Ruth Actually Hit 718 HRs (lifetime) and Maris had 62 HRs in '61, but the home runs were hit early in a game that was either rained out or for some reason called before the game was “official”. Thus all the stats are thrown out.
On July 17, 1961 in Baltimore Maris hit a home run that was nullified because it started raining in the fifth inning. Had his July 17 home run counted, Maris would have hit number 59 during his game 154 (still missing Ruth’s record) and number 60 during his game 158. And eventually go on to hit 62 that year.
Ruth lost two HRs to rain outs and two more when his home run balls bounced out of the stands and back on the field. The umpires mistakenly called the plays a “double” instead of a home run.
How many strikeouts did Nolan Ryan really throw. Certainly more than the 5,714 he is credited with.
IMHO this is BS. How does MLB justify this injustice?
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Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game.
In 1991, MLB changed the rules of what defined a no-hitter, wiping out 31 no-hitters including Haddix’s 12 perfect inning effort because he gave up a hit in the 13th… Yet, they couldn’t go back 24 hours, with video evidence and the umpire’s admission to his mistake, to fix a “blown perfect game” that was the fault of a league official.
This strikes me as being rather easily justified; a player’s statistics in a game that does not count should not count.
The sum total of all statistics should be an accurate total of the statistics accumulated in championship games, that is, games that actually count as wins and losses in the standings. If a team goes 88-74 and in those 162 games accumulates 143 home runs, the of all individual home run totals should be 143.
I don’t know if you like this justification - personally, I like it - but there it is.
I do not understand how this constitutes an injustice. Players are not entitled to statistics or records or particular numbers. The numbers simply are what they are.
I don’t see it as an injustice as long as the method for counting records is clear and it’s applied to all players. If Ruth and Maris and Ryan “lost” some of their accomplishments because of the way records are counted, then other players lost some of their accomplishments as well.
Bob Feller might well be among the top ten all time leaders in wins if it wasn’t for WWII costing him several years of playing time (figure 20 wins a year, carry the 2, hmmm).
How can MLB justify the injustice of not adding to his numbers?
What happened to Galarraga sucked big time, but there’s an important difference in principle here.
Changing Galarraga’s outing to a Perfect Game would require actually altering the in-game boxscore. A perfect game is 27 batters up, and 27 batters down, with no-one reaching base. But in that game, when the bad “safe” call was made at first, a runner reached base and another hitter came to the plate. That next hitter then recorded an out. In order to give Galarraga his due, you would have to turn a base hit into an out, and you would have to actually erase an out from the game’s data.
None of that was required for MLB’s 1991 rule change.
Ruth lost one when he hit a game winning homer out of the park, but where the rules of the time only let the winning run score-he got credited with a double.
To put it another way. If a team has a rainout, the game is rescheduled. So a batter has 162 + a fraction games to hit home runs in. Why should he get this advantage over another palyer with no rainouts?
And let’s not get into the asterisk hullabaloo when they changed the schedule to 162 games from 154.
The thing that does bother me a bit is when they describe postseason records and compare current players with three post-season series to the oldtimers with only the World Series.
I maintain that Galarraga is more famous for missing the perfect game than he would be if he’d gotten it. If the ump had gotten the call right, everyone would have cheered, and we’d all know what an awesome game he pitched that day, and SportsCenter would say “that’s the 20th perfect game in MLB history”. As amazing and rare as that feat is, it would have been just another perfect game. But as it happened, everybody knows he deserved a perfect game, but didn’t get it. I checked Wikipedia; there were two other perfect games that season and there have been three more sense then. Without looking, can you name any of those pitchers?
I don’t know if that’s any consolation to Galarraga, but I think it’s an interesting way to look at it.
In 1929 the St. Louis Browns put an 11’ fence above the right field wall. It’s pretty well accepted that at least one of Ruth’s home runs in St. Louis in 1927 would have hit the fence, while at least one of Jimmie Foxx’s 1933 doubles in St. Louis would have gone into the stands.
If that had happened, Foxx and Ruth would have each ended up with 59 home runs in their best seasons.
One of the funnest games I ever watched was Red Sox Matt Young’s 1992, 8-inning, no-hitter against the Indians. He gave up 7 walks and 6 steals and lost the game 2-1. The woulda-been no-hitter (totally legit IMO) was erased by the rule change.
I mean, what was he supposed to do? Insist that the Indians take their last at-bat in the bottom of the 9th?
I’ve often heard the phrase “facing the minimum” meaning 27 batters. It’s possible to do that and not pitch a perfect game, a walk and caught stealing or a double play will do it.
I agree you have to do the full nine innings/27 outs to qualify.
Ha ha, I missed that one. That was only two years after the Yankees’ Andy Hawkins lost an eight inning “no hitter” 4-0 to the White Sox. I was listening to the game on the radio at the time, but I couldn’t tell you all the things that went wrong. Those were some dark days.
