The Babe Ruth Truthers

With the baseball playoffs upon us, the strangest conspiracy theory is making its way through the nation’s dugouts

This past July, on Kristin Cavallari’s Let’s Be Honest podcast, the Chicago Cubs’ star center fielder, Pete Crow-Armstrong, was asked to share an “unpopular opinion.” His answer: “Babe Ruth never existed.”

The man known as “PCA” credited the theory to Tayler Saucedo, then a Seattle Mariners relief pitcher, who reached this conclusion by way of deduction. Saucedo said he’d seen hardly any video of the Babe. If Ruth existed, where’s all the footage? From there, Saucedo reasoned Ruth right out of existence, consigning him to the same category as Bigfoot, a figment of the collective unconscious.