Why has this number jumped around so much over the years?
With Adrian Beltre’s two hits last night, giving him a career total of 3082, the Texas Rangers declared that he had passed Cap Anson on the total hit list. Maybe. I wrote this story in 1999 — with help from my estimable co-editor of Total Baseball, Pete Palmer — as I recall, so for the most accurate rendering of Anson’s hit total today, see: https://goo.gl/rjxz4o. But the caveats Pete and I raised back then remain true.
As Major League Baseball nears the end of the twentieth century, with three great veterans poised to join the game’s elite 3000-hit club, a famous name from the nineteenth century rises from the record books to confound historians. Cap Anson, the first man to reach 3000 hits, today stands outside the 3000-hit club looking in, thanks to a variety of modern-day rulings by Major League Baseball and corrections to his record by vigilant researchers. His career hit total today stands at 2995, according to Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, yet the Elias Sports Bureau, MLB’s official statistician, carries a figure of 3081 in its Record Book [the mark Beltre is lauded for having passed]. Other figures endorsed by MLB at one point or another over the past fifty years include: 3509, 3423, 3418, 3041, and 3000.
Strangely, all these figures are “right” in that they reflected the best understanding of the encyclopedists and record keepers of a particular time. And all these figures are “wrong,” if they are viewed as unchanging, immortal truths. Baseball, of all our sports, is most connected to its past and its statistics. Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, and Cal Ripken are linked with Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and, yes, Cap Anson in ways that resonate for fans, and as each current player joins the 3000-hit club he celebrates alongside distant heroes who become, for a moment, his teammates.
Major League Baseball, under the leadership of its newly appointed historian, Jerome Holtzman, will reexamine the controversy surrounding Anson’s hit total. The facts will be reevaluated with the aid of the Total Baseball editors and the Elias Sports Bureau. MLB’s goal is to arrive soon at a hit total for Anson that reflects the best current understanding of his great accomplishments. One thing is certain — that whatever Anson’s hit total turns out to be, it remains, like all of baseball’s history, forever open to further research, analysis and, most enjoyably, argument among fans.
For those who wish more background detail on Anson’s hit total, please read the following:
In the past half-century Major League Baseball has endorsed three encyclopedias: The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball (first published by A.S. Barnes in 1951); The Baseball Encyclopedia (first published by Information Concepts Incorporated and The Macmillan Company in 1969); and Total Baseball (first published by Warner Books in 1989, endorsed by MLB beginning in 1995; now published by Total Sports).
When Anson went to his grave in 1922, he was universally regarded as the first man to gather 3000 or more hits. The Barnes encyclopedia credited Anson with 3509 hits, totaling his five years in the National association (1871–75) with his 22 years in the National League (1876–97). This figure was unquestioned until 1968, when Major League Baseball’s Special Records Committee downgraded the National Association, the first professional baseball league, to minor-league status. (Among baseball historians and scholars, that decision is almost universally regarded as a mistaken notion, one that could easily be reversed. This reversal would have a collateral consequence of pushing Anson’s hit total to at least 3418, as boxscore research has verified 423 hits for Anson in his five years of NA play.)
Lee Allen was the historian of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the leading historical writer of his time. He was the guiding force behind the band of researchers gathered for the launch of The Baseball Encyclopedia in 1969. Allen had succeeded Ernest J. Lanigan in the post of Hall of Fame historian, and was followed by Clifford S. Kachline, the last man to occupy the post. He worked with John Tattersall especially to review game by game the record of play in the nineteenth century; Tattersall had accumulated boxscores from several cities for each game played.
