Hats off and a low bow to White Sox slugger Frank Thomas, who has added another line to his resume: reached base in 15 consecutive plate appearances, one short of equaling Ted Williams’ 1957 major-league record.
“It was a good little streak,” Thomas conceded at Comiskey Park Wednesday night. “I got a lot of bloop hits. You have to be lucky.”
Thomas is, of course, more than lucky. He is probably the best all-around hitter of his time. He was 10 for 10 in the streak with six singles, three doubles, one home run and five walks.
He said he was unaware of the streak until gametime Tuesday night, when it was up to 12. He then reached in his first three appearances, extending the streak to 15. Rich Garces, the Boston right-hander, retired him on a routine fly to center in his fourth and final at-bat.
Garces, who was with the Cubs briefly in ’95, is known as a prodigious eater. Mike Silverman of the Boston Herald described the Thomas-Garces matchup as the “The Big Hurt vs. The Big Mac.”
“It was the hardest pitch in the world to hit–the one right down the middle of the plate,” Thomas said.
Like Thomas, I never had heard or read about Williams’ record of reaching base 16 times in a row. So, out of curiosity, White Sox media relations chief Scott Reifert was asked where he dug it up. Reifert said he went through three or four record books without success. Finally, he discovered it in a 1997 compilation published by the Sporting News, the one-time “baseball bible.”
“I don’t know how they came up with it,” Reifert said. “Give them a call.”
Craig Carter, the Sporting News’ statistical editor, said “somebody had looked it up,” but he didn’t know who it was. Nor did he have documentation.
In other words, he had no evidence who held the record before Williams. The same held for Pedro Guerrero of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who reached 14 times in a row in 1985, the National League record.
The whole thing began sounding suspicious. If a statistician, amateur or professional, couldn’t identify the previous record-holders, how could he possibly know when a record has been set?
A call went through to Seymour Siwoff in New York, baseball’s longtime leading stat man. Siwoff’s firm, the Elias Sports Bureau, has been the depository of baseball’s official statistics since the turn of the century and has play-by-play accounts of all major-league games for at least the last 50 years.
“We can’t verify it,” Siwoff reported. “We haven’t put it in our record book because we’ve never been satisfied with the research.”
Siwoff went on to explain there are as many as two dozen records in dispute, including some major marks such as Cap Anson’s hit total. Anson was the first big-leaguer to compile more than 3,000 hits. At the time of his retirement, he was a credited with a career total of 3,081 hits.
This subsequently was lowered to 3,041, and about 10 years ago, SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research, decided to exhume Anson’s stats. A small platoon of researchers, subsidized by the Macmillan publishing company, gathered at the main library in New York City for the express purpose of checking the ancient box scores.
It was, clearly, an impossible mission. There were as many as a dozen New York daily papers. If the box scores didn’t match, it was a virtual guessing game. Take your pick.
And so the researchers essentially were flying blind. Word came from the Macmillan headquarters that its Baseball Encyclopedia, which then carried baseball’s imprimatur, was about to go to press.
One of those on the project later told me–to his subsequent sorrow–that a big scramble ensued because the numbers had to be balanced quickly, and that’s why Cap Anson, in some record books but not all, is down to 3,000 hits.
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The elimination of 41 hits barely kept Anson in the 3,000-hit club. Also interesting is that only singles were purged. None of Anson’s runs or runs batted in was disturbed. Which is why I’ve been suspicious ever since of the supposed purist researchers.