So Roger Clemens broke Walter Johnson's American League strikeout record
Monday, huh?
Uh, not so fast.
If you take out your handy-dandy 2001 edition of Total Baseball -- which
says on the cover it's "the official encyclopedia of Major League
Baseball" -- it lists Johnson with 3,509 strikeouts in his career, not 3,508.
So hold those cheers. Re-cork that champagne. Don't rewrite those record
books. If you believe Total Baseball, then Clemens has only tied this record,
not broken it. Right?
Nope. Wrong again.
"Official" is apparently what you make it. And baseball's "official"
record, as determined by the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball's "official"
statisticians, was 3,508 for Johnson.
So that means Major League Baseball deems that this record has "officially"
been broken, no matter what its own "official" encyclopedia may contend.
Got all that?
Well, if you're anything like us, the answer to that question would be a
definite: NOOOOO. But fortunately, there is a logical explanation.
For one thing, says Tom Hirdt of Elias, "Total Baseball's numbers are not
the official numbers of baseball. The official encylopedia is different than
the official numbers."
And basically, that difference can be summed up this way: Marketing.
While MLB and "Total Baseball" have an official relationship, it's a
business relationship. Period.
It's still up to Elias to sign off on the numbers. And unlike Hack
Wilson's single-season RBI record, which both Elias and Total Baseball revised from 190 to 191, Johnson's strikeout total is viewed by Elias as impossible to confirm with any degree of accuracy. Therefore, his total
stands.
According to Total Baseball co-editor Pete Palmer, the discrepancy comes from 1907, Johnson's rookie year. Strikeouts didn't become an "official" statistic until 1908, so about 20 years ago, Johnson's records were meticulously checked for the 1907 season and his current total of 71 strikeouts (instead Elias' count of 70) in 14 games was verified. "It's
kind of like the election in Florida," Palmer said in a press release.
What Total Baseball didn't do, according to Elias, was go back and look at Johnson's other 20
seasons. But Elias hasn't either, because it's essentially impossible.
"Strikeouts are a category that just are not well-documented," Hirdt
says. "With runs, home runs, even walks, you can go through and check them
because they're part of 'proving' the box score. But you can't do that with
strikeouts, which makes confirmation of every strikeout in his career
virtually impossible.
"There would have been too many discrepancies to ever put your finger on.
So we're going with the accepted figure that we've had for years. We're not
going to change this figure without being able to check his entire career."
When the researchers at Total Baseball determined recently that Babe
Ruth's walk total was incorrect, Elias did go back and look at every game of
Ruth's career. So now both agree that Ruth walked 2,062 times, not 2,056.
But because this particular category can't be as reliably checked,
there's no way to do that here.
Which doesn't mean there won't be forever.
"When we finally get our first time machine," Hirdt promised, "we're
going to go back to all the games -- and we'll get it all right."
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
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