by David Nemec
9.20 Statistics
The League President shall appoint an official statistician. The statistician shall maintain an accumulative record of all the batting, fielding, running and pitching records specified in Rule 9.02 for every player who appears in a league championship game or postseason game.
The statistician shall prepare a tabulated report at the end of the season, including all individual and team records for every championship game, and shall submit this report to the League President. This report shall identify each player by his first name and surname and shall indicate as to each batter whether he bats righthanded, lefthanded or both ways, and as to each fielder and pitcher, whether he throws righthanded or lefthanded . . .
Any games played to break a divisional tie shall be included in the statistics for that championship season.
Before each major league had an official statistician, tabulation errors were often made that resulted in the wrong players being awarded batting titles, stolen base crowns, etc. The most blatant error was perpetrated by an unidentified statistician, probably from Philadelphia, in 1884. From the data furnished by American Association officials at the close of that season, the loop batting crown belonged to Philadelphia A’s first baseman Harry Stovey with a towering .404 average. Stovey’s heady figure stood uncontested for a century until researchers in the 1980s carefully scrutinized the 1884 AA season and discovered that his true mark was .326 and the real winner of that season’s batting crown was Dave Orr with a .354 average. A blunder so gargantuan seems as if it must have been perpetrated deliberately to steer the honor to Stovey, one of the AA’s most popular and highly esteemed players, rather than Orr, a nonentity at the time.
In 1901, at the close of the American League’s inaugural season as a major league, Nap Lajole was awarded the loop’s fledgling batting title with a .422 average on 220 hits in 543 at-bats. A statistician noticed in 1918 that 220 hits in 543 at-bats produced only a .405 mark, and all the record books then reduced Lajole’s 1901 average to the lower figure. Following a story on Lajoie in The Sporting News in 1953, attention was again drawn to his 1901 season. The official American League records for that year had long since been destroyed, but baseball historian John Tattersall’s examination of the 1901 box scores unearthed 229 hits for Lajole in 543 at-bats. Tattersall’s research again restored Lajole’s average to .422, where it remained until another search through the 1901 box scores in the 1980s confirmed that Lajole had actually collected 232 hits in 544 at-bats that year, for a twentieth century–record .426 average. Among the three newly discovered hits were a triple and a home run that also raised Lajole’s slugging percentage to .643, a 13-point hike.
Is it now safe to assume that at least all the serious discrepancies in batting, pitching, and fielding records in the so-called post-1900 “Modern Era” have been eliminated? Far from it. In fact, Nap Lajole’s .426 batting average in 1901 has yet to gain universal acceptance, and several other significant discrepancies that have been revealed remain intact in record books sanctioned by the major leagues, including Baseball-Reference.com.
One is the 1910 American League batting race, for years food for violent controversy, which was seemingly resolved some while ago when it was incontrovertibly established that Ty Cobb hit .383 rather than .385, giving the crown to Nap Lajole with a .384 mark.
The problem radiated from a Detroit box score that had inadvertently been included twice in the season-end calculations, the duplication resulting in Cobb being credited with three extra at-bats and two unearned hits. However, major-league officials continue to recognize Cobb as the 1910 American League batting leader, believing that history should not be rewritten. Many baseball analysts concur, albeit for a different reason. In a doubleheader on the last day of the 1910 season, to help Lajole overtake the unpopular Cobb, St. Louis Browns manager Jack O’Connor ordered rookie third baseman Red Corriden to play deep on Lajole, enabling the batter to bunt down the third-base line at will and collect six “baby” hits in the twin bill. Cobb still won the bat title by a single point—or so it was then thought—but O’Connor and Browns coach Harry Howell were later banned from the majors for their role in the plot to deprive Cobb of his honor. In any case, Baseball-Reference.com now lists both Cobb’s and Lajoie’s 1910 averages in bold, designating league leadership, even though the averages differ.
