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Imprecise baseball records

iramets May 07 2007 08:01 AM

I like the idea that we know exactly how many home runs Aaron hit, so we can celebrate (or mourn) the precise moment that Bonds hits one more, but apparently we can only guess at a given baseball record. According to [url=http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/SABR_Records/messages/272?threaded=1&m=e&tidx=1] this site[/url], it's all provisional, and there's no real effort being taken even by the maniacs at retrosheet to have erroneous records corrected. If you read that dialogue correctly, the nittiest of nitpickers refuses even to lobby the MLB official record-keepers to update mistakes, seemingly for the sake of some artificial sense of stability and consistency in the minds of baseall fans everywhere. Frankly, as an academic, this boggles my mind. It's like finding a new play by Shakespeare and simply refusing to admit it to the canon of plays, after all the authentication has been done, just because of all the readers who have grown up without knowing about it. It's perpetuating ignorance for its own sake. I don't get that at all. To my mind, you should correct errors, on an on-going basis (after making reasonably sure that you're actually correct, to the best of your knowledge), any chance you get. If McCovey drove in 51 runs that year, and not 50, just change the friggen number, would ya? A petty example of this would be the curent tallying of which Met played in which order. If we discover that no one counted some Met way-back-when (or counted Art Shamsky twice, or something) and the Mets whom we have cited many tmes as being the 100th, 200th, etc Met to appear in a game, turns out to be incorrect, why would we want to perpetuate the incorrect list, simply because it was "established" as the official record? We'd put out a new, corrected list, and note that we had the wrong guys originally (as if anyone cares), right? It's like people would rather be wrong than to admit that they WERE wrong, or even that somebody else was wrong.. The graf that really blows my mind is this one: "As for lobbying Elias, that is an absolute non-starter. There is no chance whatsoever that they will approve a public change for this. They changed Hack Wilson only because it became so high profile. All that would happen by approaching Elias is that we would make them mad."

Edgy DC May 07 2007 09:19 AM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on May 07 2007 09:48 AM

I think retrosheet is tired of getting curt patronizing letters back from Elias saying "Of course we know everything." (Elias is probably tired of hearing from Retrosheet, and probably a lot of would-be revisionists who don't have their facts as straight.) I suspect that retrosheet's strategy is, instead of correcting the record piecemeal, steadily building up an argument for thousand's of inaccuracies in the Elias database that are correct and verifiable in theirs, and holding off on laying it out there until they can maneuver for Elias' contract. A lot of people have made money (Bill James, among others) off of retrosheet's work. I think they're sick of giving the shop away.

Yancy Street Gang May 07 2007 09:28 AM

I related my encounter with inaccurate history in this thread: http://www.getalifealready.com/cpf/archives/5500/f1_t5524.shtml The guy at Retrosheet told me they're eventually going to put up a page where they list all the inaccuracies that they've discovered or that have been reported to them. If that ever happens, my little discovery about Ed Kranepool's Caught Stealing will probably be on that list.