Pete Crow-Armstrong is having a good baseball season for the Chicago Cubs. He is also apparently the president of the Babe Ruth Truther Club.
PCA went on Kristin Cavallari’s “Let’s Be Honest” podcast and shared what he called an “unpopular opinion” that has now taken over baseball social media.
“This is gonna be crazy,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Babe Ruth never existed is one that I like. I heard some pitcher with the Mariners. I think he did some podcast on Zoom when he was like going down the rabbit hole with somebody about how Babe Ruth never existed.”
He kept going.
“It’s like we always talk about how like the game is evolving and people might as well have been like underhanding the ball to that guy and he’s regarded still as one of the best players ever. And you might as well dive further into it and be like, well, maybe he just never existed.”
Let us just get this out of the way. Babe Ruth existed. There is film. There are photographs. There are Yankee Stadium records, Boston Red Sox records, hundreds of firsthand written accounts from players and reporters, and a well-documented Baseball Hall of Fame plaque. Ruth hit 714 home runs, batted .342 for his career, and was the most famous athlete on the planet for two decades. The debate about whether the level of competition he faced was watered down is a real debate. The debate about whether he was a person is not.
PCA knows that. This is the same 24-year-old outfielder who has been one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball since arriving in the majors, and he is smart enough to understand primary sources. He is doing a bit. He is saying something outrageous on a podcast because that is how you get people talking about you in the middle of a baseball season.
It worked. His clip went viral. Talkin’ Baseball posted it. It has been dunked on by every history-adjacent account on X. Mission accomplished, Pete.
The interesting part is not the take itself. It is that the Babe Ruth Never Existed theory has actually been percolating in weird corners of baseball internet for a couple of years now. Some of it is fueled by the ridiculous era-adjusted numbers he put up. Some of it is fueled by conspiracy content creators looking for the next spicy thing to say. And some of it is just baseball players being baseball players. They spend a lot of time on planes, and podcasts fill the silence.
If PCA really wants a good Ruth debate that he can defend, he should ask people around Chicago about the called shot in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series against his own franchise. Cubs fans have been rewatching that grainy footage for almost a century looking for a version of the story that lets them win.
Babe Ruth was real. His swing was real. The colossal shadow he cast over the sport was real.
Pete Crow-Armstrong is just having fun with the offseason chatter while his team tries to make a playoff run. Nothing wrong with a little podcast trolling in August.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
