Knowing what the MLB record book means

Numbers have always fascinated me. And in baseball – and probably many, many other walks of life – there’s what the numbers mean and what they really mean. Cleon Jones hit .340 in 1969, which at that point was the highest mark by a Met who qualified for the batting title, as well as the third-best mark in the National League. And it was one of many numbers that meant the Mets had arrived, not far off from Tom Seaver’s 25 wins.

In the interim, two Mets have won the batting title. And while he didn’t win the batting title, John Olerud has passed Jones for the highest average in team history, with his .354 mark in 1988. For what it’s worth, I knew that Olerud held the team record but needed to look up both the year and his final mark.

And perhaps it’s because of things like that, there’s no concern on my end about records being broken, as different eras, rules and strategy make some records easier to break as others become just about unbreakable.

Denny McLain was the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season, when he went 31-6, with a 1.98 ERA in the Year of the Pitcher in 1968. McLain had a five-year stretch from 1965-1969, where he was one of the best pitchers in the game, before being done in by arm troubles and his lifestyle. No one considers him one of the best pitchers of all time, in part due to his short tenure and part because he was active in the best time for pitchers since the deadball era.

Yet you could say the same thing about Sandy Koufax – and some do consider him one of the best pitchers of all time. Why is that? Well, it helps to play in a major media market like Los Angeles. It also helps to be regularly in the World Series. McLain only made the World Series one time, in his magical season of ’68. But he was just 1-2 in the series and took a back seat, pitching-wise, to teammate Mickey Lolich. Finally, there’s the issue where Koufax retired at the height of his fame, while McLain went 17-34 in his final three years with a 72 ERA+.

McLain holds the single-season record for wins since integration and he’s tied for the lead since the end of World War I. But he’s just tied for 135^th for all-time wins. Is that because the pitchers who performed in the 19^th and early 20^th Century are the best pitchers of all time? That’s highly doubtful. It was just a relatively easy time for starting pitchers. Many people marvel about Cy Young’s 511 lifetime wins. But he pitched in an era where every starter went deep. He pitched more innings and won more games than any pitcher in history. But despite that huge issue in innings, Young is second all time in fWAR, trailing Roger Clemens, despite that massive 2,400-innings advantage.

Is Clemens the best pitcher in baseball history? Few would say that he was, mostly due to his PED usage. It’s no different than Barry Bonds, because while he holds the HR record, everyone trivializes his final numbers due to steroids accusations. But if you were a young fan just getting into baseball, you’d believe that Clemens and Bonds were the best players ever, that the pitchers from the first three-to-four decades were the greatest ones, followed by those in the 1960s and that the best hitters played in the 1990s-2000s, followed by the ones in the 1930s.

The MLB record books tell a story. But you can’t possibly know the full story until you know how the game was played in different eras. There’s what the record book means and what it really means, what you can only know if you dig deeper.

And you know what? It’s perfectly fine to have multiple levels of meaning. It can lead to you asking questions – like why were there so many homers hit in the last decade of the 20^th Century and the first decade of the 21^st? Since we lived thru it, we know the answer to that question. But a 10-year-old today has to discover that answer.

Just because you live thru it doesn’t mean that you know it all. A bunch of pitchers won 300 games in their career in the early days of the game. And then, from 1924 and 1982, only three pitchers did. There were articles in Baseball Digest, among other places, that said we’d never see another pitcher win 300 games again. And then, by the end of 1990, there were six more pitchers to amass 300 wins. And then we saw those same articles again, how there would never be another 300-game winner. Then along came Clemens, Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux. And now we hear it again.

Maybe this time, those who cry about no more 300-game winners will be right. Or maybe there will come changes to the game and we’ll see another spurt of pitchers to surpass the mark.

The record books can tell us about the game. But they can’t tell us everything. Those who think that there’s some point in time where things were pure and you could know everything just by looking at the record book are kidding themselves. It’s a good thing to keep in mind when something new comes along. You’ll hear people shouting from the roof tops how it will make a mockery of the record book. Tell those people to relax – the record book will be just fine.

If night games, integration, expansion, the designated hitter and PEDs didn’t ruin the record book, it’s hard to imagine what would do that particular trick. And even though .340, 714 and 2,130 no longer sit atop the record books, it doesn’t do anything to tarnish what those numbers mean. If you know what I mean.