Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong has stepped into one of baseball’s strangest corners, saying he believes Babe Ruth never existed.
Crow-Armstrong floated the idea on a podcast with Kristin Cavallari, describing the theory as wild even as he leaned into it. “This is gonna be crazy,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Babe Ruth never existed … I heard some pitcher with the Mariners, Tayler Saucedo, he did some podcast on Zoom when he was like going down the rabbit hole on how Babe Ruth never existed, and I was like ‘wow!’”
He tied the theory to the way the game has changed over time, arguing that the sport looked so different in Ruth’s era that the whole idea can seem absurd enough to question. “It’s like, we always talk about how the game’s evolving,” Crow-Armstrong continued.
“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. You might as well dive further into it and be like ‘well, maybe he just never existed.’”
The claim itself centers on the idea that the visual record of Ruth is somehow suspicious. Crow-Armstrong and Saucedo both entertained doubts about the historical evidence, even though the baseball record is exhaustive.
George Herman Ruth lived from 1895 to 1948. He went from a neglected child to one of the most famous athletes ever, dominating as both a pitcher and a hitter.
In the postseason, he once threw 29 straight scoreless innings. After the Yankees got him, he transformed the home run chase, hitting 54, then 59, and finally 60 in a single season.
Crow-Armstrong’s comments also put him in the company of other athletes who have chased fringe ideas online. Kyrie Irving once pushed flat Earth claims, and Carl Everett previously denied that dinosaur fossils were real.
Ruth’s fame extended far beyond the United States. During a 1934 barnstorming tour of Japan, thousands of fans mobbed him.
His last surviving teammate died in 2009 at age 100, and plenty of others have spoken about seeing the Bambino play. Historians and baseball records continue to document his career in detail, and the theory remains firmly on the fringe despite Crow-Armstrong’s latest remarks.
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