Babe Ruth's Missing Homer

You would think, with all of the time and effort that’s been invested in meticulously recording seemingly every single event that takes place on a baseball field, from the launch angle of a fly ball to the distance run by the outfielder who caught it, that surely none of the big, meaningful numbers would be wrong. But that’s not true.

Obviously nearly all of the statistics from the Negro Leagues were incomplete, so we can’t say how many steals Cool Papa Bell had or shutouts Satchel Paige threw, but the major leagues weren’t immune from statistical holes of this sort either. We know now, for instance, that Ty Cobb didn’t have 4,191 career hits because a couple of his hits had been double-counted way back in 1910. This means Eric Show wasn’t the guy who gave up Pete Rose’s record-breaking single in 1985, Reggie Patterson of the Cubs was, three days earlier.

We know that rules changes have mucked up some of the numbers, too. I’ve written before about that the sacrifice fly rule that was launched for the first time in 1954 would have given Ted Williams another batting title, and therefore another Triple Crown, if it had been in place in 1949. One year in the nineteenth century walks were counted as hits, and for a while no one bothered to record the number of times runners were caught stealing. Hell, the American Association in 1884 didn’t record steals at all, and was pretty spotty in recording something as basic as RBIs. The league’s best player that year, Dave Orr of the New York Metropolitans, supposedly led the league with 112 RBI, but he’s the only member of the Mets with a recorded RBI even though the team scored 734 runs, second-most in the league.

Because of these gaps, especially back in the earliest days of baseball, researchers are constantly finding mistakes and making corrections. For the most part those are pretty subtle, dealing with players or stats we barely notice. But, in at least one glaring case, a mistake to a pretty important number was found.