1926 NL Batting Title

[David M Tate]

What's the story with the 1926 NL Batting Title? _Total_Baseball_ says it
was Paul Waner, .336 in 536 AB. Everybody else says it was Bubbles Hargrave,
.353 in 326 AB. Now, off the top of my head, it doesn't look like Hargrave
had enough AB; the Reds played 154 games that year. On the other hand, _TB_
has been known to wrong about these things (e.g. taking Rose over Madlock as
1981 NL batting champ).

What exactly was the old criterion for batting title eligibility?

--
David M. Tate | Not all the knives of the lampposts/ Nor the chisels
dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu | of the long streets/ Nor the mallets of the domes/
Motto: | Can carve/ What one star can carve/ Shining through
Gramen artificiosum odi | the grape leaves. Wallace Stevens

[David M Tate]

In article <19...@bunker.isc-br.com> je...@bunker.shel.isc-br.com (Gerald J. Lanza) writes:

>In article <141...@unix.cis.pitt.edu> dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:
>>What's the story with the 1926 NL Batting Title? _Total_Baseball_ says it
>>

>>What exactly was the old criterion for batting title eligibility?
>

> I recall that the requirement up til the mid 50 's was 400 official
> at bats, i.e., plate appearances - walks, sacrifices, HBP, etc >= 400.

I thought so too. That's why Hargrave's title, with < 350 at bats, is
confusing me.

Can anyone out there help out on this?

Tangent: I think it's unbelievably stupid for the Commissioner of Baseball
(Bowie Kuhn, in this case) to rule that we *not* revise official records to
reflect corrections of historical errors. His justification, as I understand
it, was that it wouldn't be fair to do it haphazardly, and nobody was ever
going to take the time to examine *every* player's stats for *every* year.

Well, somebody(s) *did* take the time, and we now have accurate (or at least
much more accurate than they were) numbers. There's nothing holy about the
number 714 (for example); if Ruth really hit 715, we should say so. Ty Cobb's
hit totals have changed, based on a game in which he went 2 for 3 having been
accidentally counted twice in the official tallies. This changes his career
hit total, his batting average for the year in question, and so on. Let's
be honest, rather than covering up the (unsurprising) fact that all those hand-
tallied numbers had some glitches in them.

[Gerald J. Lanza]

In article <141...@unix.cis.pitt.edu> dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:

>What's the story with the 1926 NL Batting Title? _Total_Baseball_ says it
>

>What exactly was the old criterion for batting title eligibility?
>

I recall that the requirement up til the mid 50 's was 400 official

at bats, i.e., plate appearances - walks, sacrifices, HBP, etc >= 400.

This was changed due to the difficulty experienced by Ted Williams in
getting enough official AB's to qualify for the batting title while
being walked approximately once a game. The current requirement,
I believe, is that plate appearances must be GT 3.1 times the number
of official games played by your team, usually 162 x 3.1 = 502.

I welcome any further information that applies to this issue.

jerry

[Steven M. Goldman]

>>>What's the story with the 1926 NL Batting Title? _Total_Baseball_ says it
>>>
>>>What exactly was the old criterion for batting title eligibility?
>>
>> I recall that the requirement up til the mid 50 's was 400 official
>> at bats, i.e., plate appearances - walks, sacrifices, HBP, etc >= 400.
>
>I thought so too. That's why Hargrave's title, with < 350 at bats, is
>confusing me.
>
>Can anyone out there help out on this?

I recall that in one of Bill James's Baseball Abstracts
that in 1938, the requirement was that 100 games be played.
In that year, Taffy Wright batted .350 while playing exactly
100 games, only to have his batting title taken away and
awarded to Jimmie Foxx. Personally, I don't understand this,
as I have problems when someone abides by the rules and then
the powers that be decide retroactively that the rules were
no good.

At any rate, perhaps this rule was in effect in 1926. Hargrave
did play in 105 games...

[Glenn R. Waugaman]

> I recall that the requirement up til the mid 50 's was 400 official
> at bats, i.e., plate appearances - walks, sacrifices, HBP, etc >= 400.

Actually, the requirement was changed *to* 400 AB's only a few years
before in 1950, and I guess that standard was quickly proven insufficient
in Williams' case. Before that, it was a two-thirds games requirement, I
believe. Look in the scoring rules section of TB indexed under
"Championship, Batting" to see the complete evolution of the rule, as it
was changed a few times...

---
Glenn Waugaman
Digital Equipment Corporation
Littleton, MA
g_wau...@nac.enet.dec.com
---