Statistical Foundation of Baseball Feels Tremor

Consternation grips the office of baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent.

What to do about George Steinbrenner?

What to say about Pete Rose?

What to offer as a compromise settlement for Collusion III?

No, it’s none of that.

Consternation grips Vincent’s office because history has been rewritten. Some of baseball’s sacred statistics have been changed in the eighth edition of “The Baseball Encyclopedia,” subtitled “The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball.”

Recently released by the Macmillan Publishing Co., the eighth edition carries baseball’s official licensing logo for the first time. The marketing collaboration compounds baseball’s concern and embarrassment over statistical changes it was not consulted about, particularly because the late commissioner, Bart Giamatti, had formed a Committee on Historical and Statistical Accuracy for that purpose.

A meeting at which the committee will discuss the changes with Macmillan editors is scheduled for August.

“We take our statistics very seriously. It’s part of the heritage of the game,” said Rich Levin, a spokesman for the commissioner’s office.

“We weren’t apprised (of the changes), and we should have been. Hopefully, it can be resolved.”

The first bit of major tinkering was discovered by Jerome Holtzman, the veteran baseball writer of the Chicago Tribune who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame Aug. 5.

From the seventh to the eighth editions, Holtzman found that Honus Wagner, who retired in 1917 and died in 1955, had gone from a .329 career hitter with 3,430 hits and sixth on the all-time hit list to a .327 hitter with 3,418 hits, seventh on the list behind Carl Yastrzemski.

Then it was discovered that Cap Anson, who retired in 1898 and died in 1922, had gone from 13th on the all-time list with 3,041 hits to a tie with Roberto Clemente for 15th with 3,000 hits, his career average falling from .334 to .329. Despite the 41 fewer hits, Anson’s total of 1,715 runs batted in didn’t change.

Seymour Siwoff, head of the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statistical house, called the changes a disgrace, particularly because no one in the commissioner’s office was consulted.

“How can you arbitrarily change the records of Hall of Fame players?” Siwoff said. “This shouldn’t be minimized. How many other things did they change?”

It is to the credit of encyclopedia editor Rick Wolff that many previous inaccuracies have been legitimately corrected in the eighth edition.

Wade Boggs, for example, was previously listed as a right-handed hitter and is now listed as the left-handed hitter he is. Jimmy Stewart, a 10-year major league veteran who scouts for the Cincinnati Reds, was previously listed as dead.

But to have rewritten history, to have tampered with statistics, seems to have infected the game’s lifeblood.

Wolff disputes that.

He is a Harvard graduate who played in the Detroit Tiger system, coached college baseball, works for the Cleveland Indians as an organizational psychologist, writes occasionally for Sports Illustrated and the New York Times and became director of sports books at Macmillan shortly before publication of the seventh edition in 1988.

“I had little input into that book, but I spent a lot of sleepless nights because of the magnitude of errors,” he said. “There were literally hundreds and hundreds, and I told the people here that if we’re going to do an eighth edition, it would be done correctly or I wouldn’t be involved.

“The result was that we formed an in-house committee and went through it page by page, checking it against our computer base back to 1969, when the first edition was published.”

And what did he find?

“I don’t know if you’d call them typos or glitches, and I don’t know where they came from or how they got there, but between 1969 and 1988 Honus Wagner suddenly had 12 more hits and there was no evidence or documentation to support that change,” Wolff said.

“I mean, if he legitimately should have had 12 more hits, then the team totals and the pitching totals should have been adjusted, but they hadn’t been. The computer didn’t balance, but now it does.”

In other words, Wolff doesn’t feel he rewrote history, he simply rolled it back to the way it was at Macmillan in 1969. And he didn’t inform baseball, he said, because the mistakes were Macmillan’s and because there are 9.5 million statistics in the encyclopedia, meaning it would be a time-consuming process to approach the commissioner’s office with all changes.

One problem: Who is to say the original edition wasn’t wrong? The record book published by The Sporting News, then and now, shows Wagner with those 3,430 hits that Macmillan says he didn’t have in 1969, doesn’t have now but did have in some of the editions in between.

The Sporting News has Anson 12th on the all-time list with 3,081 hits, which is 40 more than the seventh edition of the encyclopedia and 81 more than the eighth edition.

Compiling statistics from baseball’s early years, of course, is an inexact and risky business. The Hall of Fame, which uses The Sporting News as its statistical source, posts a disclaimer on its hallowed walls that says the statistics appearing on its plaques are those accepted as accurate at the time.

The National League did not begin to keep daily official statistics sheets until 1903. The American League waited until 1905. There are those in baseball who believe that Wolff and his crew, with the assistance of the Society for American Baseball Research, examined old box scores as a means of balancing hits, team totals and pitching records, a dangerous method because of the possibility of typos and later scoring changes.

“This has nothing to do with SABR,” Wolff said. “This was all research by our own people.”

Said Siwoff: “No one can be sure about how records were kept in the early days. The best thing to do is honor a statute of limitations and let written records stand.”

Responded Wolff: “Baloney. I have a hard time with that statute-of-limitations theory. As an editor, journalist and baseball fan, I’m more interested in accuracy and the truth.”