Talk:List of Major League Baseball progressive career hits leaders

Well done

this is very very cool! i commend you on the time it took to do this! my only question is, why do you have those date headings mixed in there? i think it is easier to read without the breaks. Kingturtle 05:12, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks very much! Without the year headers, the page gets quite massive, so I split the top two sections off as templates. It will be easier to edit this way, and increasing size shouldn't be a problem. If you know of a better way to handle this, I'd be glad to hear it. MisfitToys 22:35, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)

Statistical sources and accuracy

The note near the top of the page says:

This chart uses the hit totals which are officially recognized by Major League Baseball, as maintained and provided by the Elias Sports Bureau; they are derived from the annual official league statistics, even when those totals have been proven by later research to be in error. ... In fact, they are also not the same as the historical totals displayed on MLB's official website. ... Furthermore, this table accurately represents what observers of each era believed to be true.

First of all, that statement seems contradictory. Is this suggesting that MLB does not recognize the totals on its own web site as "official"? Additionally, I don't see why we should care what "observers of each era believed to be true". Most authoritative sources now recognize that many of the old statistics were erroneous. As an example - Cap Anson's career hit total is given in the table as 3081. However, most reliable sources (MLB.com, Baseball Reference, Stats Inc., Pete Palmer's encyclopedia, ESPN, etc.) now recognize Anson as having 2995 hits (or 3418 including 423 in the National Association). Likewise, Ty Cobb's career total is now widely recognized as 4189, not 4191. These are just two prominent examples. I don't see any reason to continue to perpetuate the old mistakes; the fact that something was once "believed to be true" at the time is irrelevant (the Earth was once widely believed to be flat...). Wikipedia should strive to be as accurate as possible at the present time. There is no point whatsoever in being intentionally inaccurate. Dsreyn 17:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: "Is this suggesting that MLB does not recognize the totals on its own web site as 'official'?" Yup, that's exactly what it means; the official, complete stats – which are maintained by the Elias Sports Bureau – are generally only made available for a fee. (Those with access to historical books and magazines have an advantage in this regard.) Note the difference between the officially recognized statistics for Cap Anson at the Hall of Fame site [1] (3081 hits) and the MLB site's listing of his stats [2] (note that the MLB site includes his 1871-75 NA stats, giving a total of 3418 hits, but even if those are discounted the total is 2995). Of course, the point here is that while historians recognize the official statistics to be erroneous, MLB's official position is that once they're made official at the end of the year, the statistics are "true" regardless of any evidence later discovered to disprove their accuracy. (This was the entire reason why MLB stopped recognizing the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia as their official encyclopedia sometime around 1990; Macmillan was striving for historical accuracy, and was revising the stats as new research came in, and MLB was furious when they found out.) Sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, MLB's official historian, wrote some articles explaining MLB's position. Thus, if John Smith was listed as having 172 hits in 1885, but it is later discovered that this resulted from mistakenly counting a 3-hit game twice, he still counts as having made 172 hits even though he really only had 169. One difficulty for Wikipedia, of course, is that if we don't list the officially recognized numbers, we're put in the position of trying to choose between five or six differing views. For an article about an individual, it's fairly easy to describe the situation and note the varying totals, but in a chart of this nature I believed it was more appriopriate to choose one source and explain the rationale. At some point I plan on starting an article specifically focusing on the background of the entire situation. MisfitToys 21:27, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

You have the same problem if you go with the so-called "official" statistics. As pointed out in The Numbers Game (Alan Schwarz), there are multiple flavors of "official". For example:

• Macmillan, 7th edition (1988) carries the subtitle "The complete and official record of major league baseball". Anson is listed with 3041 hits.
• The 2006 Complete Baseball Record & Fact Book (The Sporting News) is indicated as "officially licensed". Anson is listed with 3012 hits.

Rich Levin, a spokesman for the Commissioner's Office, even admits that "there's no official record book" [3].

