A week ago, I put up a poll on Twitter asking: “What do you think is Babe Ruth’s likely level if you plucked him out of 1927 and put him in today’s big leagues?”

The results were, as they say, mixed:

— 21 percent said he’d be a superstar

— 25 percent said he’d be a star (after adjusting to new conditions)

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— 24 percent said he’d be average to below average

— 30 percent said a 1927 version of Ruth couldn’t make it in the game today

There are a couple of things to take from the poll (assuming you can take ANYTHING from a Twitter poll). One is: Babe Ruth still matters. He is one of those rare people in sports or entertainment or politics who never seems to age, who inspires strong feelings a century after he thrived. Babe Ruth has countless fans even now.

Rogers Hornsby and Lefty Grove do not.

The second thing is that while, collectively, people seem to have no idea how Ruth would do today — the poll is almost perfectly split — individually, people have VERY STRONG IDEAS about how Ruth would play in 2019. The people who believe he would be a superstar believe it totally, completely and will fight over it. And the people who believe he would be entirely overmatched have the same certainty that they are right.

My favorite response to this came from one of my favorite people in the world, Bill James, who I believe is the most influential baseball writer and thinker of the last half-century.

“Superstar,” he said, plainly, and then he ended up writing his own thoughts on the subject. I’m always a little bit sheepish when I find myself disagreeing with Bill, but he actually wrote two things here. First, he wrote an entire essay about why Ruth would surely be a superstar today.

Later, though, he wrote an addendum that I think proves the opposite.

Here, best I can explain it, is why Bill thinks Babe Ruth would surely be a superstar today, and I apologize in advance to Bill if I blow this. His theory seems to come down to the fact that Ruth was SO MUCH BETTER than everyone else that it seems all but impossible that the game has changed enough to affect him all that much.

Bill uses some rough numbers in an attempt to demonstrate this.

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Let’s say the quality of play in 1927 was a baseline .500 record.

What was the quality of play in 1957? Baltimore was exactly a .500 team in 1957. What would have been their record in 1927? Would they have had a .550 winning percentage?

How about 1987? The Tony LaRussa Oakland A’s were .500 that year; it was Mark McGwire’s rookie season, and Dave Stewart won 20 for the first time, so what would that team have done in 1927? A .650 winning percentage? Higher?

Then jump to 2018. No team went exactly .500, so let’s take the Phillies — who went 80-82 — as an example. What would the 2018 Phillies do in 1927? Obviously, this is a thought experiment, so you can make your own choice. The 1927 Yankees, widely viewed as one of the greatest teams ever, went 110-44 for a .714 winning percentage. Would the 2018 Phillies do better than that? Would the 2018 Phillies have had a .750 winning percentage? More like .800? Higher?

Even if they did that, Bill’s point is that Babe Ruth was way better than .750 or .800 winning percentage player. He was probably closer to .850 or .900 or even better than that. He was so much better than everyone else that a team of Babe Ruth-quality players might not have lost a single game in 1927.

So his point is that while the game has changed dramatically, it could not have changed enough to make up the difference between Ruth and the league.

And to prove that point — that the game could not possibly have changed that much — he uses a classic thought experiment in sabermetrics: If the game is changing THAT FAST, how is it possible that the same player can excel for 10, 15 or even 20 years?

— Ty Cobb hit .350 in 1907 and he hit .357 in 1927.

— Ted Williams was the best hitter in baseball in 1941 and also the best hitter in baseball in 1960.

— Henry Aaron hit .300 with 40 homers in 1957, and he hit .300 with 40 homers in 1973.

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— Pete Rose led the league in hits in 1965 and led the league in hits in 1981.

— Nolan Ryan led the league in strikeouts in 1972 and he led the league in strikeouts in 1990.

— Mariano Rivera, essentially using one pitch, was the same dominant pitcher in 1997 and 2013.

— Adrián Beltré hit .290 with 20 homers in 2000, and he hit .300 with 32 homers in 2016.

— Rich Hill was pretty much the same pitcher in 2007 and 2018.

Bill admits that there are some logical issues with this kind of thinking (and confesses that when he first came across it, he ripped it apart) but he thinks there’s a powerful truth in it.

“If baseball was improving on the scale of teams — that is, if it was improving by 0.50 in a decade or something like that — then these comparisons would not be possible,” he writes. “It would not be possible for a player to remain dominant in his decline phase, seasons separated by 15 years or more, except in very rare situations where a player actually improved greatly over time.

“The fact that this happens is not evidence that baseball is not improving over time, but it IS evidence that the league is not taking large steps forward each decade. The only way Babe Ruth could NOT be a star today is if the league was taking large steps forward in each decade.”

This is a fascinating and thoughtful argument.

