AboutBrian Flaspohler Expertise Questions about baseball rules, general information about the game, statistical analysis, questions about players, questions about Baseball records. I am a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and a lifelong baseball fanatic.
Experience Lifelong fan, article about player movement from team to team throughout history.
Question Brian, my question more simply is can we suggest that Bonds broke the 80+ year-old record for SP if the statistic has only existed for ~60 years.
Thanks for all the help. SP interests me primarily because it, as an 'alternative' stat has managed to gain so much acceptance. Yet it's completely outdated in terms of its value by more relevant creations in the past 25 years.
Answer Paul,
Your question is kind of like asking if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make any noise?
Ruth did set the record; but it wasn't recorded as a statistic. Statisticians went back in time and added those records into the 'book'. So, just because he didn't know he set a record, he did - and Bonds broke that record 80 years later. This same approach works for many baseball statistics. Caught stealing wasn't measured for many years, but is being added back into the record as data is available. Walks were counted as hits in 1887 (not sure about this date - somewhere around here) but most statisticians discount the batting averages for that season because of this.
One last point - I believe slugging percentage still has plenty of value. Slugging times OBP is one of the easiest statistics to calculate and correlates extremely well with run creation. In fact, Bill James' run creation formula, in its simplist form, is basically Slugging times OBP times AB. So don't discount Slugging - it is a valuable measure and readily available in most publications.
These are interesting questions. I have much more interest in discussing these types of things then trying to explain the balk rule again!
