The records exist from my high school pitching as well, but we don’t count that. MLB isn’t just making the simple statement that those numbers exist. They are counting them as equal to actual MLB numbers. You are bringing up examples around the edges like Coors Field, etc.
This is simply allowing a league with inferior talent (I have to make sure I word that one right) to be considered on par with MLB. It is simply way too much. For the reasons I said, they were not representative numbers.
Hugh Duffy’s numbers are actual MLB numbers, and he was playing against talent far inferior to that today. His league not only didn’t include Black players, it didn’t include Japanese, Korean, or Latin American players. Within the US, talent was being drawn from a US population of 50 million (excluding Blacks) instead of almost 330 million today. And pitchers back then didn’t have nearly the training or variety of pitches they have today. In 1893, the distance from the mound to home plate was moved 5 feet back to its current distance, to increase hitting, and pitchers were probably still adjusting when he set his record. Clearly we need to disallow Duffy’s numbers as well!
As RickJay says, you can’t directly compare records from different eras or different circumstances, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be included in the record books.
Your high school team wasn’t a major professional baseball club, and recognizing those statistics does not right baseball’s greatest wrong.
No one is being hurt by this.
To elaborate on this, if we consider those countries where baseball is a significant sport (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama) MLB today draws talent from a population of 750 million. Duffy was competing against a talent pool 7% of that.
There’s a huge difference between “different eras” and “different circumstances”.
Obviously, you can’t compare different eras to each other. But within each era, the stats are a measure of how dominant a player was against the top talent of that era. So if a guy hit .440 in an earlier era, everyone knows that it’s extremely unlikely that the guy would have hit .440 today. But the historical fact remains that he did hit .440 against what was then the top tier pitching and defense, and it remains in that sense the most dominant batting average performance in history.
By contrast, if a guy hit .440 in a different era and against what was even then minor league-level pitching and defense, then it wasn’t at any time the most dominant batting average, let alone in history.
As an example from another sport, Joe Louis holds various “records” for longest reign and consecutive title defenses and such. Now you can speculate if he would have been able to accomplish the same thing if he fought the bigger, stronger (multinational?) fighters of today. But that doesn’t mean his records are meaningless. He took on the best his day had to offer and this is what he accomplished against that best available opposition, and his accomplishments are a measure of his dominance of the sport which can be compared to a contemporary fighter’s measure of dominance, even if Louis might not have been as dominant in a different era. But suppose you decided to recognize some obscure boxing circuit as a “major league” and identified some guy who dominated that circuit to a greater degree than Louis dominated his, and then wiped Louis’ records off the map. You would be substituting a meaningless record for a meaningful one, and rendering the entire thing moot.
Personally I think MLB should recognize Negro League records as a separate category distinct from MLB, and not blend them with MLB numbers. Let those who accomplished things in that league get the proper recognition for those accomplishments. But it’s a mistake to pretend that those records are something that they’re not.
I’m not a big sports stat guy myself, so I don’t care all that much. But there are others who care about these things a lot. If indeed MLB intends to blend the stats (and I’m not sure that they do) then I suspect that such people will just create “unofficial” records which do make the proper distinctions.
Baseball fans and affectionados already know the numbers. There is no real need for only one record per category, as circumstances are always different - today, in the 1890s, or other times. There probably should only be one list with multiple entries to reflect this. Although there should be limitations and rationality applied to righting many historical wrongs; this one is simple, fair and seems reasonable to most professionals.
But no records are being wiped off the map. The existing records remain. They’re adding, not subtracting.
What hallowed record is being eliminated with this move?
Even if Gibson were to replace Hugh Duffy as the single-season leader in Batting Average, that’s not a "hallowed record’ by any means. Although he’s in the Hall of Fame, I’m sure very few fans are aware of him or could name him as the record holder. And his record is also due to unique conditions of the time he played, as I described above.
When it comes to records, you can’t add without subtracting. There’s only one first place. If you put someone else in first place, then the previous first place guy is moved down to second place. If someone previously held the record for the highest/lowest/most or whatever, then recognizing someone else as the recordholder wipes the first guy’s record off the map.
I don’t know. (I also don’t know if adding “hallowed” is a valid move.) It sounds like there’s currently a lot of uncertainty about NL stats and records, so it’s possible that no one knows yet what the impact will be.
People here, who are baseball fans, were already able to tell you who the “second and third” people were with regards to obscure records. Their circumstances differed since there were hundreds of changes - technical, geographic, social and statistical - over more than a century of play. I would thus dispute that there is only one “first place”. The American and National Leagues were also once separate, and have almost always had different rules.
A more sensible argument might be counting exhibition games. Having star players, in their 40s, switch leagues and still become standouts says something about the quality of play. By what basis can one assume players in the Negro Leagues were worse than in the National or American Leagues?
This is a ridiculous statement. Roger Maris taking the season home run record didn’t make anyone forget Babe Ruth.
And it was a similar situation, in that Maris passed him due to differences in the conditions of play, that is a longer season. For a while, that caused an asterisk to be attached to the record, but they eventually dropped that nonsense. People realize that Maris’s achievement in no way wiped out Ruth’s.
There was never actually an asterisk. There were two records, one for a 154 game season and one for a 162 game season. In 1991 they removed the distinction between the two and removed the 154 game record from the books.
I assume you knew all that but just making sure the mythical asterisk is understood.
I wondered about Billly Joel being interviewed so often about his love of the game. But it is sincere. Reflecting on We Didn’t Start The Fire - it mentions Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, “Brooklyn’s got a winning team”, Campanella and “California baseball” as touchstones in a pretty short list. I’m not sure I understood the last two before watching the doc.
Speaking of California baseball, one of the things the doc doesn’t really mention is the decades-long success of the Pacific Coast League, which was considered by many (including MLB for a time) to be superior to the AAA leagues and was a serious contender for becoming a third major league. PCL clubs were able to be quite successful and even poach major league players since they had no competition from other leagues in the area.
That abruptly ended when the Dodgers and Giants moved west, and the PCL reverted to AAA status where it remains to this day. You could do a whole other series on the history of the PCL and the struggles of baseball in the west.
I’m glad I’ve been following this thread. It explains a joke from a 1939 episode of “Fibber McGee & Molly” (I used to coach the House of David baseball team, but I got tired of the bush league).
And into stadiums formerly occupied by PCL teams.
There is the famous case of Buzz Arlett, who beat the shit out of the PCL for a decade. Then in 1931 he played his one season in the majors, with the Phillies, and hit .318 with power despite the fact that he was past his prime and had gained a lot of weight. He went to Baltimore - then in the International League - in 1932, and beat the hell out of the IL for years more. There’s little doubt Arlett was a legitimate major league player for 15 years, at least.
'Course, the Dodgers moved into the Coliseum rather than Wrigley Field after Phil Wrigley sold his western baseball interests to Walter O’Malley.
Female athlete extraordinaire Babe Didrickson Zaharias played baseball for the House of David. Her reply to hecklers asking where her whiskers were: “Same as you, sittin’ on 'em!”
Maybe so. It didn’t help that he was a lousy fielder, at least early on (the Cardinals soured on him after a scout witnessed an especially bad day in the field, including a fly ball landing on his head) and supposedly had motivational problems, tending to quit when his team was substantially behind.
Arlett is also a what-if case when it comes to pitching ability. He had great success early on in his minor league career, but overwork apparently injured his pitching arm (throwing 427 innings in a season will do that).