A piece I wrote for Pitchers & Poets about Frank Fernandez, a forgotten backup catcher and greatest sub-.200 hitter in baseball history. Fernandez was a victim of baseball’s longstanding infatuation with batting average, and the human need for categorization. Once, when reporters gathered to speak to him after a game, he asked them, “Are you sure you want to talk to a .130 hitter?”
This morning, Rob Neyer beat me to a question I’d been meaning to delve into: should statistics be counted for games that have been cancelled? On Wednesday afternoon, Gio Gonzalez gave up seven runs and did not, his ERA hurtling from 2.68 to 3.88 and back again in the course of an hour. Officially speaking, the game did not take place, and thus the logical conclusion is that the individual plays could not have taken place. Gonzalez’s afternoon was a feverish chill; Mitch Moreland’s first career grand slam became a mere daydream.
The dominant opinion on the matter is unsurprising. Firstly, rainout statistics have never been counted, and the typical baseball fan is nothing if not conservative. Neyer rightly points out in the comments that any attempt to retroactively adjust statistics would be an impossible task, relying on newspaper accounts and nonexistent televised footage. Worse yet, one of these adjustments might actually matter, pry a record out of somebody’s hands, and the political backlash would be unpleasant, to say the least.
Mr. Neyer concludes his inquisition with the tale of Phil Bradley, who did and did not hit the first evening home run in Wrigley Field. It’s an excellent example, but it only fails in that it does not cut straight to the bone. Being a cynic, my first reaction was to find the end of the path, pulling the logic to its extremes. As such, allow me to present a purely, but not unreasonably, hypothetical situation:
The day is October 7, 2001. The time is three in the afternoon. Rickey Henderson, the forty-four year old future Hall of Famer, starts what may be the final game of his career; he says he wants to play next year, but after hitting .225, it’s uncertain that any team will take a chance on him. He stands at 2,999 hits.
Henderson leads off the bottom half of the first against John Thompson. Crouched in that tiny strike zone, there’s no doubt in the world what he wants: to use that unfailing batting eye, working a hitter’s count, and wait on a fastball. The wrists are mostly gone, but if he knows it’s coming, he can swing early.
Instead, he swings at the first pitch and feathers it the other way, dropping into right field between three Rockies. He reaches second standing up, appropriately finding himself in the middle of the field. The crowd, his adopted home, erupts. His teammates rush out to congratulate him. There’s a plaque. Henderson is replaced by Mike Colangelo, receives one last ovation, and joins Tony Gwynn in the dugout.
Two innings later, the rains come.
The storm crashes out of nowhere, the work of a vengeful, forgotten god. The umpires are helpless. The tarp comes out. The players wait. The fans wait. Eventually, there is no more waiting.
There are no makeup games; the playoff schedule is already set. The television companies must be appeased. Henderson can’t find work the next year. The plaque ends up in a storage warehouse in Lafayette, California, never to be seen again.
The likelihood of something like this happening is infinitesimal, of course. But with the rules currently in place, baseball is in tacit acceptance that the possibility exists.
But before we can come to a conclusion about whether statistics should be kept for nonexistent games, we have to establish what exactly the purpose of a statistic is. One could argue that a statistic is designed to establish the events and causes that allowed one team to achieve the ultimate goal of every baseball team and player: a championship. They’re official statistics that track official games. One could also, however, argue that statistics are designed to measure the skill and value of a baseball player, evaluate his performance and predict his future performance. After all, we keep track of spring training games (even though maybe we shouldn’t).
The truth is that both of these arguments are true, and that they are not perfectly congruent. Another example of the fuzziness of this logic springs from the overtime of a college football game. The construction of the play of football in overtime is completely different than in regulation: teams need to go only a fraction of the field to score, and may need to do so repeatedly in order to break a stalemate. This can lead to artificially inflated touchdown numbers. We as fans know full well that the seven touchdowns thrown by a quarterback in a triple-overtime game are not equivalent to the five thrown by another quarterback in four quarters. But in the numbers on the back page of the newspaper, they’re treated the same. As are they, it should be noted, when the Heisman voters open up those newspapers.
There is no perfect sense of justice in statistics, no way to reconcile these separate truths. Phil Bradley did hit a home run on August 8, 1988. If we are evaluating Phil Bradley, his life’s work, then we should not deny that he did this. The setting in which he did it, during a live game against a major league opponent in a competitive situation. It was no different than any of the 78 home runs he is given credit for. Even if the statistics are kept separate, they should be recorded. It is a matter of history.
The question is: whose history? Phil Bradley’s? Or Major League Baseball’s? This is each person’s choice to make.
the playful utopia 