Major League Baseball

If postseason stats were cumulative ...

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:28 p.m. ET

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Instead of the ugly passive-aggressive mess that it'€™s become, Alex Rodriguez'€™s passing of Willie Mays on the all-time home run list could have been so easy.

Sure, it could have been easy if the Yankees played along and honored No. 661 with a quick video message and a paycheck with a few zeroes that they could afford to write. But it could have been even easier.

In a way, Rodriguez passed Mays before all that hostility got all that hostile. You just have to have counted this one, which seemed pretty important.

And this one, too ...

And once you'€™re done counting those, you'll have 675, which includes the 661 home runs that it took to pass Mays as we count home runs plus the 13 he hit in the postseason --€“ six in 2009 alone. Mays hit just one in the postseason, which for most of his career consisted of 4 to 7 games for a pair of teams and none for everyone else.

That alone makes it easy to see why the records don'€™t include the postseason and why A-Rod didn'€™t pass Mays on Aug. 18, 2013 when he hit his 662nd overall home run. (In retrospect, it'€™s a good thing this didn'€™t trigger the milestone because this was the Ryan Dempster game and the combination of retribution for this plunking with a milestone and a fat bonus check would have produced a bat flip that pushed the world off its orbit.)

The convention dates back to well before the expansion of the playoffs to 10 teams and up to 18 games. According to John Thorn, Major League Baseball'€™s official historian and co-author of the reference book series Total Baseball, it was standard practice from as early as records like these were kept.

"€œWorld Series records have never, to my knowledge, been integrated with regular-season marks in a reference work, going back to the first 'Cyclopedia,'€™ Ernie Lanigan's work of 1922,"€ Thorn said. "€œThe thinking may well have been what mine was when we started Total Baseball way back when: that to do so would create imbalanced bases of comparison, crediting a fellow for, in effect, the wisdom of having chosen rich parents."

Of course, the imbalances have waned and waxed over the course of baseball history. We'€™ve generally accepted that the difference between 162-game schedules and the old 154s isn'€™t something that requires much more than brief discussion and is just eventually just accepted as part of the deal. And if we do go back to the shorter schedules, as Commissioner Rob Manfred has said early in his tenure that he'€™s open to doing, we'€™ll do so with almost no alterations to the record book.

Yet as someone who demands perfection from our numbers in baseball --€“ mostly because the sport has spoiled us with them from its record-keeping to the ability to balance a box score --€“ there is still something a little unsettling in the record books.

On Aug. 15, 2012, Felix Hernandez threw the 23rd perfect game in baseball history. How do we know it was the 23rd? Well, the Wikipedia page for the event says so, and if you don'€™t believe that as the source of all that is true, the recap on FoxSports.com labels it the very same.

But you can count the perfect games in major-league history --€“ don'€™t do this; it'€™s very boring --€“ and you won'€™t get to 23 unless you count Don Larsen'€™s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

Why was Larsen'€™s perfect game in the World Series a perfect game and Barry Bonds'€™ home run in the World Series not a home run? An accounting system that has 23 and 762 as critical figures takes a pretty special set of gymnastics to balance.

We could say that in sports we'€™re fine counting it if it doesn'€™t affect a record that everyone should have equal shot at. However, it'€™s hard to say that if someone in the future had six regular-season no-hitters and then one in the playoffs, we wouldn'€™t put him or her on an equal plane with Nolan Ryan.

It'€™s also not at all true in all sports.

NBA Most Valuable Player Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors set the record this year for the most 3-pointers made in a single season, 286, which counts only the regular season. However, before turning professional, he set the analogous NCAA record, passing the previous 3-pointer mark in Davidson'€™s fourth NCAA Tournament game of 2008. This is allowed in all the major college sports, including football, which like MLB has an essentially uniform regular-season length.

There aren'€™t a ton of leaderboards that would look all that different if playoff statistics were to count in the records. Derek Jeter --€“ Exhibit A in the defense'€™s case for the status quo given his presence on a great team in a big-playoffs era (Thorn'€™s prototypical child of rich parents) --€“ would go up from sixth to fourth on the all-time hit list. The makeup of the 3,000-hit club -- assuming A-Rod gets there on his own --€“ would add only one member (Sam Rice). And the 300-win club would remain the same, possibly for the rest of history too.

The player who might be hurt most by the exclusion of postseason stats from the official records is Fred McGriff, who has 10 playoff home runs to his name.

A 493-homer player, McGriff probably doesn'€™t belong in the Hall of Fame, and he'€™s at about the vote totals you'€™d expect, hovering around 15-20 percent every year. As a 503-homer player, McGriff still doesn'€™t belong in the Hall of Fame, though he'€™d have a much better shot with voters.

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