Today I read the best summarization of the fallacy of discounting Ruth when Barry Bonds rationalizations and feeble denials collapse like the late 80's Soviet economy. 

I wonder where the disconnect between reality and Barry Bonds occurs? 
The writer Dayn Perry (FoxSports) adequately lumps all the best fake arguments so let's run down them to see how they stack up:

"In the statistical sense, Ruth is overvalued"

Not if you mean the baseball statistical sense.  Ruth's numbers are staggering.  You can't even type such a ridiculous sentence if you simply look up his records.  2873 hits over 22 seasons which means he averaged 130 hits a season including the 5 years he was a pitcher and his last season when he only played 29 games.  Ruth smacked 506 doubles, 23 swatted for every year he played.  136 triples, 6 smacked a year like clockwork for over two-decades.  714 home runs hit out of every ballpark not just Yankee Stadium.  From 1919 to 1934 Ruth clouted them like a machine:
20-29 home runs 3-times
30-39 home runs 2-times
40-49 home runs 7 times
50-59 home runs 3 times
60-69 home runs 1 time

Why doesn't his pitching ever get included?  He was 95-46 with a lifetime ERA of 2.28.  Bonds can't pitch a lick.  You can't ignore a guy who set a World Series pitching record that stood until Whitey Ford broke it almost 40 years later.  He was 3-0 in World Series play with a combined ERA of 0.87.  That would make him the highest paid athlete in the game today.
 
Moving on to other ridiculous revisionist history:

"Ruth played when black Americans and dark-skinned Latinos were barred from playing in the major leagues." 

The implication here is Ruth faced inferior or average white players and would've had a hard time against minority players.  This is as idiotic as saying Josh Gibson benefitted from not facing white players.
There were 18 HOF pitchers inducted from the 22 year span Babe Ruth played which is mighty impressive by any standard, that's a HOF pitcher for each team in both leagues and a good indication of the caliber of pitching Ruth faced daily.

It gets even worse when Perry concludes the level of fielding skill just wasn't anywhere near what Ruth would face today.  Simply false.  Hall of Fame players by position from the years Ruth played include 6 out of the 14 catchers inducted to date, 8 out of the 27 first baseman, 9 out of the 20 second baseman, 6 out of the 18 third basemen, 12 out of the 21 shortstops, 26 out of the 60 outfielders.  Where do you find weak fielding as an excuse for Ruth's hitting when his era produced 41% of all skill position players ever inducted into the Hall of Fame?  Each league averaged 33 HOF skilled players divided among 8 teams.  Was segregated baseball an abomination?  Yep.  Are we all glad it ended with Jackie Robinson?  Yep.  Enough said, let's keep the race card safely tucked in our shirt pocket when discussing Ruth. 

Its sad to see the ESPN-ization of sports, if you didn't see it on SportsCenter, it can't mean anything.  The rest of Perry's article deteriorates into an ad-hominem diatribe against Ruth's drinking, carousing, eating and other disparaging claims that I lump together as catcrap poor logic used to exonerate Barry Bonds who isn't reviled for his diet, his drinking, or his cheating on a spouse, specifically he has fallen under a fairly damning cloud that squarely enumerates he took specific drugs to achieve a specific outcome.

Consequently using Ruth's extra-baseball activities such as drinking during prohibition are not germane, they are irrelevant.  None of them can be demonstrated to specifically enhance the skills of a player in any sport except perhaps projectile vomiting. 

Babe Ruth and his accomplishments restored the luster to baseball after the Black Sox scandal threatened the very existence of the league.

Barry Bonds and others like him created a scandal every bit as inimical to baseball as gambling.

Ruth and Bonds are not alike, they are dissimiliar and disparate in every way imaginable.

There's no false Babe Ruth sentimentality as Perry or Bonds would like us to believe simply to deflect the issue from his use of steroids.
The issue is:  What constitutes the value of a record?
Is it merely a number you let anyone wipe their feet on like a doormat?
Or is it an elevated accomplishment to be revered as exceptional?