I'd just like to add one comment to the great posts by Lyle, Dave, et al. Dave mentioned that changing corrections every year would make teams, media, and fans think that all numbers are unreliable. It seems to me that a mindset about stats would actually be correct. Obviously some totals (like homers) are almost always correct, but anything else is always questionable. The last few decades' stats have very few discrepancies, but of course there are still a few here and there.
Add in that a lot of fans view stats from different eras as inherently different anyway (1990s homer totals vs. 1960s homer totals, ERAs from the 1930s and ERAs from the 1900s, etc), and it seems to me that having people think the numbers are unreliable isn't that bad of a thing. If and when Bonds hits his 756th homer, it will undoubtably be the new record. But if he happens to get to 2nd place on the RBI total (held by Ruth), then no one will know when he actually passes Ruth since no one knows how many RBI Ruth had. Maybe it's better if fans and the media recognize sooner rather than later that a lot of stats (except for most current players) just aren't reliable anyway.
Maybe Dave meant something else by 'unreliable,' but I personally think it'd be nice if teams, the media, and fans didn't think that each stat is an indicator of exactly what the player actually did.
While keeping a list of 'corrections' to individual players' stats is useful (to see why a number has been changed after all these years and to make sure that changes aren't counted twice), it doesn't ever get at the problem. It would be nice to think that, in some future year, we'll have found almost every mistake on the official sheets and can update all players' stats at once. Even if it were possible (it isn't) to find all (or most) necessary corrections, I think there'd be a bigger outcry if thousands of numbers were changed at once than if thousands of numbers were changed over the years as the discrepancies are found.
Sorry for the long post, but I spend a lot of my time dealing with discrepancies/errors/corrections/changes/mistakes on the official sheets, so I couldn't resist sharing my thoughts.
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I'd just like to add one comment to the great posts by Lyle, Dave, et al. Dave mentioned that changing corrections every year would make teams, media, and...
I'd like to respectfully disagree with Trent. I teach mathematics and deal with a lot of students who are NOT mathematically gifted. If we were to tell most...
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Mark: You will find that most baseball statistics are Scientific, not a Hobby. The ER's, RBI's and Saves can only be proved by a PBP. However, Hits, Runs,...
Mark: The five year period is much better, because if there are errors......it will show up by then. Anything less than that time frame, would be much too...
Dave: Thank you for the message and most of all the suggestions in it, which I agree with completely. I've got the box scores as they were printed in TSL ,TSN...
I am not writing to testify either in favor or against the accuracy of the boxscores the Sporting News used to publish, but I can give some insight into how we...
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You've got to love this. Where else but in SABR can a question about whether Willie McCovey had an RBI in a game on June 29, 1961 turn into a philosophical...
Great thoughts Trent, Steve Hatcher ... From: Trent To: SABR_Records@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 6:53 AM Subject: [SABR_Records] Re: RBI...
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