National League statisticians also have a longstanding cross to bear. Chicago Cubs third baseman Heinie Zimmerman was retroactively awarded the Triple Crown in 1912 when he seemingly paced the senior loop with a .372 batting average, 14 home runs, and 103 RBIs. It has since developed that Zimmerman had only 99 RBIs that year, leaving him three behind Honus Wagner, the true leader, with 102. But the final Macmillan encyclopedia in 1996 continued to assign Zimmerman 103 RBIs in 1912, even though other major reference books by then were crediting him with only two legs of the Triple Crown (batting average and home runs).
Meanwhile, recent developments have given statistics sticklers good reason to doubt that even post-expansion statistics are 100 percent free of errors. The most significant one uncovered since the turn of this century is that Orioles first baseman Jim Gentile was deprived of an aforementioned RBI in 1961 that would have put him in a tie with Roger Maris for the American League lead that year with 141.
9.21 Determining Percentage Records
To compute:
(a) Percentage of games won and lost, divide the number of games won by the sum of games won and games lost;
Never in major-league history has a team with the highest winning percentage in its league not won the pennant. But prior to 1882, the rules made such an event possible—and it happened on one occasion in the top minor league of its time.
At the finish of its 1878 season, the International Association standings listed the Syracuse Stars with 29 wins and 11 losses for a .725 winning percentage. Meanwhile, Buffalo ended with 32 wins and 12 losses for a .727 winning percentage. Early day record books credited the pennant to Syracuse, while more modern reference works give the crown to Buffalo. This in effect would be counter to the current philosophy to concur whenever possible with the statistical rules of the time rather than those in our day were it not for modern researchers’ consensus that Buffalo’s true record was 27–10 (.730) in league play while Syracuse finished half a game behind at 26–10 (.722).
9.22 Minimum Standards for Individual Championships
To assure uniformity in establishing the batting, pitching and fielding championships of professional leagues, such champions shall meet the following minimum performance standards:
Only once in major-league history has a player been denied a batting crown even though he met the minimum performance standards then in existence. In 1938, rookie Washington Senators outfielder Taft Wright hit .350 in exactly 100 games. At that time, a player customarily had to appear in at least 100 games to be eligible for a batting title. But because Wright collected just 263 at-bats, an exception was made and the crown instead went to the far more deserving Boston Red Sox first baseman Jimmie Foxx, who finished a point behind Wright at .349.
Because there was no at-bat minimum in 1938, Wright theoretically could have won the crown with just one at bat as long as he somehow got into 100 games. The 100-game minimum became the unofficial standard in 1920 and remained in effect until 1945, when a 400 at-bat minimum was formally introduced. For the next dozen seasons, the rule for determining batting and slugging leaders fluctuated wildly, with a new twist added almost yearly. In 1957, the major leagues at last adopted the current standard that a player must have 3.1 plate appearances per every game his team plays to qualify as a batting or slugging leader.
9.22 (a)
The individual batting, slugging or on-base percentage champion shall be the player with the highest batting average, slugging percentage or on-base percentage, as the case may be, provided the player is credited with as many or more total appearances at the plate in league championship games as the number of games scheduled f
or each club in his club’s league that season, multiplied by 3.1 in the case of a Major League player and by 2.7 in the case of a National Association player. Total appearances at the plate shall include official times at bat, plus bases on balls, times hit by pitcher, sacrifice hits, sacrifice flies and times awarded first base because of interference or obstruction. Notwithstanding the foregoing requirement of minimum appearances at the plate, any player with fewer than the required number of plate appearances whose average would be the highest, if he were charged with the required number of plate appearances shall be awarded the batting, slugging or onbase percentage championship, as the case may be.
Taft Wright was denied the American League batting title in 1938 in part because Jimmie Foxx finished right on his tail. If no other hitter had been within 30 points of Wright’s .350 mark, quite possibly he would have been the first rookie in American League history to wear a batting crown.