BUT … I’m not entirely persuaded by it. My scenario, remember, is that we are taking a 32-year-old Babe Ruth out of 1927, out of his 60-home run season, and just transporting him into 2019. We’ll leave out the many adjustments he would need to make to modern living and focus on the game. He doesn’t get to grow up in today’s world. He doesn’t get to train the way players train today. He would get time to adjust to things, so he would probably figure out that he can’t use that tree trunk of a bat that he used, and he would get to work with today’s hitting coaches (assuming he would listen), and he would get to watch video if that interested him.

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What happens?

Well, Bill wrote a late-night addendum to his essay that I think is relevant. In it, he dealt with a reverse Babe Ruth question: How dominant would, say, reliever Adam Ottavino (with that upper-90s fastball and cartoonish slider) be in 1927? No batter of that time had ever seen ANYTHING like those pitches. He would be a Martian in the Roaring ’20s.

But would he be a star? That’s a trickier question.

Here’s why: As Bill points out, there was no such thing as an Adam Ottavino-type pitcher in 1927. The very IDEA of an Adam Ottavino would have been entirely foreign to everyone. There were no one-inning relievers in 1927. The concept would have been seen as incredibly stupid.

So Ottavino would surely be made into a starter, and he would be asked to throw nine innings every start, and there’s no indication that he could do that for very long. The last time he was a starter was 2011, and that was in Memphis, and he wasn’t very good.

Even if Ottavino was made a reliever, it was an entirely different role in 1927. The Yankees that year had a fantastic rookie reliever named Wilcy Moore. He was asked to pitch all the time, for as many innings as necessary, and he started 12 times and pitched 213 innings. Could Ottavino do that? Maybe. Maybe not.

Ottavino might say to the management, “No, look, I’ve seen the future. If you put me in for 80 innings for the year, I will literally never give up a single hit.”

But even if they bought in (which they probably would not) nobody would even know HOW to do that. The Yankees only used nine pitchers in 1927 — six pitchers threw 89 percent of their innings — and the idea that some prima donna would come from the future and pitch just one or two innings a game every two or three days would be so insulting, maddening and foreign to everyone that it would have no chance of succeeding.

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What if Ottavino did start? Well, he would realize that he needed to take something off his pitches so that his arm didn’t fall off. The pitches then would not be the same quality that they are now. Maybe he throws 92 mph. Maybe it’s 89 mph. The balls were not of the same quality then. The fielders were not of the same quality then. Hitters prided themselves on not striking out then. They would bunt and slash and drive him up the wall, but he would have to keep on pitching, and Bill’s point is you can see how Adam Ottavino might struggle in 1927.

I totally agree with that. And I think the exact same thing is true if you brought Babe Ruth to 2019. It’s not a question of how much BETTER players are now. It’s a question of how much the game has changed. Ruth, in my view, would have no idea what to even do in 2018. He never saw anything close to a 100-mph fastball in his life. In Jon Hock’s wonderful movie “Fastball,” scientists estimated that Walter Johnson was clocked at 93.8 mph*, and Johnson was far and away the fastest pitcher of his day.

*He actually was clocked at 83.2 mph they didn’t measure the speed of the baseball until AFTER it had crossed 60 feet, 6 inches, so scientists adjusted the speed up about 10 mph.

It’s not just a question of hitting much faster fastballs. He would have to face sliders that explode much differently than the pitches of his time. He would face a procession of remarkable pitchers every game, each with entirely different arsenals, each armed with advanced reports of exactly how to attack Ruth. He would face a lot of lefties, and even in his time, Ruth struck out more often against lefties (a mediocre lefty named Ed Wells owned him). He would face players from around the world. He would play under lights, he would travel much more, he would be under an entirely different kind of scrutiny, he would be playing in a league where everyone was fit and in peak condition.

It’s not a question of baseball being that much better than it was in 1927. It’s just so much different than it was in 1927, it would be unrecognizable to Ruth. How many times could Ruth show up at the ballpark hungover and get away with it? How many times would he face a pitcher who even slightly resembled a pitcher from his time? How much would he have to change that hitch in his swing in order to catch up with today’s game?

We’ll never know, unfortunately. In the end, my guess is that great athletes would be great athletes in any era. If Jesse Owens grew up in today’s world, I think he’d be the fastest man alive. If Johnny Unitas grew up in today’s world, I think he’d be the NFL MVP. If Chris Evert grew up in today’s world, I think she’d be the No. 1 player on the planet.

If Babe Ruth grew up today, he’d be the biggest star in baseball and American sports. I deeply believe that.

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My guess is also that you can’t just take athletes right out of their time because they couldn’t be prepared for how much the games have changed. The legend of Babe Ruth is timeless. But I don’t think he could hit Max Scherzer.

(Photo of Ruth: Louis Van Oeyen/Western Reserve Historical Society/Getty Images)