I'm posting this to both Retrolist and Baseball Databank. Apologies to
those who get it twice.

I was aware of the problem of unbalanced statistics in distant seasons, but
still I was surprised today. Upon commencing some research into walks, I
found some large discrepancies between batter and pitcher totals. Taking
1911 for instance, there is a difference of 76 walks between the AL batting
and pitching totals. In the NL, for which Retrosheet has most PBP and I
believe all box scores, there is still a difference of 3. Other statistics
show discrepancies as well. Retrosheet has 2 more runs allowed by NL
pitchers than NL teams scored. Baseball-Reference.com, on the other hand,
has the totals agreeing, with several teams having different totals than
Retrosheet shows. BB-Ref has the same differences in other categories,
though. Does this mean that someone has reconciled the differences in the
runs columns, while leaving the others alone? Are incorrect numbers shown
by Retrosheet because they are the official ones?

Is anyone trying to reconcile these other differences? Is this something
that relatively easy to do now, at least for the seasons Retrosheet has all
box scores?


Cliff Blau
http://mysite.verizon.net/brak2.0