In 1968 for The Baseball Encyclopedia the publishers put together the Special Baseball Records Committee. The committee had to decide how to balance accuracy with history, and as a result ended up tinkering with some of the game's most historic numbers. As The Numbers Game says, in 1876 walks were considered outs (what that would have done to Kevin Youkilis!) and in 1887 they were scored as hits. The committee made the decision to treat walks in their modern fashion. There were other small changes, too, and as a result, Ty Cobb got one more hit, Honus Wagner lost 15, and Cap Anson, the first member of the 3000 hit club, ended up with just 2995.

But the changes to the rules overtime had more serious implications for baseball's records. Ground-rule doubles were considered homers once upon a time. And the committee's biggest controversy came when then tried to change Babe Ruth's home run total. In 1918, Babe Ruth hit a walk-off home run with a runner on base and was awarded a triple; games were ruled over when the runner scored, so Ruth ended the game at third base. This was the Babe's 715th homer—but everyone knew Babe Ruth had hit 714. Due to public outcry and the work of one member, the committee changed the decision to keep walk-off hits the same as they always were, and Ruth went back to 714.

A little over a decade later, Pete Rose started to work toward Ty Cobb's hit total. After one researcher stumbled on a game where Cobb's hits were recorded twice, The Sporting News examined all Cobb's hits and found he'd really hit 4,190 (as opposed to the 4,191 of history or the 4,192 of The Baseball Encyclopedia. Also, Cobb did not, in fact, deserve the batting title in 1910. But Bowie Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, announced that, "The passage of years, in our judgment, constitutes a certain statute of limitations as to recognizing any changes….The only way to make changes with any confidence would be for a complete and thorough review of all team and individual statistics."

What's the answer? Where do you strike the balance between respecting the game's history and getting it right? Given all the difficulties we see throughout the book in knowing everything that happened during baseball's early years, is it possible to ever get it truly right? If you truly want to compare players, a ground-rule double should be the same throughout history, but if you start turning homers back into doubles, doesn't that even affect the outcome of games? Is there a statute of limitations on the records? Given the unreliability of old statistics and box scores, how many home runs should Babe Ruth have? How many hits should Ty Cobb have?