The Information Concepts Incorporated team, headed by Lee Allen and David Neft, corrected may errors of long standing, including Anson’s hit total. The case of the phantom hits awarded to Anson in 1879 is emblematic; researchers had known about this mistake since the 1950s. From Lee Allen’s National League Story, Hill & Wang, 1961, an official history endorsed by then NL President Warren Giles:
Great as he was as a hitter, Anson was the beneficiary of some strange statistical legerdemain in 1879. He is credited with having batted .407 that year, and the official averages gave him 90 hits in 221 times up. But a check of three different newspapers that published box scores daily shows that he really made 72 hits in 227 trips for a .317 figure.
The official statistician was the league secretary, Nick Young, who was later to become president. Apparently Nick liked to add a few hits to the totals made by his favorites. Published averages in the early days were frequently prone to error, and some of the distortions are laughable. For example, as late as 1896 the averages were accompanied by this note: “A careful perusal of the tables shows that the figures, in several instances, differ from those published last fall. In once case the records give Holliday a credit of fifty-seven stolen bases, whereas he stole only a single base.
So, Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia of 1969 reported 2995 hits for Anson, removing his National Association total, the bogus hits of 1879, and a variety of other corrections to the figures that had been reported in the Spalding Guides (these had previously been the basis of not only Elias’s figures but also those of The Sporting News in such publications as Daguerreotypes).
From the first edition of Macmillan’s Encyclopedia (Mac I) to the second, published five years later (Mac II), Anson went from 2995 hits to 3041, a gain of 46 hits — all of them, incredibly, singles — while gaining only 20 at bats. Anson gained neither a run scored nor one driven home. His phantom hits of 1974 were created with the strokes of pencils, not through box-score research or newly unearthed official scoresheets, because they had no effect on team totals, either those of his own Chicago White Stockings or those of his opponents.
Here is how it happened, in the transition from the first edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia to the second. (It is worth noting that the Information Concepts Incorporated group dissolved after creating the first edition, selling the publication rights in the volume to the Macmillan publishing company, which appointed its own editors to replace David Neft, Lee Allen, et al.) Between initial publication in 1969 and the subsequent edition in 1974:
1. Anson gained 18 hits for 1879, and no at bats, no runs scored, no RBI (all hits added are, improbably, singles). This was a reversion to the 90-hit total recorded by Nick Young, though not a reversion to the 1879 at-bat total of 221. Retaining the 227 at-bats, Mac II gave Anson a batting average of .396, not Nick Young’s .407.
2. Anson gained 16 hits for 1889, and no at bats, no runs scored, no RBI (all hits added are, improbably, singles).
3. Anson gained 5 hits for 1894, and 7 at bats, no runs scored, no RBI (all hits added are, improbably, singles).
4. Anson gained 7 hits for 1897, and no at bats, no runs scored, no RBI (all hits added are, improbably, singles).
In the eighth edition of Big Mac, Anson’s hit total fell to 3000 on the button; Macmillan held to that total through its ninth and tenth (final) editions. Anson’s 1879 record was corrected to delete the 18 bogus hits and restore his average of .317. For 1889 his phantom hits were deleted, too, all of them, and his record restored to the totals reported in 1969. For 1897 the phantom seven hits were also deleted. For 1894, however, the five extra hits were retained, so as to arrive (conveniently) at the total of 3000 when added to the verifiable 2995. Thus Anson remained a member of the 3000 hit club, which seemingly was an instance of the end justifying the means.
The San Diego Padres are currently flying pennants atop their stadium, one for each member of the 3000 hit club. The Padres include Anson in the club, giving him a hit total of 3081. This total has been reported by Elias in its Book of Baseball Records and by The Sporting News in its Daguerreotypes volumes. We know that 60 of the hits reported by Elias are walks that Anson drew in 1887, which MLB’s Special Records Committee ruled in 1968 must be scored as neither hits nor outs. The figure carried on MLB’s website is 3041, which may have been published in an older edition of Macmillan, between 1974 and 1990; we will have to get our hands on older editions to check.
Below is the year-by-year rationale for Total Baseball’s total of 2995, and why it might differ from earlier accountings:
In 1876, Anson got 12 walks, which were counted as outs. The Special Records Committee voted to subtract these at-bats.