Supporting this is the fact that several other batting leaders prior to 1957 who would not have qualified for their crowns under the current rules were allowed to continue to reign largely because their averages stood alone at the head of the pack. Since 1901, the two major leagues have crowned five batting champs—some say six—with inadequate credentials by current standards. The two American League winners who would not qualify now are Ty Cobb in 1914 and Dale Alexander in 1932. In addition, some current reference works—Baseball-Reference.com among them—credit Nap Lajoie with the 1902 crown even though he had only 352 at-bats and played just 87 games of a 140-game schedule. The three National League champs with far fewer than 3.1 plate appearances per game their teams played are Bubbles Hargrave in 1926, Debs Garms in 1940, and Ernie Lombardi in 1942. Lombardi won with just 309 at-bats, and Hargrave had only 326. Both were catchers, accounting somewhat for the willingness to overlook their skimpy plate totals. Because of the position’s harsh demands, catchers have generally been given special dispensation with regard to appearance requirements in determining league leaders. In fact, for many years they were only required to catch half their team’s games to qualify for the fielding crown.
Since Lombardi’s triumph in 1942, no National League catcher has won a batting title, and only Joe Mauer, with three titles, has won in the American League. But had the same 100-game-minimum rule that governed in 1942 still applied a dozen years later, the 1954 NL batting crown would have gone to Smoky Burgess, a backstopper with the Philadelphia Phillies. In 108 games and 345 at-bats, Burgess swatted .368—23 points better than Willie Mays, the recognized leader in 1954.
Bubbles Hargrave reached base via a hit, walk or hit by pitch only 144 times in 1926 but won the National League batting title.
The 1954 season saw another batting-title first when a player who would have won his league’s title under the current rule failed to qualify under the standard then in existence. On the surface, this seems an impossibility. How could a player accumulate 3.1 plate appearances for every game his team played and yet fail to have enough at bats to qualify as a leader? And yet, incredibly, it happened.
In 1952, a rule was enacted that a player had to have 2.6 official at-bats for every game his team played to win a batting title. The rule was still extant in 1954, when Ted Williams posted a .345 batting average, slugged at a .635 pace, and had a .516 on-base percentage after he collected 136 walks in just 117 games. But because Williams got so many free passes, he had only 386 at-bats. His total was 20 short of the 406 he needed to give him 2.6 at bats for each of the 156 games the Red Sox played, and the crown instead went to Cleveland’s Bobby Avila, who finished the season with a .341 average. Williams was awarded the slugging title, however, largely because his .635 mark was 100 points higher than runner-up Minnie Minoso.
When Williams’s walks, sacrifice hits, and hit by pitches in 1954 are combined with his at-bats, his total number of plate appearances is far in excess of the number needed today, let alone in 1954 when the schedule was eight games shorter.
But although Williams surely felt an injustice had been done to him, few members of the baseball public were aware of it at the time. By 1954, most fans were thoroughly befuddled as to what credentials a player needed to win a batting title. The confusion persisted until expansion lengthened the schedule to 162 games and made it imperative that a player whose team played a full slate accumulate at least 502 plate appearances to qualify as a leader. In 1959, many Clevelanders were baffled when Tito Francona of the Indians entered the last day of the season with the highest average in the American League and yet was said by the media to have no chance to win the batting title even though he was just a couple of at-bats shy of 400. Only then did Tribe fans discover that at some point (back in 1957, to be exact) the rule had been changed from 400 at-bats to 3.1 plate appearances for every schedule game. Francona finished with 399 at-bats and a .363 batting average—10 points higher than winner Harvey Kuenn. But since he needed some 30 more plate appearances to meet the minimum standard, his average would have fallen below Kuenn’s had the requisite number of plate appearances been added to his total.
One final note: In 1996, Tony Gwynn fell four plate appearances short of the required 502 when injuries held him to just 116 games, but when four hitless plate appearances were added to his total of 498, his .353 mark still finished well ahead of Colorado’s Ellis Burks at .344.
9.22 (b)
The individual pitching champion in a Major League shall be the pitcher with the lowest earned-run average, provided that the pitcher has pitched at least as many innings in league championship games as the number of games scheduled for each club in his club’s league that season . . .
Before 1951, qualifications for ERA leaders were fuzzy. Generally, any hurler who either hurled 10 complete games or else worked at least 154 innings—the number equaling the amount of games scheduled prior to expansion in 1961—was considered to be a qualifier, but sometimes the ERA champ would be a real eye-opener.
