I don't know who the greatest baseball hitter is, but he almost certainly played in the last 40 years, 50 years at the most. Players today are bigger, stronger, and better conditioned now than they were before the 1960's. Babe Ruth was a behemoth in his day, but he weighted 198 pounds in his prime which is puny by today's standards.
But when judged against his peers, there is little doubt that Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all time. Ruth not only set homerun records that held for decades after starting his career as a pitcher in the deadball era, but he out-homered whole teams a couple of seasons.
Nothing is likely to get an argument started among sports fans faster than attempts to name the all-time greatest in any sport, or even the all-time greatest in a particular aspect of a sport. However, in baseball, we can at least narrow down the list of possibilities -- considerably, in fact -- when it comes to hitting.
Who was the all-time greatest hitter?
A lot depends on how much weight you give to batting average versus power hitting. But it would be hard to consider someone for the title of the all-time greatest hitter if someone else had both a higher lifetime batting...
As a pitcher Ruth might have been the best in his day. As you may know, Walter Johnson was the only pitcher besides Cy Young to win over 400 games, but Ruth beat him in every one of the 7 games they pitched against each other.