The Book of Baseball Literacy: Second Edition

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Chapter 7: Records, Statistics, & Awards

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Ty Cobb's career batting average at his retirement, the highest in baseball history. After examining the records of Cobb's era, researchers have determined that Cobb was wrongly credited with a 2-for-3 game, and so Cobb's lifetime hits total should be lowered from 4,191 to 4,189 and his batting average should be adjusted to .366.

For many years, major league baseball resisted statistical changes such as this one. "The passage of 70 years..." said commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1981, "constitutes a certain statute of limitation as to recognizing any changes in the records with confidence of the accuracy of such changes." In 1995, however, major league baseball changed its policy by endorsing the statistics book Total Baseball, which lists 4,189 and .366 as Cobb's official totals, among other changes.

Many purists continue to argue against such revisionism. "Some of these numbers acquire a kind of a poetry to them," says Hall of Fame librarian Tim Wiles. "When somebody takes them away or changes them and says we've improved baseball record-keeping, it's someone else's loss." But John Thorn, Total Baseball's co-editor, believes historical accuracy is more important. "To me," he says, "that's the equivalent of saying that if we disinterred Napoleon and found that contrary to all written reports he was not five-foot-two but six-foot-two, we should keep this a secret." I agree with Thorn, that truth should win out over fiction. Nevertheless, I think it's great that a controversy so trivial can stir up such a bonfire of emotions. It just proves that we baseball fans are a special breed.

Recommended books available from Amazon.com:

Total Baseball
edited by John Thorn

Cobb: A Biography
by Al Stump

56

Record number of consecutive games in Joe DiMaggio's famous 1941 hitting streak. DiMaggio batted .408 with 15 homers and 56 RBIs during the Streak, which lasted from May 15 to July 16. It was finally stopped in Cleveland by pitchers Al Smith and Jim Bagby in front of a crowd of 67,468, which at the time was the largest crowd ever to see a major-league night game. Third baseman Ken Keltner made two great fielding plays to rob DiMaggio, and Bagby induced him to ground into an inning-ending double play in his last at bat. The failure cost DiMaggio a tidy sum of cash: He would have received a $10,000 endorsement deal from Heinz 57 if he had extended the streak one more game.

Cy Young Award

The Cy Young Award came out of the (good) idea that pitchers should be honored separately from position players. In one of his few good accomplishments, commissioner Ford Frick helped orchestrate the new award, which initially honored one pitcher in both leagues, as selected by the Baseball Writers Association of America. Since Frick instituted the award because pitchers received little representation in the MVP voting, it's ironic that the first Cy Young winner was the man who also won that year's MVP award: Brooklyn's Don Newcombe in 1956.

In fact, pitchers' eligibility for both awards has never been addressed by the BBWAA, and every time a guy wins both, griping can be heard all over the land. The gripers do have a point: Why should one group of players have the chance to win two awards, while everybody else can only win one? The BBWAA can resolve the issue pretty easily -- by rendering pitchers ineligible for the MVP Award -- but for some reason, they haven't.

Anyway, after Newcombe won, his career pretty much fell apart, making him the first victim of the so-called Cy Young Jinx. Supposedly, the Jinx strikes pitchers the year after they win, and a cursory look at the record gives that theory some credence. Some notable Jinx victims include Bob Turley, Mike Marshall, Steve Stone, Pete Vuckovich, LaMarr Hoyt, John Denny, and others. However, superstitions aside, it's pretty easy to figure out why the Jinx struck these guys: they were above-average pitchers who had one great season that was good enough to win them the award. It's hard enough to have a good season, let alone a great season, and it's unfair to expect these pitchers to have great seasons in a row. Pitchers like Sandy Koufax, Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer, Tom Seaver, Roger Clemens, and Greg Maddux -- all multiple award winners -- were (or are) legitimately great pitchers from whom great seasons are expected. The Cy Young Jinx is, in fact, simply a matter of a pitcher returning to his old self.

Back to the award history: At commissioner Frick's insistence, the first 11 awards were given to the best pitcher between both leagues. When he retired, the award was changed to honor one pitcher in each league, which is how we have it today; it never did make sense to have Koufax compete with Whitey Ford, but most of what Frick did made no sense, so we shouldn't be surprised. At first, the voting structure was kind of screwed up: one writer in each major league city placed a single name on the ballot, and the pitcher who got the most votes won. MVP Award voting, on the other hand, featured a weighted ballot on which writers places 10 names in descending order. In 1969, the screwed-up voting system came back to bite the BBWAA when Mike Cuellar and Denny McLain tied for the award with 10 votes apiece. After that, the voting changed to an MVP-like weighted system -- voters placing three names on their ballots with five points going to the first place pitcher, three to the second place, and one to the third place. That's how it is today, and it's a good system.

"Mendoza line"

The mythical "line" that separates decent hitters from bad hitters. The de facto Mendoza line is .200, even though Mario Mendoza--the Mendoza in question--hit .215 over his nine-year career with the Pirates, Mariners, and Rangers. George Brett gets credit for the originating the term when he said, "The first thing I look for in the Sunday papers is who is below the Mendoza line."

Exactly what Mendoza did to earn such notoriety remains a mystery. Thousands of other players have hit worse than the poor guy. If Brett had been a National Leaguer, for example, he might have named it the "LeMaster line."

Copyright 2008 David H. Martinez. All rights reserved.