In 1940, after being called up from the minors with less than eight weeks to go in the season, Ernie Bonham of the New York Yankees tossed 10 complete games in 12 starts and compiled a 1.90 ERA, easily good enough to win the crown . . . until someone pointed out that he had pitched only 99⅓ innings. A number of record books recognized Bonham anyway (and a few still do), whereas others gave the honor to Bob Feller, who finished the season with a 2.89 ERA. The unofficial complete-game minimum of 10 was otherwise firm prior to 1952, however, including in 1943 when Howie Pollet was recognized as the NL ERA leader with a 1.75 mark despite having toiled only 118 innings. Incidentally, Baseball-Reference.com continues to recognize Pollet, and not his far more deserving Cardinals teammate Max Lanier, who finished with a 1.90 ERA in 213⅓ innings as the 1943 NL ERA king, while refusing to recognize Bonham as the 1940 AL ERA leader.
Until recently—just once before 1951, when the one inning for each game played by a pitcher’s team went into effect—was there an exception to the unofficial complete-game minimum: in 1927, when New York Yankees rookie Wilcy Moore, working as a combination starter-reliever, posted a 2.28 ERA in 213 innings, but had only six complete games in his 12 starts. Ironically, exactly ten years earlier, Fred Anderson of the Giants—who had eight complete games—was not recognized as the 1917 NL ERA champ (though he now is by Baseball-Reference.com) even though he hurled 162 innings and had an ERA 0.39 less than the leader, Pete Alexander. The Moore and Anderson cases pointed up the most serious flaw in the then-existing qualification standards: Unless an exception was arbitrarily made, as in the case of Moore, a pitcher frequently used in relief had no chance to win the award regardless of how many innings he hurled because he could never collect a sufficient number of complete games. Significantly, in 1952, only the second season the new rule was in place, the National League ERA crown went to Hoyt Wilhelm with a 2.43 ERA in 159⅓ innings and 71 games, all in relief. Whether Wilhelm would have been awarded the ERA title if his performance had occurred prior to 1951, we will never know.
Along with embracing the in
creasing importance of relief pitching, the new rule in 1951 paraded a certain prescience in another way when it made a minimum number of innings pitched the only criterion for eligibility. Were 10 complete games still a criterion, no pitchers would have qualified for an ERA crown since 2011 when Tampa Bay’s James Shields became the last pitcher to date to log a double-digit complete-game total with 11.
9.23 Guidelines for Cumulative Performance Records
(b) Consecutive-Game Hitting Streaks
A consecutive-game hitting streak shall not be terminated if all of a batter’s plate appearances (one or more) in a game result in a base on balls, hit batsman, defensive interference or obstruction or a sacrifice bunt. The streak shall terminate if the player has a sacrifice fly and no hits. A player’s individual consecutive-game hitting streak shall be determined by the consecutive games in which such player appears and is not determined by his club’s games.
Rule 9.23 (b) answers whether Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 would have been terminated if he had been unable to play in a game during his skein. It would simply have been put on hold and then resumed when DiMaggio returned to action regardless of how many games he missed. Some other significant hitting streaks have nearly gone unrecognized, though, when their perpetrators sat out games. In 1922, first baseman Ray Grimes of the Chicago Cubs set a then major-league record when he collected at least one RBI in 17 consecutive games. No one was aware of it at the time, not even in Chicago, because the streak did not come in a continuous 17-game stretch—Grimes was idled by a back ailment for nine days in the middle of his skein. But even if his feat had been accomplished in a single 17-game burst, it still might have gone unremarked until long after the fact. In 1922, RBIs had only been an official statistic for two seasons, and as yet few cared all that much about records anyway. When Pete Rose established a new record for career base hits in 1985, virtually the entire sporting world was aware of it, but Ty Cobb’s landmark 4,000th hit in 1927 received so little attention that even Cobb failed to realize what he had done until he read about it in the newspaper the following day.