In 1877, the games with Cincinnati that were thrown out by the league were added back in as a ruling by the Special Records committee. Anson was 19 for 55 in 12 games against the Reds.
In 1878, Anson went 3 for 5 in a tie game. This game, like all ties, was not counted in the original league averages; individual totals from tie games were added by the Special Records committee.
In 1879, Tattersall determined from newspaper accounts that Anson was given 20 extra hits by the league office. Thus he should have been 221–70 instead of 221–90. He also played in two of Chicago’s four tie games and went 2 for 6, giving a total of 227–72. (See Lee Allen quotation above.) There are no records supporting this except for the newspaper box scores. All official NL records before 1903 have been lost.
In 1880, Anson went 3 for 10 in two tie games.
In 1884, Anson went 0 for 4 in a tie game.
In 1887, Anson’s 60 walks were subtracted from his at-bats and hits per the Special Records committee. This was the only year walks were counted as hits.
In 1889, Tattersall determined that many of the Chicago players were benefited in the averages reported by the Spalding Guide by extra hits (as compared to the newspaper box scores). He subtracted 16 hits from Anson. Other hits without boxscore basis were those by: Burns, 8; Duffy, 10; Farrell, 6; Pfeffer, 7; Ryan, 10; and Van Haltren, 7.
From 1891 through 1897, the revised figures from the ICI computer printouts at Cooperstown were used (this was the documentary record of research for the 1969 Macmillan encyclopedia). These were slightly different from the guide figures.
There are only two sources for nineteenth century extra-base hits. The first is the data in The Sporting News publications of the Baseball Register (old-timers in the back) and Daguerreotypes. This we assume was done by Leonard Gettelson and possibly Paul MacFarlane from newspapers (there were no official extra base hit records). The second source is the 1969 Macmillan/ICI Baseball Encyclopdia, which used Tattersall’s boxscore research for 1876–90 NL (which had no day-by-day backup sheets that survived) and the computer printouts at Cooperstown for 1891–1902 NL, 1901–04 AL, all of the American Association, Union Association, and Players League, this also from newspaper research. Except for 1876–90 NL we do have daily records. Total Baseball used the second source (with a few corrections, mostly homers from research by Pete Palmer and Bob McConnell, mainly).
There is another minor point concerning protested games. Tattersall counted them for 1876–90 NL because they were counted by the league (except for the win and loss for the pitcher and for the team). What he did basically for this period was take the guide figures for g-ab-r-h and po-a-e and add the tie games for 1878–1884 and fill in 2b-3b-hr-rbi-bb-so-dp from newspaper accounts, with a few other adjustments, as with Anson’s hits. The ICI computer printouts for the years after 1890 incorrectly did not count protested games. We have always been meaning to add them to Total Baseball’s database, but something always seemed to come up. You can see the list of such disputed hits in previous editions of Total Baseball. One of the reasons that the printouts had fewer hits for Wagner was that he was in four protested games in 1897–99. Anson was in two in 1894, May 23 and August 18 (first game). Anson was 1 for 3, as recorded in a boxscore in Sporting Life on May 23, but he did not play in the game of August 18th that was later protested.
So … the revisions to Anson’s hit total [1876–1897]will end in the next edition of Total Baseball not at 2995, but at 2996!
Modern-day addendum: Baseball-reference.com, using Pete Palmer’s historical data, today gives Anson 3435 hits, electing not to count his 60 walks in 1887 as hits, although that was what Jerome Holtzman and I preferred (we both felt that scoring rules of the day should have prevailed, counting walks as outs in 1876 and as hits in 1887). MLB has not, since 1969, recognized the National Association of 1871–75 as a major league, so let’s remove Anson’s 423 hits in those seasons. This will give Anson a hit total, from 1876 through 1897, of 3012.
Cap Anson’s Hit Total was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.