Pete Crow-Armstrong jokes Babe Ruth didn't exist. Why the footage is gone

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Pete Crow-Armstrong went on a podcast last week and said with a laugh he likes the theory that Babe Ruth never existed. Baseball's internet treated it like a confession.

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"This is gonna be crazy," the Cubs center fielder told Kristin Cavallari on her show "Let's Be Honest." Then he brought up the theory that the sport's greatest player may never have existed. He picked up the theory from Tayler Saucedo, a Mariners pitcher at the time, who floated it on a podcast in 2024 because he had barely seen any video of Ruth playing. Saucedo said this was a discussion in the Mariners bullpen and that they also decided that Ted Williams' legendary 500-foot home run never happened either.

Crow-Armstrong piled on Ruth saying the game has changed so much since then that pitchers back then might as well have been throwing underhand.

Then everybody lost it. One site used the quote to worry about American public education. Another brought up the plague of misinformation. A bunch of them criticized the young Cubs outfielder. It raised eyebrows and ruffled feathers! That's a lot of coverage for a 24-year-old answering a question about an unpopular opinion on a podcast hosted by somebody from "Laguna Beach."

The video thing has an actual answer, if any Millennial or Gen-Zer wants it.

Film in the 1920's was shot on nitrate, which is chemically unstable, burns easily and eventually turns to dust on its own. Studios also destroyed and recycled old reels, because before television there was no money in keeping last year's pictures. The Library of Congress studied it in 2013 and found that 70% of the roughly 11,000 American silent features made between 1912 and 1929 are completely gone. Only 14% still exist. Newsreel crews shot a couple of minutes of highlights, not whole games, because nobody was broadcasting anything.

The written record of Ruth is voluminous.

Every game he played was covered by competing newspapers in every American League city, with box scores and photographs and league records to go with them. Crow-Armstrong's real question about Ruth's greatness compared to the modern era is an old argument in clubhouses over the decades. Adam Ottavino took flack a few years ago for saying he could strike Ruth out. It's a time-honored tradition to argue about the eras of baseball players.

And for those paying attention, Crow-Armstrong is making a case for being considered among the great young players of his generation.

He leads the Cubs in homers (26), RBI (69) and hits (126). He has 29 stolen bases, including stealing third base in the bottom of the 11th inning on Thursday. He pressured the Blue Jays and forced Blue Jays catcher Brandon Valenzuela into a throwing error to score the winning run.

Crow-Armstrong is suddenly in the debate for the National League MVP, ironically battling the player that they call the modern day Babe Ruth: Shohei Ohtani.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pete Crow-Armstrong jokes Babe Ruth didn't exist. Why the footage is gone

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