14 June 2015

The Unicorn of Baseball Facts

You're reading today that Alex Rodriguez has become the second player in baseball history to 2,000 RBIs, after Hank Aaron.

Yay him.

Except, this is abject nonsense and everyone disseminating this "fact" knows it.

The lords of baseball established the RBI as an official stat in 1920. Prior to that, it was not tracked. But it's not like it didn't exist. Uranus existed before 1781 even though humans didn't know it.

From 1920 onward, Babe Ruth drove 1,993 runners home, including himself nearly 700 times. But he began driving in runs before that.

In 1919, his first as an everyday player, he smashed a record 29 home runs. So without any calculating, we know that Ruth passed the 2,000 RBI mark (1,993 + 29). He also popped 11 out the year before as a pitcher/outfielder.

It strains credulity to think that Ruth didn't knock in many more than 29 runs that year. He batted .322 with 34 doubles, 12 triples, 64 singles and 101 walks for the BoSox.

Reviewing the boxscores of every game in which the Sultan swatted prior to 1920, Baseball Reference estimates he drove home another 221 beyond those officially tallied, for 2,214 in total.

Now maybe the intern at Baseball Reference was smoking dope the week he did the calculations. Let's say he was seeing double and vastly over-estimated the Bambino's RBI total. What's the difference? He's well over 2,000 by any standard.

We can say there is uncertainty about Ruth's lifetime RBI count. He's around 2,214, give or take a handful. But he unquestionably accounted for 2,000+ runs. We know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Then why does the world of baseball journalism assert and repeat a piece of information that it knows, not withstanding any other uncertainty, is wrong. False. A lie. Mis-information. Stupidity.

You know my theory: because baseball "journalism" and stupidity go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or really like unicorns and horns. Because like baseball journalism, a unicorn is a figment of our imagination.

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