I certainly agree that you need to pick one source, but I think you should try to pick an accurate source, rather than one that is known to be riddled with inaccuracies. Additionally, you alluded to the fact that Elias does't provide statistics for free; this makes it harder to verify the information (which raises another question - where exactly are you getting the statistics?). So why not pick a more up to date, accepted, authoritative source (the 2006 edition of Palmer's encyclopedia would be one good choice), rather than going with something known to have serious problems? I don't think the records once "believed to be true" are of much interest (the Earth was once widely believed to be flat...). Dsreyn 00:09, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Another point - the general trend on Wikipedia is to use accurate records (such as Baseball-reference.com, etc.), rather than "official" records. For example, List of Major League Baseball batting champions shows the 1910 AL batting champion as Nap Lajoie, not Ty Cobb as recognized at the time. As you may know, since 1910 it has been discovered that Cobb was incorrectly credited with two extra hits. To be consistent, Cobb's career hit total should be shown as 4189, not 4191 as listed in this table. Dsreyn 13:50, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

1) Macmillan, as of 1988, was still designated as the official record; however, this was before MLB officials realized that Macmillan's editors had been revising the official stats on their own, without MLB approval - the cause of MLB withdrawing the designation.

2) The Sporting News volume, while officially "licensed", does not necessarily include the official records.

3) True, there's no official record book or book of official statistics (perhaps for any of the major sports). There probably hasn't been since the designation was stripped from Macmillan - although Total Baseball was designated as baseball's official encyclopedia, replacing Macmillan, I don't believe the statistics therein were ever recognized as official; in any event, both volumes ceased publication several years ago.

4) It would certainly be ideal to pick the most accurate source, but there is no agreement as to which source that is. Palmer's volume isn't universally accepted; as I noted, there are about a half dozen different versions used by ESPN, The Sporting News, CNN/SI, Baseball-Reference, etc. Choosing Palmer as our "official" source would no doubt irritate those who side with other sources, and would raise the question of why the baseball-reference links are included when they differ from what we regard as official. I was probably the contributor who started adding the baseball-reference links to player pages as a standard practice a couple of years ago, but primarily because their player pages included more material (awards, league leaders, player comparisons) than other stat sites – not because I believed their version was more accurate than the others. Ultimately, it's likely that all the sources have some inaccuracies. My own personal preference is for the Macmillan version, which is the one currently recognized by ESPN.

5) As to your question of "where exactly are you getting the statistics?", I got them from the Spalding Official Base Ball Guide (beginning 1876) and the Reach Official Base Ball Guide (beginning 1883), which annually published the official stats of the NL and AA/AL respectively; these are the stats used by Elias and recognized by MLB. The books are available at the Hall of Fame library, as well as the Amateur Athletic Foundation library in Los Angeles (which I frequent), but are hard to find elsewhere. Believe me, it took weeks to compile the data for the chart.

6) You suggest that "to be consistent, Cobb's career hit total should be shown as 4189, not 4191 as listed in this table"; obviously, this would fly in the face of the fact that MLB adamantly insists that Cobb's record was 4191 (for one thing, they're not about to state that they recognized Pete Rose as breaking the record on the wrong day).

Lots of answers to lots of questions; I realize this is a difficult topic, and that whatever choices are selected are going to be rejected/disputed by many readers and contributors. MisfitToys 19:58, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Mistakes

There seem to be mistakes in this list. Try and compare it to List of Major League Baseball players with 2000 hits. There are several differences, even in the top 10! Please fix! Happy138 21:42, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The top 10 for which year? As noted in the intro, this list is based on the officially recognized totals, which can be hard to track down. The other list suggests that it uses Baseball-Reference and the official MLB site as sources. Honus Wagner's career total, for instance, is widely debated, though is officially recognized total is 3430 (see his Hall of Fame page), although both Baseball-Reference and the MLB site list him with 3415. (I know it's difficult to comprehend that the MLB site doesn't actually display its officially recognized stats.) Total Baseball lists him with 3420, as does The Sporting News Official MLB Record Book. MisfitToys 22:07, 10 August 2007 (UTC)