it clear which version of him the game needed more.
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Ty Cobb
Ty Cobb played 22 seasons for the Detroit Tigers, including six as player-manager, before closing out his career with two seasons in Philadelphia — and across that span he set or held roughly 90 different MLB records, an almost absurd number for a single career, many of which stood for decades after he retired in 1928. His career batting average of .366 to .367 (sources vary slightly on the exact figure) stood as the highest ever recorded for nearly a century, until MLB's 2024 decision to formally incorporate Negro Leagues statistics into its official records. Cobb also finished with 4,189 or 4,191 career hits depending on the source, a total that held as the all-time record until Pete Rose passed it in 1985. Cobb's 12 career batting titles remain the most by any player in MLB history, and he hit .300 or better in 23 consecutive seasons, another all-time record. His base-stealing was just as relentless — 897 career steals, a modern-era record that stood for 49 years, including 54 career steals of home, still the record today. Cobb was inducted into the inaugural Hall of Fame class in 1936 with 98.2% of the vote, the highest percentage of any player until Tom Seaver surpassed it in 1992 — a fitting first-ballot honor for a player whose statistical dominance across two decades of Deadball Era baseball has rarely been matched since.
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