Albert Pujols handed Eddie Collins for tenth place on the profession hits listing when he went 2 for 4 in a loss to the Mets on Wednesday. Or he tied Collins. Or perhaps he was nonetheless one quick. All of it relied on the place you appeared.
One factor is for certain: Pujols, who’s completely having fun with his farewell tour with the St. Louis Cardinals, had 3,314 hits after Thursday’s loss to the Mets. As for Collins, who performed for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox from 1906 to 1930, his hits complete is murkier.
The excellent news? There may be an official complete for Collins. The dangerous information? It’s laborious for a fan to search out. And the variations function a reminder that whereas baseball statistics really feel set in stone, there may be extra variation to them than many would guess, largely due to a predictable issue: human error.
Baseball Reference, a typical first cease for folks on the lookout for such a quantity, says Collins ended his profession with 3,315 hits — another than Pujols, via Thursday. MLB.com’s accounting, which matches up with the previous Whole Baseball encyclopedia, had Collins tied with Pujols at 3,314. The Elias Sports activities Bureau, which is the official statistician of Main League Baseball and its golf equipment, had him at 3,313.
The Elias quantity is the official one — therefore St. Louis’s celebrating the feat Wednesday — however as a result of Elias doesn’t have a searchable web site, the whole is all however hidden from followers and journalists who’re doing their very own analysis.
Baseball Reference, which collects its statistics from quite a few sources, usually differs from the official Elias numbers, however each agree on Collins’s hit complete in 24 of his 25 seasons. The place they differ is in 1920: Elias credit him with 222 hits that 12 months, whereas Baseball Reference has him at 224. (Both method, it was Collins’s single-season profession excessive.)
The distinction, as famous up to now by Alan Schwarz and others, is defined in analysis finished by Retrosheet, an archive of each field rating since 1906. In a doubleheader on Sept. 4, 1920, the official report e-book has Collins 0 for 3 within the second sport. However field scores from the time point out he truly was 2 for 4. Retrosheet attributes the error to a “swap,” by which the totals for one participant are by accident recorded for an additional. The veracity of that field rating, as of Thursday morning, was the distinction between Collins’s being in tenth place on the profession listing or eleventh.
There doesn’t look like as easy an evidence for MLB.com crediting Collins with 10 hits from 1906 to 1907, whereas Baseball Reference and Elias credit score him with 11.
Potential errors in a statistic as distinguished because the hit complete of a Corridor of Famer would possibly seem to be one thing Elias would wish to right, however it’s comprehensible why the corporate wouldn’t wish to delve too deeply into disputed numbers from the primary few many years of the twentieth century: In Collins’s profession alone, Retrosheet has recognized what it believes are 173 box score discrepancies. Apply that throughout all the gamers from that period, and it might most definitely be 1000’s of revisions, every with little greater than newspaper field scores to function proof.
Pujols could make issues simple by accumulating one other two hits and passing Collins on every listing. Ought to he catch hearth and acquire one other 122 hits this season — extremely unlikely given his age and position — he might begin a brand new debate, about whether or not he has extra hits than Cap Anson.
Anson, a Corridor of Famer who notoriously helped create baseball’s shade line, has 3,012 hits by most accounts, however he had 423 other hits taken away from him in 1968 when M.L.B.’s particular data committee decided the Nationwide Affiliation was not a significant league — a choice that many baseball historians imagine was a mistake.
If these hits have been ever to be restored, Anson would vault to seventh on the listing, pushing a parade of Corridor of Famers down one spot every.
