I was watching Ken Burn's Baseball on Netflix and they have a part where Ray Chapman is killed by a baseball in 1920. This ushered in the new rule that any dirty ball is immediately replaced. This also meant the pitcher gave up a lot of control of a ball BECAUSE it was dirty and scuffed. THEN Babe Ruth just happens to show up on the Yankees in 1920 and seem like the greatest slugger ever.
Well there is no reason Babe Ruth stood to gain from the end of the deadball era than any other hitter at the time. Although Babe Ruth did cash in along with the entire sport on the explosive popularity of the home run. Baseball was very much a different game before that.
During the deadball era the only home runs ever hit were in the park.
Babe Ruth also of course benefitted from not having his career interupted the way many other prominent ballplayers did. Lou Gherig (IMO the greatest player who ever lived) got struck down by ALS. Ted Williams who could justifiably be called the greatest hitter who ever lived had his prime years interrupted by both WWII and Korea. Mickey Mantle could arguably be called better than the Babe, but also suffered through many injuries.
Sports is a field very easy to quantify, all those statistics really do mean something. But when words like "greatest" get thrown in things get kind of murky.
It wasn't just home runs. Babe had an amazing career batting average (.342), OBP (.474), RBIs (2214), and slugging (.6897). Not all of which can be accounted for by a livelier ball.
Babe also had a .315 average in 1915 (the height of the deadball era), that same year, Detroit had the highest team average in the AL with .268. He was a phenomenal hitter almost his entire career, and was hitting record numbers of home runs even before 1920. His numbers certainly improved after 1920, but just about everyone's did.
Sources for stats:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/yearly/yr1915a.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL/1918-batting-leaders.shtml