What if Babe Ruth joined the 2004 Yankees?

The 2004 Yankees were already loaded. Derek Jeter was the captain, Mariano Rivera closed, and that February they traded for Alex Rodriguez. They won 101 games, then became the first team in baseball history to lose a best-of-seven series after leading three games to none. The Red Sox came back to beat them in the ALCS and won their first World Series since 1918, ending the so-called Curse of the Bambino.

This one is pure fantasy. We dropped a 25-year-old Ruth onto the 2004 Yankees and simulated twelve seasons, 2004 through 2015, fifty times over, against the real rosters of every season, on real modern schedules with the real wild-card postseason format.

Moving a player across eras means making a choice. Each simulated season takes his real, age-matched production and translates it, component by component, into the run environment of the destination league. The translation is uncapped: he is allowed to be better than any real hitter of the era. He keeps the same edge over the league that made him Babe Ruth, and he faces pitchers who throw harder and bullpens that go deeper than anything the real Ruth ever saw.

In 2004 Ruth hits .355 with 83 home runs and 202 walks. No real hitter has ever come close to 83; the real 2004 leader was Adrian Beltre with 48, and Barry Bonds' 73 from 2001 stands as the real record. The Yankees win 95 games, beat the Red Sox in the Division Series, and lose the League Championship Series. The curse still doesn't get settled the way it really did.

2005 is almost as absurd: .377 with 73 home runs, and the Yankees go out in the first round. In 2006 the Yankees win 103 games and the World Series over the Cardinals, the club that really did win it that October, though Ruth plays only 109 games: the sim mirrors his real 1922 barnstorming suspension at the same age. In 2007 they win it again, over the Rockies, a rematch of that fall's real World Series. Two rings by the time he is 28.

The Red Sox, who famously broke their own curse in 2004, almost never break it here. Across the fifty runs they win the 2004 World Series just 8% of the time. This world's October belongs to the team Ruth supposedly cursed.

The 2008 Yankees, who really missed the playoffs for the first time since 1993, win 96 games and the World Series with him. Ruth himself has a quiet year by his standards: .293 with 38 home runs.

2009 is the ghost. The Yankees reach the World Series and lose it, and Ruth has the worst full season of the run: 93 games, a .245 average, 30 home runs. That is the sim mirroring his real 1925, the bellyache year, at the same age. As in real life, the Yankees still win 103 games without needing much from him.

Then the machine rolls on. He hits 71 home runs at 31 in 2010 and 64 more at 32 in 2011, and the Yankees win the World Series both years. Three rings in this window, four in five years for the franchise.

At 33, in 2012, Ruth hits 54 home runs but only .206, the lowest average of the run, and the Yankees still win the World Series. At 34 and 35 the team finally shows its age around him: 74-88 in 2013 and 81-81 in 2014, two missed postseasons, the only ones of the twelve.

Then one more October. At 36, in 2015, he hits .311 with 57 home runs, the Yankees win 91 games and their seventh World Series with Ruth, and the simulation stops. Seven championships in twelve seasons, with the median across all fifty runs also at seven, is the number to read with the most caution on this page: one all-time hitter can tilt a league for a decade in this engine, and the receipts below show how much of that is the engine's spread.

Across the fifty runs, the median simulated Ruth hits 642 career home runs over the twelve seasons with a .300/.442/.677 slash line at the median, and his best season at the median is 78.5 home runs. The season-by-season tables on this page follow the median run, in which he hits 642 home runs with 1,602 walks. Against the best real seasons of the era, the receipts are blunt: his 2004 median of 73.5 home runs sits 25.5 clear of Beltre's real 48, and his .355 average in the median run lands within seven points of Bonds' real .362.

The modern game gets its licks in too. He strikes out at the head of a modern lineup's rate, around 29 of every 100 plate appearances at the median, more than double his real rate. And the walks come with the whole package: 202 of them in 2004, against Bonds' real 232 the same year.

As a check on the engine itself, we replayed Ruth on his real 1920-1934 Yankees with the same machinery: across 50 runs it lands at a median of 648.5 career home runs against his real 659, about 1.6% under. The numbers on this page come from that same engine. At least in our simulation, the answer to the old barstool argument is yes: Ruth's edge over his league is big enough to survive the trip to 2004, and then some.