Yesterday, I read two bits (still $0.25) about the same phenomenon, old-time MLB records that have been changed slightly, Hoss Radbourn’s single-season record for wins and Ty Cobb’s lifetime hits total. The Radbourn bit was published yesterday on https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2019/04/old-hoss-radbourn-59-or-60-wins/ in Sports Reference.com, and the Cobb bit appeared in Herm Krabbenhoft’s somewhat lengthily entitled "How Many Hits Did Ty Cobb Make in His Major League Career? What Is His Lifetime Batting Average?" in the Spring 2019 edition of the Baseball Research Journal, which SABR members got in their e-mails, also yesterday.
Both articles, and the entire concept of revising and updating records based on scrupulous research, would be unexceptional, I believe, if not for a thoroughly wrong-headed pronouncement by the unfailingly pompous Bowie Kuhn, as Commissioner of Baseball, some years ago, to the effect that there is, or ought to be, a statute of limitations on baseball records, preserving in stone their sanctity, or their immortality, or—well, who the hell knows what Kuhn was ever talking about? Mr. Krabbenhoft ends his article with an apt quotation from MLB’s Official Historian, John Thorn, to wit: "A statute of limitations on the truth? When you discover truth, you have to report it."
MLB has been dragging its heels on changing its records, probably as long as it’s had records. Human nature, I suppose. No one likes the need to change a long-memorized trivia answer, which is what drives this fanatical adherence to preserving incorrect records. After all, could anyone possibly care less if it were discovered that Dick Calmus threw 43 pitches and not the 42 he was credited with throwing in a meaningless game between the Dodgers and the Pirates in 1964? That’s impossible, and not least because I didn’t even look up whether Calmus was on the Dodgers’ roster in 1964. We don’t have such records memorized, and therefore don’t give a good goddamn whether that number is 43 or 42 or 0. But somehow, according to Kuhn, records by Cobb or Ruth or Rose, when entered incorrectly, cannot exit. They are stuck in place, in perpetuity.
I probably wouldn’t give a hoot, probably have no hoots to give, here if Kuhn had simply said "Oh, who cares? It’s just a game, nothing to get worked up about," but the legalisms he employed tick me off. "Statute of Limitations," my eye, like he’s carefully adjudicating a thorny problem by applying some carefully considered point of law to settle it. I don’t really mind lazy slobs who don’t enjoy exerting their brains unnecessarily, but I do mind pompous snobs like Kuhn pretending they’re thoughtful jurists.
Anyway, for the both of you who aren’t members of SABR, I’ll sum up Mr. Krabbenhoft’s detailed research: Cobb is traditionally credited with (all together, now) 4,191 hits, in 11,429 at-bats, for a .367 lifetime mark, but through a careful analysis of dozens of contemporary sources (scorecards, newspaper articles, etc.) submitted to Retrosheet and other authorities for their unanimous approval, it is more accurately rendered as 4,189 hits in 11,434 at bats for a .366 mark.
This, too, is subject to change, of course, pending further research, and MLB ought to be grateful that people like Mr. Krabbenhoft are willing, nay eager, to devote hours of their lives and skill to tracking down this sort of thing (for free). I suppose, since Thorn is MLB’s Official Historian, that MLB is Officially Coming Around to a position of gratitude in place of Kuhnian Disrespect, and that is progress.
Knowledge is elusive. It’s a slippery thing, difficult to grasp, challenging to hold in place. New facts, and new ways to interpret facts accurately, keep cropping up, and that’s why historians will never run out of work. I find it funny, for example, that according to a 2015 article by Kirk Kenney mentioned in the SABR article, the whole to-do about Pete Rose breaking Cobb’s hits record against the Padres, with all its hoopla, and ceremony, and suspense, and cap-doffing, might all have taken place on the wrong day, and the actual breaking of the record might have taken place during a different game against a different opponent with no one playing the slightest attention to it.
To me, that’s funny. Anything that undercuts pomposity is funny, and personally I wish all sorts of ceremonies during games that take an extra second from the game itself were mocked more often. A warm round of applause for a player who accomplishes some significant mark, or even the hoarding of the ball in some rookie’s first MLB hit, or the scoreboard flashing that "THAT WAS JOE BLTZVIK’S 200TH STRIKEOUT OF THE YEAR" doesn’t really take up that much time. If we made a mistake with them, who notices or cares, but when we turn these things into major productions, halting the game, presenting players with trophies, getting executives to deliver speeches, well, we had damned better be right in marking the moment as THE moment because we look kind of silly if it turns out differently. As it often does.